Businesses spend billions of dollars every year to attract and retain clients. On a daily basis, owners and managers shout, “Whatever it takes, we need the business!” When a good client makes a request, we bend over backward to fulfill it.
Yet, how quick are employers to treat their employees with the same consideration as a top client? All too often, as employers, we forget that our first clients are our employees. How we treat them is exactly how they in turn treat our clients!
If this truth is a bit too philosophical for pragmatists, one only need look at the extremely tight job market, combined with the high costs of training and turnover, to connect bottom-line reality to the nurturing of employees.
During a workshop at Automation Management Group’s High-TECC Conference, I compiled a list of 10 ways in which a company can enhance its employee relationships, while also providing a learning climate for ever-changing technology:
- Design Internet scavenger hunts to promote electronic research. This is a fun way of motivating employees to learn their way around the cyber world - and gain valuable information on a variety of topics from management to social marketing.
- Use company-wide e-mail to honor employee performance. Everyone likes to be recognized, and this reinforces your company’s commitment to the electronic world.
- Establish an electronic suggestion box. This offers the younger, more computer aware members of your company an opportunity to expand your technological horizons. These people were born into the computer generation and can offer some excellent and creative ideas.
- Publish an electronic version of your employee handbook. Again, this reinforces your commitment to automation and ties in with the “paper-free” concept of efficient operations.
- Honor an electronic employee of the month. This might be he person who offered the best suggestion, the winner of the electronic scavenger hunt, the person who learned the most about new technology, or maybe the in-house trainer or automation mentor. Whatever the reason, acknowledge their efforts in expanding their technology horizons.
- Publish an electronic newsletter. Make this a joint effort of all your employees by having them submit articles of interest.
- Investigate computer-based training programs and classes. This provides a highly efficient and cost-effective method for both training and CE credits. Again, this will help make your personnel more computer savvy.
- Add your employees to your contact management system. Just like your clients, let your database help you to remember birthdays, special events, anniversaries, and other appropriate points of contact.
- Provide each employee with a personal page on the Web site. Employees provide the information, pictures, or other items that go on their page. This will help your clients get to know your employees, creates a sense of self-esteem for employees, and challenges their Web creativity, Also, encourage employees to tell their friends and neighbors, which will bring more traffic to your site.
- Create an employee-based community page on your site. Poll employees about their community activities and memberships, and then promote the various events on a community page. This will: a) again create more traffic for your site; b) allow employees to bring a value-added factor to their community activities; and c) dramatically underscore your company’s commitment to the community.
On a closing note, moving away from the electronic side, no article about the employee as a client would be complete without a few of my personal thoughts on this issue:
- Take an employee to a convention. This offers one of the most effective educational and bonding events between employer and employee.
- Walk and talk. Employees need to feel connected. Make a point of walking your premises every day, talking with employees. Get to know them, their families, their values, their concerns, and their hobbies. You already do this with your top clients - and too many employers know more about their clients than they do about their employees.
- Establish an alliance benefit program. This one is for all of your clients, internal and external. Create a nurturing business climate in which everybody wins by establishing a discount alliance. . If you insure a hardware store, a video store, a dry cleaner, a restaurant, negotiate a standard discount that all of your other clients and employees can access. This will promote business for all of your clients from your employees, as well as other clients. Everyone will see this as a value-added benefit - and you’ll get the credit!
Treat your employees as the valued clients they are to you. In fact, they should be your most valued clients!