Focus on Your Employees for Exceptional Business Outcomes

Peter PsichogiosEmployee Engagement, Leadership

If you’re a leader, it’s tempting to want to focus your efforts on profit margins and business processes, which are obviously important for any business. However, I believe if you focus on recognizing your employees, removing obstacles that get in the way of their service, and creating an exceptional experience for them, that these things will come as a result.

Remove Obstacles in the Way of Superior Service

We live in an experience economy, where customer and employee experiences are so important in shaping their motivation, buying habits, and loyalty.  As a leader, your primary function is to enable your employees to achieve a desired customer service experience and exceed customer expectations.

One of the key factors in achieving this is to remove obstacles and barriers in the way of your employee’s service performance.  This could include removing outdated rules/policies, unbalanced performance measurements, lack of resources, inadequate learning and development, influences of compensation, and other areas that would inhibit their superior performance.

Improve Internal Service Cooperation

Once you have evaluated your workplace culture and removed obstacles in the way of service, you want to focus on improving your internal service cooperation.

Here are a few ways you can look at improving your internal service cooperation to make your employees more productive, motivated, happy and prepared to serve their customers:

Stay positive and polite. Nobody wants to work with someone who brings down the team, and customers especially do not want to spend their time and money to interact with someone who is negative.  When you are positive and polite with your colleagues, they will be more responsive and efficient, which results in better service for your external customers.

Honor your commitments with both your colleagues and customers.

Communicate transparently about any obstacles you encounter that might delay your service.  If you communicate honestly and transparently you will set their expectations and be able to over deliver on your promises!

Step out of your silo and learn about the organization and service workflow.  This will help you to discover how your output can be a better input for your colleagues and customers.

Be helpful by directly or indirectly supporting a customer or co-worker.  It’s easy to play the “It’s not my job”? game, but when you have a servant attitude that puts your colleagues and customers first you will find much more joy in your service interactions. 

Recognize and Celebrate their Service

Once you have removed obstacles and improved your service cooperation, you want to recognize and reward those employees who are doing exceptional work.

The best organizations catch people doing things right and recognize and reward them for it.  Celebrate great business outcomes and recognize employees who create value for customers and others will follow suit.

An employee recognition program can also be very effective at supporting this employee focused proposition.  When you recognize exceptional internal service cooperation with both monetary and non-monetary rewards through a formal recognition program, your talent is much more likely to invest their energy and motivation in the form of exceptional service, leading to better profit margins and business processes (full circle moment!!).