Employee engagement seems to be the new buzzword.
Everybody understands that it is important but there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about how one gets to full engagement.
Each year the Gallup organization pours more oil on that fire when they publish their Employee Engagement Overview.
Year after year we see that somewhere between 60 and 70% of the workforce is not particularly engaged. And only somewhere between 15 and 20% depending on the region are actively engaged.
Apart from the fact that it means that a lot of people are leading lives that could be so much more fun, it is also problem seen from productivity point of view.
Engaged employees are anywhere between two and ten times more productive than employees that are not engaged.
From a service point of view there is also a world of difference between the service that a fully engaged employee will give a guest and what that same guest will receive from an employee that is more or less indifferent.
We have all tried both – and we all know what a difference it makes.
So understandably most companies would like to raise their engagement levels.
However in my view lack of engagement is just a symptom. The problem is trust or more correctly lack of trust.
It is great to be fascinated by customer loyalty and the net promoter score – as long as we understand what really drives that metric.
This is also why when we want to implement the concept of the service profit chain we can’t just focus on attracting loyal customers, however tempting that may be. We must start out by examining our own culture.
So how do we create trust
And James L. Heskett makes this point very clearly here:
Managers do what they say they will do. Make few promises and keep them all. Setting and meeting expectations is critical to creating high levels of trust
Simon Sinek says it all boils down to this:
whether a leader puts themselves or their people first, determines if they are worthy of our love and loyalty.
In his book Why Leaders Eat Last he makes this point brilliantly.
in the book he also demonstrates what it really takes to develop trust
There is also an interesting article on trust here:
Great leaders build a culture of courage in a climate of fear