Loyalty

How to significantly increase employee, colleague and client loyalty in a tough market.

“Hang on to your most-prized asset … your staff.  Company owners may need to work harder to retain their key employees”.  This is the title of an FT article (2012), it says what many of us already know, so why do we not act on these words of wisdom?  It takes time and effort however, again we can build this through one conversation at a time.

Harvard Business Review (HBR) in their Special Customer Service Collection’ state that ‘Customer Satisfaction is Rooted in Employee Satisfaction.’

What is employee loyalty – why should we bother?

Employee loyalty happens when employees are committed to your business and its success.  They believe that working for your business is their best option.  Not only do they plan to remain with your business, but they do not actively search for alternative employment and are not responsive to offers.

The ‘Service Profit Chain’ illustrates the links:

Internal Service Quality >>> Employee Satisfaction >>> Employee Retention >>> External Service Quality >>> Customer Satisfaction >>> Customer Retention >>> Profit

HBR – “the customer doesn’t expect everything will go right all the time; the big test is what you do when things go wrong … Occasional service failure is unavoidable”.

The same goes for the workplace and your employees and why it’s important to admit your mistakes; transparency breeds transparency and in the long term save time, effort and embarrassment.