Successful leaders engage their colleagues, professional relationships and networks to drive innovation, growth, and extraordinary careers. Although engagement is a measure of an organization’s capacity to deliver and a leading indicator of financial performance, most companies ignore it or make it the job of the digital marketers. Certainly digital presents new, more effective ways to engage consumers and build brands. The engagement revolution, however, has much broader opportunities for business – accelerating decision-making, changing the dynamics of relationships, reinventing capabilities, and increasing profits.
Disengagement is costly
According to Gallup, in average organizations, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is 1.5:1. In contrast, the ratio in world-class organizations is near 8:1. Sadly, disengaged employees cost businesses more than $300 billion in lost productivity. There are additional costs such as turnover, lost opportunities, customer erosion, and lower rates of innovation.
Disengagement also blocks successful execution. Management, for example, says the customer is king, but employees refuse to go the extra mile. Leaders seek to change the competitive marketplace, while their businesses strive to mimic it.
Leaders can also be disengaged. Consider the impact on investor confidence when a CFO proclaims, ”My job is to track and present the financials, not to influence business results or stock performance.” The remedy includes clear expectations with accountability for results – and investor relationships where applicable – especially at the executive level.
Engagement drives great businesses
High engagement organizations have distinct business cultures. Employees actively seek change, reach for new ideas, and proactively involve colleagues, consumers and stakeholders. Leaders communicate often, empower teams, and ask everyone to be out in the marketplace. Networking for information and advice becomes part of corporate life. Employees are connecting the dots before new techniques and trends become obvious. Work is a source of fulfillment because it’s difficult, ambiguous, and important to the organization’s success.
In effective companies, employees actively manage their careers, searching internally for assignments that stretch their capabilities and prepare them for the future. A rich rolodex, once necessary only in recruitment and sales, enables a call for action across the organization and beyond. Employees in every department are motivated to develop and access key relationships to achieve their goals.
Outreach to consumers is a source of power for anyone with the passion and skills to get involved. While it’s easy to get in touch with consumers, engaging them is hard. Yet engagement is becoming essential to understand how to make products and brands more relevant to the consumer. To quote Jack Neff in Ad Age, May 17th, “in a growing number of cases even the biggest marketers in the world, such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever, are adjusting creative and media plans on the fly within days, weeks or even hours based on changing events or the shifting tides of social-media feedback.”
Leaders and employees also engage suppliers, retailers, government agencies as customers or regulators, the public and media. Needing to increase its outreach, the Federal Reserve moved SVP Deborah Perelmuter, a 25 year veteran, into a new position to interact with all external stakeholders including the public to educate them about the business context of the Fed’s activities. Perelmuter continues to advise internally and collaborates with the Executive Office.
Making engagement matter
Companies need to assign accountability to its leaders to spearhead interactive communication as a strategy, skill set, and coordinated activity. Organizations often need designated people to build and nurture critical relationships and develop the underpinnings of productive engagement strategies.
The role can take many forms including a Consumer Engagement Officer who focuses on building and mining the company’s connections with customers – or a Chief Engagement Officer who uses the power of collaboration and communication with all constituents to enhance relationships. The force of these changes can be powerful and substantive - with measurable impact.
