Some Companies Forget the Employees are also Customers

It has always amazed me how tone deaf some leaders of organizations are about the obvious. While this article in the Wall Street Journal deals with job seekers as customers, the more important question is do they consider employees as customers? According to Gallop polling, only 30 percent of employees are engaged—so it is safe to assume that the 70 percent don't speak well of their employer.

In my many years in retail I made it a point as a senior executive to treat every employee the way I wanted them to treat customers. Doing so engages employees as ambassadors for the company and your brand and helps create a psychologically healthy, safe and fair workplace. You need to look no further than the recent fiascoes with United Airlines to know how forgetting to treat employees like customers impacts your brand and reputation. On the other hand, a positive work culture creates an outreach and representation by employees that is more valuable than any other form of promotion.

Photo credit: BIGSTOCK

The Power of Questioning in the Office

Abbey Lossing for NYT

I love the sentiment of this article from a workplace culture perspective – working in an environment that encourages healthy questioning of ideas and practices is a good sign of a psychologically healthy workplace. However, considering that 70% of North American employees are not engaged at work, I have to assume that not every workplace is structured to allow free and open questions. If more business leaders opened their corporations up to this kind of culture, they might find that their greatest asset is the curiosity and problem-solving capacity of their employees. You can read more in The New York Times.

Misjudging Moods: The Connection Between Brexit and Workplace Culture

The implications of the Brexit vote are far reaching and momentous; the economic and political effects are only just now being felt, but I’m more interested in the social aspect of the vote from the perspective of workplace culture.

In my experience, many workplaces are home to a total disconnect between upper management and general employees. Whether it’s values, goals, or general emotions about work, this disconnect can lead to a multitude of different conditions that create toxic workplace cultures, like a lack of trust, pervasive bullying and low productivity. In short, when managers completely fail to understand the points of view of their employees, workplace culture tends to go downhill.

Enter the Brexit vote – from an outsider’s perspective, it appears as though the political elites in the UK wholly misunderstood the emotions and plights of the average people. This disconnect allowed many UK voters to be swayed by general language, biases and misinformation in the media that took advantage of their frustrations. The political establishment misread the mood of the public, leading to a monumental (and potentially catastrophic) decision that is being felt the world over.

This is why emotional intelligence is so essential – both from a workplace culture perspective and a political perspective in terms of the Brexit vote. Managers should be aware of their employees’ feelings to avoid poisonous workplace cultures; similarly, the establishment of the political landscape need to be aware of the feelings of their constituents in order to effectively lead them. Understanding why people feel the way they do is the best way to diagnose issues and work together to solve them. A lack of understanding leads people to target issues that cloud how they’re really feeling – which is what appears to have happened in terms of the Brexit, which may not hold the solutions to the many real concerns UK citizens have about economic instability. In much the same way as employers use mass layoffs as a first rather than last resort, the British people seem to have taken the Brexit option as a first rather than last resort – and both have happened as the result of a fundamental disconnect between emotion and action.

While UK and EU citizens will undoubtedly continue to have mixed feelings on the Brexit vote, the fact that the top Google search in the UK was “What is the EU?” goes to show how essential communication and awareness are. Hopefully, this example will serve as a powerful lesson for the USA come November.

Image Credit: Al Jazeera