“I know ‘culture’ is valued by our staff, but it’s at the bottom of my to-do list.
It’s really a job for HR, right?”
Not so fast. Culture and Employee Experience (EX) can be the ownable difference that drives a sustainable competitive advantage.
The day to day experience of your company’s employees is probably the last thing on your to-do list as a senior marketer.
After all, it’s Customer Experience (CX) that’s been the battleground in marketing and business for the better part of the last decade. And it’s true (but hardly surprising). A Harvard Business Review study found customers who had good customer experiences spent 140% more on a company’s products compared to those who had poor experiences.
But there’s a missing link.
We’ve found through our Employee Experience (EX) practice, that a key to delivering good and consistent CX is improving EX.
EX is a reflection of your culture, your beliefs, even your purpose. It is the internal embodiment of your brand. And it’s something AFFINITY takes very seriously – not just for our clients, for ourselves too. In fact, testing our approach was the catalyst for entering the recent AFR Boss Best Places to Work competition (more on that success here).
It’s why marketing should be involved; at least providing frameworks for connecting the experience of your employees with your customers. And we’re talking employees in a big sense, not just those at the pointy end of your business. Whether customer facing or behind the scenes, it’s these human beings, not “resources”, that truly shape your business and your future success.
Your key to a sustainable success is ensuring all of your people understand your purpose as a business, their role within that purpose, and that you both enable and free them to play their part in realising that purpose. Purpose. Mastery. Autonomy. These are the core tenets of our EX engagement methodology.
So, if you’re wondering whether your business delivers a good EX, here’s a quick list of questions to think about:
- Does your organisation have a clear and compelling purpose? A purpose that’s more than a framed statement on a wall – it’s a reason to be that inspires people to share more than 33% of their life with you. (Yes, that’s really how much time we spend at work.)
- How is your business set up to provide them with the skills, knowledge and tools to be the best they can be to realise this purpose? Put to work properly, a purpose should infuse every touchpoint within the workplace, and naturally carries through from EX to CX.
- Do you have the systems and structures in place to give your people autonomy (with support where needed)?
- Does your leadership group have sufficient trust and respect in the wider team to let them get on with being their best? Respect is one of the most critical aspects in maintaining a strong workplace culture and a positive EX.
This line of questioning can be confronting. You might not like all the answers you get. But if you really want to power your business up for a sustainable advantage, your secret super-power is actually your people. You just need to effectively enable them.
Whether you want to improve your EX, CX or even BX (that’s Brand Experience for the uninitiated), the team at AFFINITY has you covered. Reach out via hello@affinity.ad – we’d love to talk further.
