Recognize This! – Employees need to know their efforts are noticed, recognized and valued as much as compensated as part of their job.
Who in your organization has the most direct impact on how your customers perceive the company? This, of course, varies by industry, but it’s rarely ever your senior executives. No, it’s more likely the people on the lowest rungs of your career and compensation ladder.
I have the privilege and honour of contributing to the Compensation Café blog. Two of my fellow bloggers in the Café recently offered solid insight and advice, starting with Chuck Csizmar, founder and principal of CMC Compensation Group, on the importance of your front-line employees:
Since these employees are critical to retention of valued customers, does that mean we should pay them more? Not necessarily. Pay scales and appropriate ranges for knowledge, skills, job functions, etc., exist for a reason.
But we do need to value employees more.
Another Café colleague, Dan Walter, president and CEO of Performensation, made the case quite well in a post discussing a recent man-hunt in the U.S. for a man who was pursuing and killing police officers and their families. Dan explained:
Dan’s point is that more money, while an obvious solution, isn’t always the right answer. For many legitimate reasons, we often cannot or should not dramatically increase salaries or pay. But once we do have pay rates at appropriate levels, then we need to focus on how we value employees.
Valuing employees requires us to:
1) Realize the critically important role those in customer-facing roles play.
2) Look for ways to reinforce for these employees how and why their efforts are important.
3) Value these contributions by recognizing and rewarding employees when they demonstrate excellent customer service and other key values of the organization
Of course, this “valuing” shouldn’t be limited to just those who interact with employees. Everyone, right down to the person who makes sure the offices or sales floor is clean and attractive, are critical to delivering a good customer experience.
Our focus should be on all employees to recognize and reward and, indeed, value¸ them for the difference they make for customers and, ultimately, the success of the company,
Do you feel valued in your organization?