How Do You Get Employees to Do the Right Thing?
Posted July 26, 2016 in Employee Experience, Living the BrandAt Fifth P, we believe employees play an integral role in the overall success of your organization. After all, they are the fifth “P” in your marketing mix. Employees are the last link in the customer experience – they are the ones who deliver the experience to the customers, so it’s important to do everything in your power to ensure employees do the right thing.
Why People Matter Most
There are a many ways an organization can inspire people to do the right thing. Great organizations remove barriers, reward employees for the right behaviours and have strong leaders who lead by example. But at the end of the day, no method for getting your employees to do the right thing will work if you don’t hire the right people for your organization.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the manager at a local restaurant, you want to hire people who are committed to delivering your brand experience. Not only will you and your customers enjoy interacting with these types of employees, you’ll find their attitude and desire to do the right thing will rub off on your entire organization.
Consider this example. You’re walking by a fast food restaurant. It’s a notoriously messy place – mostly because of it’s extremely busy downtown location. You notice an employee stop to pick up garbage in the entrance way with her bare hands. Clearly this isn’t her job – she isn’t wearing gloves or carrying any other cleaning equipment. She’s picking up garbage because she knows it’s the right thing to do and she can’t, in good conscience, leave it on the floor near the entrance of the restaurant.
Organizations create all kinds of policies and procedures, but getting employees to do the right thing can be a real challenge. It’s impossible to document and plan for every customer scenario and interaction. If you start by hiring the people who believe in your brand and are committed to delivering it, you are much more likely to find that they will do the right thing.
Hire and Live By Brand
Hiring the right people isn’t just about the recruiting process – it starts well before meeting and interviewing candidates. It begins with determining the characteristics of your ideal employee – traits that align with your brand and the customer and employee experience you want to deliver. At Fifth P, we call this the ideal DNA. The more people there are in the organization with the ideal traits, the easier all levels of the organization will be able to live the brand.
Consider a speciality grocer whose brand promise is to help customers with meal solutions. Traditionally, this organization would focus on hiring individuals with retail experience who are comfortable operating a store, running a POS and have good customer service skills. However, their brand promise is about more than that. They need individuals who are interested in food and cooking – people who want to help customers with meal ideas and tips for meal preparation.
There are many skills you can train employees to do – such as operating your POS – but it is much harder to change someone’s attitude to align with your brand promise. If you hire individuals who are passionate about delivering your brand, you can feel confident that they will do the right thing.
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The identification of characteristics and personality traits that align with your brand are a key component to making sure your organization hires the right people – the ones who are most likely to deliver your brand promise every day.