HR Service Matters

By: Mike Smith

If you were curious about my previous blog concerning employee engagement, I saw a recent article from Knowledge@Wharton that presents some very interesting research results from Wharton management professor Adam Grant.  While the research is focused on what motivates employees, it is hard to imagine a motivated employee who is not engaged with the organization.

The premise in my blog was that recording and then replaying videos of employees relating positive experiences that customers had encountered with a product or service would help engage other employees.  Even a simple video made with a Flip Video camera would surely do the trick.  For details, here is a link to my previous blog:

http://tiny.cc/oe5IA

Adam Grant’s notion was straightforward.  If a person knows that their work has had a meaningful, positive impact on others, that realization can make the employee happier and more productive (and I contend more engaged).  Here is a sample of Adam Grant’s research results:

In his 2007 study, Grant and a team of researchers -- Elizabeth Campbell, Grace Chen, David Lapedis and Keenan Cottone from the University of Michigan -- arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school's fundraising largess. It wasn't a long meeting -- just a five-minute session where the workers were able to ask the student about his or her studies. But over the next month, that little chat made a big difference. The call center was able to monitor both the amount of time its employees spent on the phone and the amount of donation dollars they brought in. A month later, callers who had interacted with the scholarship student spent more than two times as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.

"Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation," the researchers write in their paper, titled "Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior," published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 

You can review the complete article at:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2436

The big takeaway for me is that we need to make sure we are providing opportunities for our employees to interact with customers (or the ultimate end users) on a regular basis.  Hearing the benefits directly from the customer or end user is a powerful way to engage employees in the organization.  If employees can’t meet the end user directly, then make a video and post it on employee portals or replay during periodic employee webcasts.   Even if the customer is internal, take time to capture on a regular basis the benefits the customer experiences so all can see that their work is making a difference.