It’s often said that it’s up to us as individuals to cultivate our own passion in our personal lives and that we shouldn’t hope to find it in our professional lives. But maybe we can have it all. Perhaps companies should also take some responsibility here. After all, passion feeds employee engagement, which in turn fuels employee retention. Companies definitely realize some major economic benefits by having happy employees who are highly productive and motivated to stay where they are – and they suffer the consequences when the reverse is true.
This isn’t exactly rocket science. Research confirms a link between employees’ engagement and their company’s performance. A Gallup poll found that 71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, and are thereby emotionally separated from their workplaces and less likely to be productive. If they decide to leave, companies face expensive turnover costs. If you want to see how this affects your own company, try this nifty online employee turnover calculator.
Moreover, companies that have passionate customers also enjoy additional financial rewards. Another Gallup study has shown that “emotionally engaged customers deliver superior financial returns than disengaged customers. Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth than the average customer, while disengaged customers deliver a 13% discount.”
Thus, when faced with the prospects of disengaged employees and disenchanted customers, passion really does start to have an interesting dollar value. What can companies do, then, to insulate themselves from these alarming financial and HR risks?
The answer is surprisingly simple. Companies should address both issues at once.
According to Gallup research, laid out in the book Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, 2007), optimizing both employee and customer engagement delivers significantly stronger financial performance than focusing on either one separately. Further, organizational units “that simultaneously optimize both employee and customer engagement significantly outperform units that optimize just employee or customer engagement — or fail to optimize either element — on measures of financial and operational success.”
So how should your company approach this challenge?
Part two of this series provides specific strategies to help your company spark some passion by aligning itself with the issues that employees and customers care about the most.
A version of my post was originally published on the UpMo blog on Feb. 22, 2012.
