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America's Worst Companies Equals a Crashing Brand
It doesn't take a brand expert to tell you that if your company is listed as one of the worst companies in America, your brand value will plummet. These companies on the other hand are certainly losing their brand value (as well as $$$) when 24/7 Wall Street recently came out with a list of the 11 worst companies in America -- and many of these large corporations all lack one common theme. (Read more for a re-post of their article).
Poor employee satisfaction. Companies such as Dillard's, Dish Network, Sears/KMart are suffering because of their poor relationship with their employees which eventually trickles down to a poor relationship with their customers.
24/7 Wall Street using reviews from the Glassdoor.com reported nearly all of the companies that received the lowest scores are either in retail or regularly communicate with customers through relatively low-paid workers. And the terrible relationship these companies have with their employees often extends to their clientele as well. Most of the companies on this list are in industries that do poorly on customer satisfaction surveys, including satellite TV, retail and banking. Sears and Dish Network, for example, received among the worst ratings in their sector on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Another factor shared by many of the companies on this list is the perception that they have been bulldozed into the ground by competitors. RadioShack falls into that category. So do OfficeMax and Dish, which have been overwhelmed by large numbers of rivals.Finally, most have been hurt by poor brand perception, years of layoffs, poor sales, bad public relations and falling stock prices. Whatever else may have caused the workers at to turn against their employers, public opinion has not helped.
Can these companies make a comeback or is it too late?
The Importance of Employee Surveys
Do you know what your employees are thinking? How would your average employee describe your company culture?
It always surprises me how many companies don't conduct marketing research with employees. Employee satisfaction and attitudes about your company are inextricably linked to what the customer and prospect think about your company. Not having a good measurement from your employees is to miss a big chunk of information that is critical to understanding and managing your brand.
Now, having said that, I also believe that when you survey employees you are sending the message that you intend to take action on the information. I once worked for a company where the Human Resource department was convinced that we needed an employee survey. So, I, as the marketing research expert, was co opted to go along with them to present the project to the CEO. We made our case and at the end of the meeting, the CEO said, "I'm not going to do an employee survey. If I ask them what they think, they will expect me to do something about it, and I am not going to. So I don't want to raise expectations I can't deliver on." Not a good answer, but the right answer, under the circumstances!
But back to the link between brands and employees: My colleague and friend, Sybil Stershic, President of Quality Services Marketing recently posted a blog discussing the link between employees, culture and brand. We are delighted to share her blog with you!
Much has been written the past few weeks about Greg Smith and his public reasons for disengaging from Goldman Sachs – with a lot of the discussion centered on the importance of corporate culture.
Employees don’t work in a vacuum. For better or worse, they’re greatly impacted by “the way things are done around here” and what actions get rewarded and reinforced; i.e., behaviors that reflect a company’s culture and values.
Sure, a company needs profits to survive … but profit is only one of several components critical to sustainable success. A company also needs its employees, stakeholders, and partners associated with the enterprise to be aligned around a purpose that goes beyond pure profit. As these successful executives have learned:
“Maximum growth and high ideals are not incompatible; they’re inseparable. … A brand ideal of improving people’s lives is the only sustainable way to recruit, unite and inspire all the people a business touches, from employees to customers. Without that connection, no business can truly excel.” Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer at Proctor & Gamble and author of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies
“The companies that put profit before people are a vanishing breed. Companies big and small, with a multiple stakeholder approach to business, the ones that value their employees and customers as much as shareholders, are realizing that the financials only get better. If you want to make more money, focus on your people first. It’s not only the right thing to do. It’s good for business.” Paul Spiegelman, founder and CEO of the The Beryl Companies, in his article “Attention Goldman Sachs: Time to Buckle Down and Focus on Culture”
“Over time, as we focused more and more on our culture, we ultimately came to the realization that a company’s culture and a company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of a company’s culture.” Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO and author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
The bottom line: Focusing on people and purpose creates a strong culture and positive brand that helps drive profits."
Sybil F. Stershic is a marketing and organizational advisor with extensive experience helping service providers strengthen employee and customer relationships. A respected thought leader on engaging employees through internal marketing, she is the author of Share of Mind, Share of Heart: Marketing Tools of Engagement for Nonprofits (2012), Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care (2007), and the Quality Service Marketing blog. Sybil specializes in internal marketing & communications and mission-focused/customer-focused staff development. She also teaches marketing workshops nationwide to corporate and nonprofit professionals. Active in leadership and professional development, Sybil is a former Chairman of the American Marketing Association. Besides her continued involvement with AMA, she serves on the Advisory Council of Global Facilitators Serving Communities and is a member of BoardSource and the International Association of Facilitators.
Employee Satisfaction: How to Show Them You Care
Earlier this week, another of our Polaris editorial team, Danica Kwon, explored the idea via her blog that your employees are also your customers. Some companies may dismiss this but others take it to heart.
Want to know what companies are listening? Recently, Glassdoor.com published a list of the best places to work. Glassdoor.com is a website where employees can anonymously post comments either for or against the company where they work and is used extensively by job hunters and occasionally by HR Departments. In 2012, the companies making the Top Ten included McKinsey & Company, Facebook, Google, CareeerBuilder, REI and Trader Joe’s.
Want to know how they got there? It’s because they DO treat their employees like customers that they want to keep. Apart from workplace amenities such as free gyms, on-site day care and subsidized cafeterias, there are other things that companies can do that won’t cost them much but will go a long way in garnering employee satisfaction.
An easy example is Best Western hotels who publicly recognize their employees via their social media sites. This is an inexpensive but effective way to build employee morale in ‘real time’. Another excellent website, Mashable, came up with several other cheap but very effective ways to keep your employees happy. One easy way is to make sure your company website reflects all your employees – from the top down. Another way is to share iTunes playlists among employees.
And one that is becoming more and more important, letting employees work ‘in the cloud’ occasionally. During last year’s ‘Snowmageddon’ that most of the country experienced, forward-thinking companies had already set-up systems that allowed employees to work from home which resulted not only in greater employee morale, but also, no loss in production for the company.
As a contrast, think of the companies that didn’t even make the Top 50, such as Coca-Cola, UPS and Georgia Pacific. I wonder if they know they have an employee problem?
An excellent way to make sure that you're treating your employees as well as you treat your customers is by conducting regular employee satisfaction surveys. But one caveat, employee satisfaction surveys only work if the employee feels that the feedback they give will be at least evaluated by management, if not acted upon.
A company that conducts these surveys ‘for show’ but with no apparent action, will find out fast that subsequent surveys will reflect the employees’ doubts that anything they say will be listened to. And unsatisfied employees are as big, or a bigger problem, than unsatisfied customers – but both can sink a company.
Are there any good examples of ways your company shows appreciation to it’s employees?
Employee Satisfaction: Employees are Your Customers Too!
With the start of the New Year many people are thinking or seeking a new job. Are you one of the many? A study released by Mercer, reported that a third of U.S. employees are doing just that. The survey also found that more than half of senior managers are among them. So why are people leaving?
Engagement (or lack of). Much along the lines of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction relies on the level of engagement between it's employer and employees. According to Mercer, an engaged employee is one who feels a vested interest in the companys' success and is motivated.
So, the 13 factors that influence engagement are:
Being treated with respect
Having work-life balance
Quality of organizational leadership
Working in an environment where they can provide good services to others
The type of work
The quality of people employees work with
Benefits
Base pay
Long-term career potential
Having flexible work arrangements
Learning and development opportunities
Opportunities for promotion
Incentive pay and bonuses
Not all these factors are important or as important to your employees or company, but to be able to measure what is can uncover your individual company needs. Once these needs are uncovered you'll have a better understanding as to what motivates your employees, what drives their loyalty, and makes and keeps them happy. That's the key to a great employee satisfaction survey!
What engagement factors are most important to you? How long would you stay at a workplace if you weren't engaged?
Don’t Be Surprised by Employee Satisfaction Surveys
It’s a beautiful day outside, you just got back from a nice vacation and to you, the world and your business seem fine. Then someone tells you about a website called Glassdoor.com. You go to the site to see if your company has any comments and lo and behold, your ‘good day’ could just become a very ‘bad day’.
For those of you not familiar with this website, it allows employees to post (anonymously) everything from their salaries, to the culture of the company to any gripes they may have with their boss to what they think about the physical surroundings. And people who post on this website especially like to talk about ‘management’, or the lack thereof, but the point is this is not the way you want to find out about your company’s employee satisfaction.
Employee satisfaction surveys should be conducted on a regular basis (for tracking purposes) and now more than ever they should be conducted more frequently than they have been historically in order to stay ‘in step’ with today’s fast-changing business climate. An important reason to make sure your employees are satisfied is that with the unemployment rate at an all-time high, the morale, or more specifically, the fear of losing one’s job, is the highest cause of anxiety in today’s workplace. And if someone has a complaint they feel will cost them their job and want to tell everyone what they really think about their company, there’s no need for them to go to Human Resources, they can just broadcast their opinions or complaints to the world since they now have a forum to do just that.
For those companies who believe that ‘airing one’s dirty laundry’ may be an admirable trait in this age of ‘transparency’, is that true of comments that may represent your company as being the last place in the world a talented new hire would want to work? There’s no way to please all employees all of the time but the best way to stave off these surprises, are regular checks on the pulse of the company through employee surveys. These do not have to be long, intricate surveys, but rather they should be a fast, easy way for an employee to voice a concern and get a resolution before deciding to go to Glassdoor.com and letting everyone on the worldwide web know that you’re complaining and down-rating a company because they don’t have the preferred salad dressing in the cafeteria.
Do you know how your employees feel? When was the last time you asked them? Did an employee survey produce unexpected results? Tell us about it!
Can ‘Hope’ Be a Valid Market Research Finding?
Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Royal Wedding in London last Friday was covered live by eleven television networks in the US, with an average audience of 22.8 million viewers. Attendance figures for the wedding are estimated to be more than 600,000, based on the fact that the capacity of Westminster Abbey is 2,200, and outside, since the 1981 wedding between Charles and Diana had an estimated crowd of 600,000, similar numbers were posted.
Even in the U.S., companies from Betty Crocker to Papa John’s benefitted from “Royal Fever” with “Betty” releasing recipes for royal wedding cakes and what to serve for traditional British meals and Papa John’s, which has created a Royal Wedding Pizza with toppings arranged in the couple’s likeness!
But debates over Royal Wedding’s economic impact on British economy continued as Britain prepared for the event. Recent “unofficial” polls in Britain suggest that more people think that the wedding between Kate and William will cost the UK economy billions, versus the anticipated $1-2 billion it might bring to the country’s struggling economy, in the form of wedding memorabilia, pub attendance and tourism.
Specifically, British tax payers will also be paying around $33 million for the wedding in terms of clean-up, security, top notch surveillance, and police officers who worked overtime to eliminate all possible threats on the big day. This economic ‘jolt’ to the UK economy would be respectable enough if it had not come after a similarly large fall in the previous quarter, when heavy snow in December kept customers away from hotels, restaurants, airports and other opportunities to spend. Under those circumstances, a bigger rebound in activity might have been hoped for by economists. As it is, the British economy has stood still for the past six months and the growth rate in the year to the end of March was a sluggish 1.8%.
Suffice to say, Britain is experiencing some of its worst economic conditions in years. If the country had turned to a survey company to conduct a poll to find out how the British people felt about the money being spent on the wedding, would the response have been “No way!”?
But ‘hope’ can be the results or a major finding of a study. In business, ‘hope’ is that a new product will sell as anticipated based on marketing research results. There’s ‘hope’ that your employees are satisfied with their working environment and ‘hope’ that your customers are satisfied with your service based on research.
In this case, maybe the answer is as easy as people needed a break! With the killer storms we had in the US last week, the recent earthquake and tsunami disasters in Japan and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, people needed something “good” to believe in – something to give them ‘hope’ and for a day, the world rejoiced with England and their fairy tale wedding and gave ‘hope’ that the world would once again spin in greased grooves.
Have you ever conducted research where the result was an intangible such as ‘hope’? Do you think that the wedding costs for Britain were justified? Tell us what you think!