How Essential Is Employee Engagement For Your Brand?

On Friday, I was asked to tag along to visit several dealerships in a hunt for a new car. Having grown up around cars in my late father's car repair shop, my entourage believe that I bring added insight to the matter, a misconception I maintain thanks to Google and the internet.

When we set out on our grand tour, my companion told me beforehand which brand dealerships they had visited and which car had ranked more points in in the quest for it to be The One.

As we hopped from one dealership to another, met with their salespeople, discussed the various vehicles specs and budgets and eventually had our own post review discussion, it dawned on me that there was a close correlation between some specific wording used by the salespeople and how we perceived the brand from our angle as customers.
Out of 5 dealerships we visited I noticed the following:

• 3 dealerships left us unimpressed, one of which was completely unpleasant
• 2 dealerships were great, one of which was really excellent.

I am not going to mention which is which because this is not the point of this piece and because there are enough people on blogs whoring themselves out to brands. What I will mention though is the common denominator among the 3 dealerships which offered the most disappointing experience. During our visit to each of those, we naturally asked a lot of questions about the exhibited vehicles, their features, the lack of certain options and models and whether they might be bringing those into the local market. In retrospect, I noticed that in each case the salesperson would refer to his own dealership  as "they". To be clear, they did not refer to the brand but to the local dealership (management)

• They chose not to include these options in the car
• They chose not to bring this model to Lebanon
• They decided to raise the price
• They prefer not to sell this...

This was aggravated by a more detached body language that made us feel that the salespeople just wanted to be done with answering the questions in order to go take a break.

Compared to the two locations where we had a good experience, this inferred a major disconnect between management and its employees. In both locations that made it to the final selection lists, salespeople distinguished themselves by:

• A more upbeat demeanor: they would immediately notice a new client walking in, greet promptly and engage in helpful but non intrusive discussion.
• They ALWAYS talked about their offerings and vehicles by using "WE":
• We have the best rated vehicles
• We have superior after sales
• We have the best deal in this range of vehicles

This forced me to do some introspection about my own behavior in various instances of jobs, associations and activities that I had been a part of. I can safely say that the correlation applied also to me.  The best example I can give is my past experience in the Telecom sector:

• While working with Cellis (FTML) one of the first two mobile operators in Lebanon, my speech always used the "We" form.
• When Cellis was substituted by what is now Alfa and the plethora of companies that have subsequently managed this brand name ("managed" being an overstatement here), myself and several of my colleagues drifted slowly but surely to using "They" when referring to the company even while we still worked there.

In essence, no matter how deep business owners, management teams or any person in charge of  brands choose to bury their heads in the sands of "employees are here to slave for me", at some point they need to wake up to the smell of disgruntled staff passively sabotaging the business just by their demeanor and body language (to begin with).
The only time a business can carry on not giving a damn about it's employees and not suffer the consequences is when it is monopolizing a sector (and we know all about that in Lebanon).

It goes beyond any doubt that whatever you seed internally in terms of employee engagement will surely trickle down to you customers. It won't matter how many discounts you do, how many offers you release, your brand will be always associated with the resentment emanating from your customer-facing staff.
Good luck getting rid of that stench!

Employee Retention & Other Myths

Over the past few months, I have come across this  business quote over and over again, on various social media channels.
While I was among those who applauded the apparent wit behind it and found myself relating to it, both as a business owner and as someone who spent 13 years in the corporate environment, I must admit I have grown tired of seeing it over and over. The reason is perhaps related to the fact that it oversimplifies the issue of employee retention while falling into abstract stereotypes of corporate roles. It is just too simplistic, too shallow as an assumption; so bear with me a bit here and allow me to dive more into what employees I would not want to retain and why.

Employees and managers come in all shapes and sizes and they walk into the corporate environment pre-molded by their education, their cultural background, their family upbringing, their past experiences in life and work and their own expectations for the future. For any setup, retaining an employee is a delicate balance between all these factors along with the mandatory needs of the business itself.
It is for this very reason that we can sometimes discover employees who stick around with the same employer for years without any getting human development benefits while others would walk away in spite of huge perks. So how to tell if your employee is a match for your leadership style and whether they are in it for the long run?
Here is my own personal list of things to watch for. I am not an HR expert and this list is based on my experience, my gut feeling and years of being disappointed by both employers and employees alike. Here are the people I would not want around me in my business environment:

• The Acute Politeness: Exaggerated politeness is for me an immediate red flag. Email signatures with expressions like "Respectfully yours" and other sugar coatings are just someone who is trying to make themselves seem small and vulnerable enough so they get away with something way bigger, like stealing your client's website for example and reselling it to someone after a quick make-up job.
    
• Buddy Buddy:
  Pretty much like the acute polite person, this one has no boundaries, they think that by cozying up to management folk, they can gain some sort of immunity to actually having to do the job they were hired for. It's an equal opportunity cross-gender syndrome, and those who fall for this tactic are way too many, unfortunately.
     
• The Collector:
  If you ask to take on every project that passes under your nose or if you make a purpose of not missing a training and you act always like you are racing the clock to do as many things as possible, this will make me think you are just passing by the company and looking to gather as much momentum as you can before you leap onto your next stop.
     
• The Office Decoration:
  If I can't tell you apart from the Dieffenbachia that's sitting next to your desk you might as well go find another place to work. People who succeed in staying that inconspicuous are in my book either not skilled enough and prefer to keep this under wraps or sneakily planning to do something you would never see coming.
     
• Little Miss Precious:
  My use of the word "Miss" here is not directed towards women. This title is unisex. If you are too precious to move your sorry a..arm, arm...yes that's the word I was looking for, then you probably belong on a shelf, in a closet, in your parents' living room with all the rest of the kitsch collectibles they probably have lined up in there.
     
• George Costanza: if you don't know who's that, google him. If you want to know why, watch this:
  
  

However, subordinates aren't always the ones to blame, even for managers and high level executives misconceptions rule and appearances can be deceiving:
The Marketing Manager is not always a show off , the CTO isn't always right, the HR Manager is not always nice, the CFO is not always stingy and the CEO is not always the champion.

Bottom line, no one is irreplaceable! Not the employee, not the manager and not the business, we all go our separate ways in life and try to find the perfect angle where our view of the world aligns with how we have grown comfortable seeing it. Go ahead, Instagram that!