Employee Engagement Makes Member Service Thrive

The rise of the caring employer and the introduction of workplace wellness initiatives are not mere displays of altruism or gratitude.

These are just two things known to enhance employee engagement, which leads to increased business performance and productivity.

Gallup’s report, “State of the American Workplace 2017,” reveals employee engagement levels have been more or less static since the turn of the Millennium. In 2016, 51% of employees were not engaged while 16% were actively disengaged and costing somewhere between $450 and $550 billion each a year in lost productivity. Only 33% of U.S. workers were engaged.

Employee engagement is defined in the report as an emotional and psychological attachment to one’s work and workplace. Chances are you’ll be able to name an engaged employee. It’s that person who excels, always has energy, is brimming with ideas, has a career progression strategy you know about, offers feedback to managers and gives time to juniors. They wear the T-shirt and drink the Kool Aid.

Engaged, member-facing employees double as brand ambassadors. They can offer the best member experience because they have bought emotionally into the credit union and its core values. They talk the talk.

Although the credit union member experience is increasingly virtual, the best member service will always be underpinned by human interaction, whether in the branch, over the phone or behind live chat.

Credit unions should be nailing engagement, because they operate on the principle of helping people and tend to attract more altruistic employees than other financial services institutions. Plus, a proportion of employees will be invested, financially, as members. And the organizations that really get engagement right treat their employees as stakeholders.

Measuring Employee Engagement

The most obvious aid to measuring engagement is technology, which can monitor and analyze the employee response to shared information.

But you also have to have something to measure, and it’s worth spending time pinning down exactly what measurable metrics could be linked to engagement.

One example is professional development, known to be a key driver of employee engagement. Online training courses, delivered via video, are increasingly being adopted to pass on knowledge, upskill staff and offer the chance to earn accreditations.

Data captured through the online learning software includes pass rates and course attendance, allowing credit unions to uncover key insights. Many are now adding a gamification element to online learning, with quizzes to check absorption and offer a higher level of engagement with the information delivered.

Another way to check your staff’s engagement level is through the intranet and social media. What levels of engagement do posts get, and who is posting, sharing, commenting and liking? What events, socials and initiatives are the most popular based on the online response? Interactions can be easily compared and contrasted. To measure external communications by staff on social media, encourage the use of company hashtags so you can track the response.

Other key areas to capture data include productivity per employee measured by outputs, staff retention and attrition by team and department, career progression, whether goals have been reached, how often staff members ask for or offer feedback to management, and notable achievements.

Look, too, for opportunities to compare positive change. If onboarding, progression or training is to be improved or overhauled, for example, it would be worth comparing engagement metrics between those who experienced the old process and the new.

Key performance indicators such as new members gained per month, member retention and prospective member inquiries can all be recorded, measured and cross-referenced with data from employee engagement initiatives. This means credit unions can analyze trends, spot patterns and detect areas of improvement. Organizations may find that member retention drops when staff attrition spikes, for example.

Forget Surveys, Take Action

Too many companies think employee engagement is about an annual HR-driven survey that staff members are made to complete. In fact, the process should be continuous.

In its aforementioned report, Gallup warned: “Achieving engagement is simply not as easy as putting together a survey to measure employees’ level of engagement … Commonly, organizations put too much emphasis on measuring engagement, rather than on improving engagement. They fall into the ‘survey trap.’”

One method is to be agile with an employee engagement strategy. Collect data continuously, analyze periodically but regularly, and then move to form a reactive response. The agile method works best when driven by a team that is collaborative and harnesses the power of collective thinking, or the hive mind.

Agile teams will find a response that suits the results, rather than persevering with a strategy regardless or, worse, sitting on survey results and failing to take any action at all. This kind of flexibility – used by technology software companies that have to make continuous and incremental changes based on demand and circumstances – results in reactive and relevant change.

Tie Engagement to Member Experience With Empathy

You can hardly expect disengaged employees to lead the charge on a positive member experience. Member experience, like employee engagement, is both cultural and emotional. While metrics can be used to track and analyze to a point, culture and emotion don’t always care for data.

According to Businessolver’s 2017 Workplace Empathy Monitor, empathy is the key to driving employee engagement, retention and productivity but it says there is “a persistent – and growing – “empathy gap”… between CEOs and employees.”

Businessolver’s data shows that, although 60% of CEOs believe their organizations are empathetic, only 24% of employees think the same. An overwhelming 85% of employees believe empathy is undervalued by U.S. organizations.

Empathy is something that can permeate culture if it’s implemented strategically and consistently. It can be a core value, expressed consistently and often through internal communications, underpinning a peer support campaign, clear to see in every appraisal, a main feature of onboarding, evident in your employee benefits line up and a big part of your member service training.

Six Ways to Engage Employees

1. Demonstrate trust and empathy by offering flexible working hours so staff can work when they are most productive and gain a better work-life balance.
2. Offer remote or mobile working options, too, so your team can spend more time with family rather than commuting and work without distraction.
3. Support new working practices with technology that enables mobile working, and makes communication and real-time collaboration on projects easy.
4. Create a vibrant and cohesive culture underpinned by a set of core values and communicate this through several internal communications channels, e.g. an intranet and a staff newsletter or magazine.
5. Pick a hashtag and encourage content creation on social media. Get your team sharing photos and going live from events and away days. This is also one way to promote an authentic, unfiltered employer brand.
6. Offer opportunities for learning and professional development. Many financial services institutions are now investing in cost-effective online learning software and producing training videos.

Nigel Davies is the Founder of Claromentis. He can be reached at 0044-7771-776-454 or nigel.davies@claromentis.com.