Are Employees Necessary?

The corporate and business world is slowly arriving at the realisation that their strategic advantage is their people and their purpose. It’s not in tech nor process improvement. It’s in using commercial activity to do good in delivering on their purpose and in the process do well.

This was my last post--Doing Good Gets You Doing Well—and the data on this post is very revealing!

I’m thrilled with what the data says --> 367 people saw this ànd 295 liked it ànd 14 commented and 48 re-shared! A little over 13% of those who viewed this post felt it good enough to re-share with their network. I know it’s a drop in the LinkedIn ocean of millions of members but keeping in mind my network and reach this engagement is very heartening and proves that there is a clear need for businesses and corporates to engage from their point of purpose and not from a product or service benefit with the intent of making profits.

Here’s how important people are

People make organizations. Without people organizations are just empty shells. It’s the people or employees, their leadership and their behaviour that creates a culture which then becomes the organizations’ identity. 

This behaviour goes on to create and deliver a crucial element of organizational success-- brand experience! This experience then drives all perception of the organizations’ identity and ability and ultimately is reflected on their share price.

Among stakeholders of a brand employees are the single most important stakeholders. Strangely enough organizations fail to acknowledge this in the brand experience and identity development process. If you take the experience provided in the recruitment stage to a potential employee, compare that with the experience provided to an employee in employment versus that it delivers to a customer the gaps are simply amazing!

Often each segment of experience is operating in an individual silo. There’s no overall connectivity with the organizational purpose let alone with the operating strategy. Each segment is an individual campaign which is executed, measured and reported. Then we wonder why we aren’t having higher engagement and we’re not hitting the projected revenue numbers.

Culture drives engagement and creates profit

 An organisation with strong ethics & empowerment having goals that clearly link to developing individuals and where the employee feels empowered to contribute ideas inspires employees to strive for delivering to the best of his/her abilities.

This comes about because the employee likes going to work every day, learns and is appreciated. It creates engagement.

This engagement leads to specific behaviour that is aligned with the organisational values and manifests as the work culture. Strong teamwork is visible. Positivity is visibly felt, and success of individual activities occurs.

Activating a culture action plan is not easy. It takes time, persistence, consistency and most importantly clarity. Clarity between business goals, functional roles and individual development.

Where do we start?

Find the hidden influencers!

Developing an effective corporate culture is not an external effort. It is purely an internal exercise that needs as much attention, planning, and leadership support for effective implementation, as any regular function of an organisation.

In every organization there are the positional leaders, based on the organizational chart, and then there are the actual ‘influencers’ working cross-functionally in teams. These influencers need to be identified, assessed for their self-motivation and alignment of purpose and flagged as potential change champions. They need to be recognised by organizational leadership and provided clarity on business goals and business purpose and the brand experience that would help the organization achieve its purpose.

These influencers work from within in impacting on changing behaviour. This is the most difficult part as work habits are part of our individual cultural make-up that we carry with us when we walk into a job. Affecting change requires having a consistent interaction in which the values are held up all the times in the one-one-one interaction and makes an employee know and feel what is the right way to behave in the organization.

For more on this I’m happy to #HaveAConversation with you and see how we can mutually create value for your organization.

Contact me here????

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Joy Abdullah is a senior marketing leader who brings a proven ability in developing business solutions that enable organizations to create financial value through brand experience.

A British national born in the UK, raised in India, and settled in Malaysia he was recognized as one of ‘Malaysia’s 10 Most Engaged Marketing Folks on LinkedIn’ in 2015.

He writes, consults, trains and speaks on brand experience value in an Asian perspective

Click here for his articles.  

?Connect with Joy on:

1. Linked In 

2. Twitter @JoyAbdullah.

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