The Story:
No one had a high opinion of the in-house technical support group in this Silicon Valley software company. Business units, key functional groups and employees throughout the company had the same story to tell: the support staff’s service was spotty and their information was unreliable.
Contrary to the opinion held throughout the company, the technical support folks were actually smart, hard-working people whose original intent was to provide excellent service. They could recall a time when they felt respected and supported by the organization, worked well together and had established excellent relationships with their internal customers. But times had changed. Slowly, in response to multiple factors including leadership changes, increases in technical and organizational demands, insufficient attention to the employees’ basic needs and outsourcing of a number of the critical functions that they felt should have remained with the company, employees disengaged. They had lost touch with their customer—the company’s employees. And they had loosened their grasp of the meaning, purpose and even value of their work. In their gradually increasing struggle for basic survival, submerged in the fast pace and heavy demand of their workplace culture, they had become Boiled Frogs… learn more in this article. The CIO of the company who had responsibility for this organization engaged Authentic Connections to help get to the root of the issues and work with the leadership to improve employee engagement and leadership involvement. Working closely with the leadership team, we came up with a plan that led to a 15% increase in employee engagement metrics while significantly improving their overall response times, reliability and net promoter scores with their internal customers.
Top-down, middle-out and bottom-up – you need all levels of the organization working in concert to take meaningful and lasting action. Engagement is much more about what you do than what you say.
Authentic Connection’s approach to significantly improving employee engagement is action-oriented and based on common sense steps. We help you to:
No one had a high opinion of the in-house technical support group in this Silicon Valley software company. Business units, key functional groups and employees throughout the company had the same story to tell: the support staff’s service was spotty and their information was unreliable.
Contrary to the opinion held throughout the company, the technical support folks were actually smart, hard-working people whose original intent was to provide excellent service. They could recall a time when they felt respected and supported by the organization, worked well together and had established excellent relationships with their internal customers. But times had changed. Slowly, in response to multiple factors including leadership changes, increases in technical and organizational demands, insufficient attention to the employees’ basic needs and outsourcing of a number of the critical functions that they felt should have remained with the company, employees disengaged. They had lost touch with their customer—the company’s employees. And they had loosened their grasp of the meaning, purpose and even value of their work. In their gradually increasing struggle for basic survival, submerged in the fast pace and heavy demand of their workplace culture, they had become Boiled Frogs… learn more in this article. The CIO of the company who had responsibility for this organization engaged Authentic Connections to help get to the root of the issues and work with the leadership to improve employee engagement and leadership involvement. Working closely with the leadership team, we came up with a plan that led to a 15% increase in employee engagement metrics while significantly improving their overall response times, reliability and net promoter scores with their internal customers.
Top-down, middle-out and bottom-up – you need all levels of the organization working in concert to take meaningful and lasting action. Engagement is much more about what you do than what you say.
Authentic Connection’s approach to significantly improving employee engagement is action-oriented and based on common sense steps. We help you to:
- Involve employees and managers at all levels from the outset in what will happen to them. Through discussion and action, empower them to solve their own problems.
- Frame the messages about leadership, direction and expectations in the language of the employee and structure it into digestible pieces.
- Interact with employees in a variety of formal and informal forums with a focus on smaller informal groups to build trust and reinforce the notion that "two-way" communications are real.
- Reinforce what was promised in the message by quickly and consistently building on employees’ on-going experience with positive actions that signal they are being listened to.
- Listen to the voice of the employee and the customer and carefully consider the implications. Establishing reliable feedback loops is essential to keeping change on course.