Consider this. How can you as a leader create an environment where employees are energised and passionate enough to play their role in delivering the organisation's strategy and customer goals? Sounds obvious, but employees are people, with particular points of view, some of which leaders hear, most of which they don't. Those highly customer centric and agile organisations are adept at keeping pace with and recognising employee needs for input, creativity and adding value.

The employee market is changing

It is predicted that by the year 2020 (only six years away!) as many as half of Australia’s workers will be employed on a contingent, project-based arrangement. According to research by recruitment firm Hays, 83.1 per cent of employers say up to a quarter of their workforces are made up of these workers. Lost productivity due to employee disengagement costs more than $300 billion a year in the US. However research by Amabile TM1, Kramer SJ in 2005 ‘Inner work life: understanding the subtext of business performance’. They found that the single most important differentiator for employees was their sense of being able to make progress in their work and deliver value.

What can leaders do?

Apply external brand principles internally by knowing your target audience as people. Brand decisions are about people’s lives, choices, who they are and who they aspire to be, their values. Clearly a one size approach to employee engagement and happiness does not fit all! Employees have choices, so emotional outcomes are as important for them as for customers.

Here are some key areas for leaders to help stimulate a creative and customer centric culture;

• Listen to and empower your people - everybody, and I mean everybody, has a point of view. Really show that you can listen. Provide regular, visible outlets and forums for people to express that view – you’ll be amazed at what wealth of ideas insights and underlying passion sits in your organisation and how your customers can benefit.

• Don’t be shy – be a visible leader and align with your brand internally and externally. Clearly understand your brand’s personality, its values and show evidence of this in action both to your staff and customers. Remember, your teams watch you carefully and will take your lead.

• Think differently, but simply – as leaders, try simple changes to how you create a different work environment. E.g. more informal gatherings to share updates and ideas, meetings can be at little or no cost off site to create fresh thinking e.g. in the park!

• Determine gaps in customer experience - understand your brand today in terms of delivering the customer experience across all touch points and where you aspire it to be – where are the leaks in terms of customer experience quality, what are the root causes, get your teams to contribute and share perspective. It’s them after all that will put actions into place.

• Celebrate the importance of customer – bring them to life across all parts of the customer journey – sales, technical support, customer service, marketing, advertising, bring them into the organization live or virtually – show customers as real people with names, lives and personalities. Create the human side to your brand.

• Think of the organization as a tribe – so tell the tribal stories. Brands are dynamic things, but without people behind them they are nothing – so tell the stories of the people behind the brand, successful outcomes and failures, customer experiences, they all form part of the brand folklore.

• Create a crusade - this can be big or smaller crusades, but following a common cause or a rallying cry, especially if its about customer, can give people a belief and something to care for, something that goes beyond the norm. It’s about leadership, but when it works it really works.

Ultimately, by creating happy and engaged employees we can accelerate the process of moving employees from a general awareness of the organisation’s goals, through to being passionate brand and customer advocates. The organization can see benefits in terms of better creativity, customer outcomes, loyalty and staff engagement.

For many organisations the brand focus is largely directed externally, for all the right reasons – customers, competitors, the market. The question is, how well do people within the organisation live and deliver the brand, compared to how you want it to be? How well are the people in the organisation connected to the customer and your brand experience ambition? Quite simply, many employees are not as emotionally connected to the internal brand as they are to the products and services they buy in everyday life outside of work. When employees feel great about the brand and the importance of customer, this allows them to play their role in delivering the unique benefits of the organisation’s brand through to the customer experience.

Customer Passion at Zappos

Zappos the US online shoe retailer exemplifies the notion of employees living the brand to drive great customer experiences. Zappos successfully connects very clear, customer centric brand values to employees and this has a direct effect to their customer service quality. An excerpt from the book, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, by Francis Frei and Anne Morriss sets out a very neat case study of Zappos culture and the corresponding effect on staff loyalty and customer service. The key point here is staff empowerment – aligning their values with the company’s values. It’s very compelling, because it empowers people to be who they are.

The Zappos case study is a worthwhile read – it might be seen by some as quite an extreme example of culture, but consider the principles at play; leadership, staff empowerment, meaningful and purpose, authentic brand positioning and values. These principles can be applied to any organization, not just a high energy online retailer.