Building an Employee-Centric Mindset and Culture at Your Company
Employee-centric, people-centric, human-centric - all imply focusing your business around the people who make it run. Columbia University professor, Stephan Meier, argues that putting employees at the center is just as crucial as putting customers at the center.
According to Forbes, companies prioritizing the customer outperform competitors in market share and revenue generation. This mindset can be applied to the treatment of your staff. Logically, if prioritizing one group yields positive results, then prioritizing another equally vital group, employees, should have a similar positive impact.
Employees are the people who deliver on the customer experience, so investing in their satisfaction can directly translate into better customer relationships and business outcomes.
How To Be Customer and Employee-Centric
Meier argues that employees should be treated the same as customers. He says that “employees are the new customers;” they are your ultimate influencers and evangelists. Sometimes, they may be customers of your company’s product.
This means they should be treated with the same respect as potential clients, if not more, since they are mandated to bring in new clients. According to Meier, customer centricity is about figuring out what the customer wants and improving their experience; if the same is done with employees, they will likely be more engaged and happy in their work.
Anything leaders can do to improve employee retention and support staff can help with morale, culture, and productivity and ultimately control costs and company knowledge.
The Four Factors Driving Employee Motivation
Creating an employee-centric culture can take time, but Meier provides some helpful steps. He lists four factors that motivate your employees, which he says can humanize work.
1. Purpose
When employees are given work they believe has an essential purpose, they are more likely to thrive.
2. Autonomy
People hate being micromanaged and can be scared to do something without approval. If you give your workers the autonomy to make their own decisions, everything moves forward faster.
3. Competence
If your business consistently shows competence as a market leader, your employees will have more buy-in to your vision, mission, and values. This also applies to competence in dealing with seemingly small internal items, such as onboarding or customer issues.
4. Relatedness
Your team, including their co-workers and managers, wants to feel comfortable with the general vibe of your business. Good relationships build solid foundations of trust.
While Meier says a job isn’t just about money for most workers, it’s also vital to ensure that your compensation plans are at market rate or slightly higher so that your people don’t feel underpaid and underappreciated.
How To Put Employees First in an Employer’s Market
We’re seeing a significant shift to an employer’s market with the surge in AI use paired with an uncertain economy. As this is happening, we can’t worship too much at the altar of AI and forget about the human element. People are still needed for most jobs. As much as senior leadership may want to replace people with automation, most in-market solutions need someone to run the input and edit the output.
Meier states that improving employee experience enhances productivity, ultimately benefiting the business. An Indeed article similarly argues that employee centricity can help boost workplace productivity.
It also decreases the chances of employees leaving the firm. This is a point to consider beyond short-term trends, and, at its core, treating employees well is simply the right thing to do. It will undoubtedly reverberate through the organization and onto customers.
Do you want insight into employee engagement and productivity to limit employee attrition? Prodoscore can help ensure you’re encouraging an employee-centric culture where employees are engaged, productive and motivated to succeed.
