How to Make Your Employees Your Best Fans
Employees Who Are Your Best Fans Sell Your Employer Brand
Your employees work for you in your organization. You pay employees to do specific jobs. They are each tasked with individual responsibilities that keep your company moving forward with positive momentum. You supply them with solid salaries, reasonable benefits, and comfortable working conditions. This means you’ve done your part, right? What if you could do more? What if your employees could also act as your company or brand’s biggest fans?
What if they carried your message to their networks outside of working hours? Chances are, this social interaction would drive more attention than any company marketing campaign could on its own.
To convert your employees into your most positive fans, use these tips and strategies.
Promote and Live By Your Mission and Values
Yes, employees are drawn to job descriptions and salaries. But they’re also drawn to what you claim to represent as a company. Mission statements describe the vision and values that your company lives and follows.
This is important to share with customers, but it’s also important for employees. In fact, when expressed properly, mission statements should provide inspiration and motivation for employees to perform above and beyond your expectations.
To maximize the rewards of a mission statement, you must:
- Create a proper mission statement. If your company has yet to create and ascribe to a mission statement, now is the time. Get your employees in on the process to promote ownership of the resulting mission, vision, and values. Think about why you exist, what you hope to accomplish, and what values will move you in that direction. Make the mission easy to remember and something in which you actually believe.
- Incorporate the mission into your everyday culture. The majority of companies have mission statements. In fact, they’re generally required to put together the paperwork to become a legally recognized entity. However, for far too many brands, this is where identifying the mission, vision, and values stop. The employees aren’t familiar with the mission statement and the employers don’t do what is necessary to make that statement part of everyday culture. To change this, post your mission statement, send it in emails to employees, and provide incentives for carrying it out in their work.
- Make your mission, vision, and values pervade your work. Point out and empower employees to note when actions, goals, and leadership responsibilities and responses are consistent with the practice of the values and the vision you aspire to achieve. Talk regularly about how your jobs contribute to attaining your mission and vision.
When you integrate your mission statement into your workplace’s culture and stand by it, it shows how important the mission is to the organization. This promotes trust and is a strong foundation for turning employees into fans.
Keep Employees in the Loop
As a business leader, you’re able to see the bigger picture more clearly than employees. Letting employees know what’s going on with regular updates and effective communication makes them feel valued and leads to greater performance and loyalty.
When employees are part of the decision-making process, when they’re aware of decisions and are able to voice their opinions about those decisions, they’re likely to feel like a greater part of the team. Having a voice leads to empowerment, and empowered employees are fans.
Look at Options Beyond Salaries
Salaries are important. Your employees need to know that they’re earning an amount on which they can live comfortably. This stability is essential to their connection to the company.
But, to build fans, you need to provide more than just great compensation. A few options to consider beyond basic salaries include:
- Accommodate your employee needs with flexibility. Employees who have the flexibility to work when and where is best for them–within reason and with guidelines–are more likely to experience job satisfaction. In fact, with millennial employees, flexibility is essential.
- Grant adequate vacation and sick days. Employees are more likely to feel content with their jobs when they feel free to take time off to enjoy life with their families and to take a sick day when needed. The work will still get done, but employees will feel a stronger appreciation for the company.
- Offer professional continuing education. Investing in the education of your employees gives them a sense of pride in their work and provides opportunities to advance. This is important to both the company and the employees’ sense of pride.
- Provide benefits that are hard to find. Solid benefits are sometimes hard–if not impossible–to come by, especially when it comes to wellness and lifestyle benefits, which is why employees appreciate them. Look into good wellness programs and other benefits such as parental leave, childcare, and company-sponsored events and activities if you want to increase employee happiness and well being through enhanced work-life integration.
Fair salaries are an excellent starting point, but sometimes it’s the fringe benefits that turn employees into lifelong fans.
Give Your Employees the Freedom to Make Decisions
If you claim that customer service is one of your top values as a company, you should actively prepare to stand by that claim. If an employee has to jump through hoops and talk to three managers prior to providing a solution to an unsatisfied customer, neither the employee nor the customer is likely to relish the experience.
When guidelines are in place that highlights the remediation process along with potential solutions, your employees are able to make decisions on their own. Of course, you can discuss these decisions afterward and talk about potential ways to improve.
When employees have a sense of autonomy, though, they make better decisions and take more pride in their work–and the company for which they are working.
Put simply, by going the extra mile as an employer and investing in the lives of your employees, both monetarily and beyond, you can turn them into your greatest fans.
Employees who are fans will rave about your business to those around them. They will generate excitement that’s hard to come by elsewhere. Now is the time to focus inward, on growing your best group of fans ever.