By Barbara Burke
Stealing lunches from the office frig could be a symptom of a more serious problem — low employee engagement.
“Hunger does crazy things to you,” was the comment made by an employee interviewed on the Today Show segment, “Pains in the Office.” While physical hunger is one reason employees pilfer lunches, I suspect that employees who steal from each other have a different kind of hunger.
If your office is experiencing a rise in the number of stolen lunches, you are not alone. Recently several call center managers told me that they’re getting a lot more “stolen lunch” complaints. It’s no coincidence that these are the same managers who are plagued by low employee morale.
Low morale can have disastrous effects. When employees are dissatisfied and chronically unhappy they are less committed to delivering great customer service. Low employee engagement translates into sub-standard productivity, too many customer complaints, low customer satisfaction scores, negative turnover, and high operating costs.
If you have an employee morale problem, you have an employee engagement problem. Start by measuring engagement with a survey. I predict that one of the things you will learn from the survey results is that your employees yearn for a different, more personalized type of support from their immediate supervisor. When supervisors provide each employee with the right blend of coaching and mentoring, they feel more valued. When front-line employees feel valued, they make their customers feel valued.
I guarantee that once you satisfy your employees’ hunger for quality face time with their supervisor, they’ll have less reason to pilfer lunches from the office frig.
According to research by the Gallup Organization, only 28% of the 80,000 employees surveyed considered themselves fully engaged in their work. Even more troubling, many call centers report employee engagement levels of less than 20%. When 80% of the workforce is delivering sub-par performance, operating costs rise, efficiency drops and customer satisfaction suffers.
Supervisors play a pivotal role in driving employee engagement. In 2008, Vertex, a leader in business process outsourcing, conducted an innovative project that demonstrated that when supervisors get the correct training in coaching and mentoring skills, employee engagement improves dramatically. The ground-breaking project involved 250 reps from two call centers and included 21 supervisors. The results were impressive. Within three months after the supervisors completed training, the engagement survey scores jumped an average of 10%.
Five important lessons were uncovered by this project:
1. Supervisors required four things in order to improve the engagement and commitment of their employees:
- Time. Internal surveys revealed that what the reps craved was more “face time” with their supervisor. Supervisors discovered that they could easily increase the amount of time they spent with their ...
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