What’s the secret sauce behind encouraging employee productivity?
Treating your employees the same way you treat your customers, according to Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School and author of The Employee Advantage: How Putting Workers First Helps Business Thrive.
Meier shared with HR Brew what people pros can learn from his October book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What can HR pros learn from your book?
Treating employees nicely, or treating them well, or putting them first, can actually be a way to create a competitive advantage…I want people to shift to see what are actually the benefits of treating our employees well, very much so in an analog to how we thought about customer centricity. Being very customer-centric led to competitive advantage for firms who were able to do so. So, I [want] people to take away that we can do the same with employees…Employees are the new customers.
Think about what can we actually do, in a very concrete way, in order to humanize work and getting the best out of our workforce and creating an engaged and motivated workforce…We need to understand what actually motivates people at work in the first place…and most of it has to do with not just money, so there [are] many more aspects to what creates motivation in an organization…I talk about four factors that creates this: Purpose…Autonomy…Competence…Relatedness…Whether you’re the CEO of a 100-person organization, or whether you’re the leader of a small team of three, understanding what your team members actually want allows you to humanize work.
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When the labor market favors employers over employees, as it does currently, how can HR encourage leadership to actually put employees first?
Customer centricity is like figuring out what does the customer actually want, and then improving that experience, and as a result, we can actually increase the price. So, what I argue is you have the same analogy about your employees. If you improve the employee experience, as you do with the customer experience, you actually get more out of your employees because they’re more motivated. They’re more productive. They’re more innovative. As a result, they’re less likely to leave.
What do you think will happen to the companies that don’t adopt this employee-centric mindset?
Not every firm is customer-centric, and some are still surviving in the competition, but the really customer-centric organizations are going to thrive, and I think the same is going to be true for employee centricity. There are some firms, when unemployment rate is high, they will still be able to attract people. [Are] they going to get the best work out of them? I don’t think so. Are they going to be the most innovative? I don’t think so. Once the unemployment rate goes down again and the economy is doing well, they’re going to lose people left and right, and only those who really shift and change are the ones who are going to be surviving in the long term.