Why putting customers first is only half the picture: putting employees first
Why is it important for a business to adopt an 'employee first' approach? After all, the customers are the ones who pay the bills and keep the lights on. As long as the employees get their pay and benefits, does it matter how they feel? Is expending energy in the direction of employee delight a helpful exercise or a wasteful one?
Employee turnover is expensive
People might tell you that trying to keep your employees happy is a futile and never-ending exercise. A truth many leaders and managers often forget is that employee turnover is far more expensive than what you spend in the way of employee experience. What do you do when you invest money and resources in hiring a crop of employees and then you lose them? You're forced to start over from scratch. You reinvest in hiring talent, and what's more, you need to train the employees on all the things that the older crop had taken time and energy to learn. When attrition is high, these costs rack up.
On the other hand, when you gain a reputation as an employee-first company, your expenses in attracting talent come down. Employees wait for a turn to interview with you as a famously good employer. And once they land a job, they are less likely to want to move on. With an employee-first culture, staff feel like they are part of a community rather than a workforce.
As a business, people can be your biggest asset. But for this to be true, companies need to create an atmosphere where they are empowered and engaged. An environment where employees choose to stick around. Not because they have to but because they want to. And that's when the magic happens.
At Zoho, doing right by our employees has been paramount to us. As a result, we have an extremely low turnover rate, and our employees have become our biggest advocates and champions. Listen to some of our longest-serving employees at Humans of Zoho, and you may get an idea of how powerful an employee-first culture can be in establishing a thriving business.
Customer delight starts with employee delight
Every business aims to delight its customers, but this is no easy task. It requires all your employees' careful, concerted, and coordinated efforts to ensure no stone is unturned in offering customers the best. But adopting this as a plan is one thing — how do you actually get everyone to go along with this? It's not something you can slip into to-do lists and hope people act on. Customer delight as a philosophy needs to be infused into the very identity and ethos of the company so that employees put its principles into action without thinking about it.
It's easier said than done. Employees need to think of their job as more than a job. They must want to give more of themselves to the job so that despite the countless moving parts in an organization, they do not allow themselves or others to drop the ball. Naturally, customer delight is difficult to achieve in an environment where people want to finish their tasks for the day and get home. They must want to add value.
It's on the organization to make employees feel this way. The employee must feel a sense of belonging and loyalty. They must feel content and happy in their role and feel a sense of attachment to the company's mission and values. The foundation for such a mindset shift among employees starts when the company begins by delighting employees first.
Paying it forward
When employees feel that the organization is proactive about putting them first, you unlock drive and loyalty among your workforce. They, in turn, will want to pay the favor forward and redirect this positive energy toward the customers. It is a win-win situation for all involved. What it requires from the leadership is a willingness to demonstrate that employees are valued and that the organization will go above and beyond to treat them with the respect that they deserve.
Workers are more invested in the company's success when an employee-first culture is in place. They do not dissociate from the work and merely seek to collect the next paycheck. They look beyond their daily tasks and look to what kind of impact they can have on the organization. Of course, some employees are wired this way naturally, but the key is to make this kind of thinking part of the broader culture. When it happens, one will find that the bar for excellence is raised automatically, and the organization becomes a fertile ground for innovation and intrapreneurship. At Zoho, the results speak for themselves.
