In the last edition of our blog, we discussed the importance of your organisation’s brand and the messages that you are communicating either intentionally or un-intentionally.

As mentioned in the last edition, there are a number of tools at your disposal when communicating your brand identity to others and in future editions we will discuss your website and social media accounts.

In this article we will discuss possibly the most powerful tool you have, your employees.

On a mission

Your organisation’s employees represent you every single day, during any interaction, whether it’s with a customer, service user or candidate or via email, phone or face to face. Each interaction will convey a certain image of your organisation – is this the image the same?

It is crucial that you communicate your brand identity to ensure a shared mindset and vision throughout your organisation and amongst all of your employees.

An approach taken by many organisations is to create a mission statement, this is usually no more than a sentence, which captures what that organisation sets out to achieve and how they approach doing so. A mission statement should be accompanied by a set of values and an ethos and together should give an accurate representation of who you are and where you want to be. This can be an incredibly effective tool in creating a shared mindset, it is something that your employees can use to shape the way in which they approach their work and have in mind whenever interacting with customers, service users or candidates.

Involving your employees in the creation of a mission statement and values can help create a sense of ownership amongst your employees. The more that they take ownership of this, the more passionate they will be about properly representing it when interacting with others, having a mission statement and values is useless if your people do not take it on board.

Only the best

Each of your employees plays a role in the services that you provide and therefore subsequently have an impact on the way that your organisation is perceived. Obviously the quality of the service that you provide will have a huge impact on the impression you make on customers and service users and this will, in turn, affect your reputation with potential candidates. It is therefore essential that strong focus is placed on each aspect of your service.

Your employees must be equipped with the proper tools to carry out their duties to the standard that you expect of them. Tools are not just physical entities, ensuring that your employees are properly trained is an essential part of securing high quality services for your customers.

A key aspect to ensuring high quality of service is keeping your employees motivated, in doing so you keep energy levels high and ensure that maximum effort is put into the work that is carried out.

Rewarding good work with perks and benefits can be an effective motivational tool, this can include staff activities, employee of the month awards and general recognition of achievements. Another incredibly effective motivational tool is appealing to your employees’ ambitions, this can include providing extra training opportunities that will aid future progression as well as highlighting future opportunities that may arise and a plan of how they can work towards this. This can go a long way to securing commitment, which will significantly contribute to the quality of service provided.

Keep it consistent

As much as the quality of the service is crucial, so is the consistency of the quality of service. There is little point in providing great service some of the time as that good work will be undone by lesser service delivered at other times. It is essential that this is effectively communicated to the people in your organisation.

Unhappy customers are likely to be much more vocal than satisfied customers and in today’s society where social media gives everyone a platform from which to broadcast their grievances it is more important than ever to avoid creating unhappy customers. This is where consistency becomes key as even if you satisfy 9 out of every 10 customers, that 1 unhappy customer could cause significantly more damage than the happy 9 did you good.

The employer that disregards the people element of their organisation does so at great risk. Loyal, motivated and committed employees can be an organisation’s greatest assets whereas disloyal, discontent and unmotivated people can be its biggest downfall.