Wearing the hat
Today I’m at the WRC Rally in Umeå in Sweden with my son.
Everywhere that you look, the culture of the WRC team is evident. It permeates every interaction and the experience is a visible manifestation of it.
It’s in the retail outlets selling hats (obviously!), the marshals helping to direct traffic, the medical staff ready to intervene should there be an accident, the commentators providing services to those who can’t be there in person and the volunteers providing guidance to tourists like ourselves across the entire weekend.
And the experience has been such a good one so far, that we are proud to wear the hats to say that we were there and part of it.
And of course, the same is true of your organisation. It’s not only visible to you internally in the way you collaborate, communicate and treat each other, but also visible to the outside world too.
Retail is a perfect example of this. Whilst sales training is important in ensuring that the customer is efficiently moved through the process from interest to sale, their experience is driven by how the person who is serving them feels in their work.
Their attitude, values, behaviours and the way that they work with others throughout the working day has a direct impact on the experience that they provide to their customers.
When customers have been on the receiving end of a poor experience, the organisation will lay the blame on the member of staff, when it’s more likely that the organisation hasn’t provided the right culture in which the sales person can flourish.
This will likely be evident in any engagement survey that you run (or else you can try my simple quiz here). The higher the score, the more intrinsically motivated people will feel to perform; the lower the score, the more disconnected they feel from the culture.
The simple rule is this: employee engagement generates customer experience which in turn builds brand advocacy.
When organisations choose to build culture, not only are they rewarded with a positive attitude, growth mindsets, and a commitment to following process from employees, they also ensure that the customer is provided with the experience that they are looking for. So much so that they’ll ‘buy a hat and proudly wear it’ for all to see.
