Where do you spend it? Product? Marketing? Operations? Sales? Training? Service? Putting aside the fact that a dollar won’t buy you a donut today, what’s your gut say?
According to Gartner, 89% of companies compete on customer experience today. After more than 20 years working with businesses in almost every industry – from donuts to drill bits – this makes total sense.
However much we love the thing we work on all day long – our product, our service – and can reel off all the ways we’re different and better than alternatives…
No one will ever know or care enough to appreciate it the way you do.
I wish we had a stat for this, but there is far more parity in markets than anyone wants to admit. Being better by degrees is still, really, just the same.
So…experience wins.
And that’s why your best marketing, sales, product, and innovation dollars are spent on your people.
You want people to love your product? Get your employees to love their jobs.
How do we do that? It’s the million dollar question.
I’ll bet you have programs in place today.
- Compensation models
- Benefits
- Culture initiatives
- Training and development
You may even have an employee recognition and reward system.
Those are great things, but with 85% of the global employee base unengaged at work, they aren’t enough.
And it might be no one’s fault. We live in a culture where extrinsic motivators rule the day. Just check your Instagram feed. More money, cooler clothes, better spouse, dreamier vacations. We’re looking at all the wrong things.
We don’t do a good job of cultivating meaning in life, in work, in simple everyday things. We teach people to look for bigger salaries, nicer cars and more time off.
We don’t teach people to look for ways to make a meaningful contribution and connect it to a vision that matters in the world, not just the bottom line.
If we want people to love their jobs, they have to see how what they do matters…at a personal level.
And to do that, we need to help people identify and develop what matters to them most – their own sense of meaning, their unique strengths and the impact they want to have. Only then, can they give your mission all they’ve got – whether it’s donuts, data or world peace.
Your mission begins inside your people and radiates out when they bring their best to the cause. Activating your people is the most important product, marketing, sales and service thing you can do.
And it just happens to be work we love doing.
Learn more about our InsideOut™ Team Activation program.
