Increasing Employee & Client Engagement

If we were building a house and caring is the foundation, than involvement is the structure.  Most companies do not involve their employees or clients in their strategy.  I believe companies need to do more planning involving their employees and clients.  Organizations need to do focus groups, surveys, an employee or client spec council, Wiki (collaborative websites), community platforms, and stewardship reviews.

Feel free to add your own comments at the bottom of this article on what’s worked for you.  It is a great way to make a good impression and meet new contacts.

A Case Study about involvement…

Best Buy has had several successes in Web 2.0 applications and I read a successful story about a Wiki had done and posed one question… What can we do to better serve our customers and they got thousands of responses. 

Think about this for a second.  Nine times out of ten, an organization’s top management comes out with what they think the company needs to do, they communicate it to the employees and then the employee’s communicate that to the client base.   The employees may not really agree or buy into this message and how it is communicated may not be genuine by the client or even if it is genuinely accepted it may not get the response expected.

The lesson to the story… The essence of engagement is involvement.  This helps us understand our customer and employees and understanding is the next element we will discuss.

strong>What ways do you involve your employees and clients?  Share some successes so we can learn and improve.