Driving Sales: A Strategic Approach Employee to Acquisition and Retention

This segment will be part two of a three-tiered approach to creating a meaningful customer acquisition and retention strategy that you can implement.  Last time we discussed we discussed the role of continuing education and training as a sales driver and retention tool.  Today we will discuss the role of employee acquisition and retention.  You have to have the right people working FOR you to attract the best customers to work WITH you.

When asked what one of their greatest concerns are within the dental laboratory industry today, managers and owners often say “hiring and maintaining appropriate staff.”  We are in the midst of a training crisis.  When you link in abundance of technologically advanced products with a chronic shortage of skilled technicians and a perpetual lack of newcomers to the field along with a 60 percent decline in the number of two-year dental technology programs over the past 20 years, you really get a crisis in the hiring and retaining of employees.  In fact, owners often turn to art schools, nail salons and anywhere that didactic skills are taught to find technicians.

At the Pankey Institute, we worked intimately with the Gallop Poll Company out in Lincoln, Neb.  They understood a definition of terms that has evolved from employee satisfaction to employee loyalty to, finally a term that is being tossed around in literature today, employee engagement.  This engagement goes far beyond just being satisfied at work or being loyal to the workplace.  It is the definition of an employee that is dedicated, consciously and subconsciously, to the support, development, and profit of the business entity they’re working for. This employee engagement correlates very highly with customer engagement and sustained profits.

In Harter’s study in 2001 which involved research with more than 200,000 employees across 36 companies he showed how engagement drove real business outcomes and profits, had a significant effect on turnover rates, sales, profit and customer loyalty because of the relationship that the employees ultimately have with the product and services provided by the company.

The basis for this employee engagement discussion and Harter’s work as well as that of Gallup Poll and others since them, is centered around a series of 12 questions that the surveyors used that are designed and protected by the Gallup Poll.  Those 12 Questions are as follows:

   1. I know what is expected of me at work.
   2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
   3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
   4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
   5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
   6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
   7. At work my opinions seem to count.
   8. The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
   9. My associates (fellow employees) are committed to doing quality work.
  10. I have a best friend at work.
  11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked about my progress.
  12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

The answers to these 12 questions scored on a scale from one to five, five being the highest level of agreement with those statements and one being the lowest, correlates best to calculating the level of employee engagement and ultimately sustainable profits for that company.  Only the fives count as fully engaged.

I would like to suggest three actions that we would take to improve all three of these arenas of surveyed items in the workplace.  The goal would be to create activities or systems that support the development of a higher level of employee engagement so that once we do find the right people and put them in the workplace they are less likely to want to work any where else.

1. Training

Creating technical and behavioral growth opportunities for employees in the workplace is critical to the long term success of the business model.  Where do we find that kind of training?  One of the sources is manufacturer supplied technical bulletins, videos, and information sources for their specific materials.  We can send our employees to growth, training and educational opportunities at state and regional laboratory meetings, NADL’s activities at the Chicago Midwinter Meeting and NADL’s Vision 21.   The NADL’s Wealth of Knowledge Library is a convenient and inexpensive source.  Online learning and in print CE opportunities are becoming more available everyday.  A new initiative that began last year was that NADL recommended National Lab Network’s DVD series on Excellence in Lab Management and Excellence in Tech Training.  These valuable monthly DVDs provide educational and training opportunities for managers and technicians alike. NBC certified and with prominent presenters, these DVDs provide and easy, effective and affordable opportunity for maintaining a level of training and development of technicians and managers.

2. Socialization

When asked why their scores on their employee engagement surveys were so high, the manager of a particular organization spoke about a variety of training and educational programs they had, feedback loops and mechanisms.  But they said at the end of the discussion and interview that is was probably more due to the round table they had at work than anything else.  Upon further discussion, it was realized that every morning the employees of that particular division came to work and met at that round table. They chatted and talked about their caseloads.  They asked each other for advice and offered help.  And then of course they headed off to their workstations, cubicles and desks to start their day.  Sometimes they had the chance to meet in smaller groups back at that table during the day and whenever there was an office wide or laboratory wide issue to discuss it seemed to always happen at that table.

Now the table itself is symbolic, creating the environment where these kinds of ideas and information can be discussed as a significant opportunity for people hear and be heard in the workplace.  It is also a minor socialization event.  We can create more structured or systematized social events by having weekly, or monthly, quarterly, or even annual sessions, parties, training, and things where we have an opportunity for all of the employees to come together and learn about each other.  It has been found by Gallup that it is much easier in populations of workers if they know and care about each other that they work together more effectively and the business model is more profitable in the long run. Weekly lunches at team meetings, maybe a monthly bowling, or movie session, or some kind of chance for everybody in a non work environment to get together and to know each other, creates those same socialization events   These socialization events are a significant part of creating an employee engagement experience that has successful and sustainable profits for a dental laboratory.

3. Care

When you read those 12 questions regarding employee engagement, listen to some of them a second time and think of the possibility of creating a caring environment between management and owners and their employees and how this would drive the employee engagement and ultimately the profitability of the business.

“I know that is expected of me at work.” One of the most commonly low scored questions is that employees do not really understand the expectations in the workplace.  They usually don’t really feel they know what is expected of them because it has never been appropriately communicated from management or ownership.  Simply knowing what is expected of you and the performance criteria actually provides the peace of mind an employee wants so they can feel inside themselves that they have done that job well. “At work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.  Although certainly rooted somewhere with training, materials and supplies availability a sense that we want you to be free to develop the skills and the systems to support doing your best aiming for average seems to be too easy for us.  I am not afraid of someone who aims to high and misses slightly in their performance characteristics. I worry most about some of you who shoot for average and hit it every time.

“In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work” and “my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person.”  And the third question that is tied so deeply to those two is “in the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.”  It is interesting that when we do exit interviews, money never ranks higher than fourth as the reason.  It is more likely to be about not feeling that they are heard, haven’t received feedback, didn’t know how they were doing, or didn’t feel as if they were important in the workplace.  Feedback can be positive and encouraging.  People feeling good about what they do at work is critical to them finding satisfaction and feeling fully engaged in the workplace.  Performance reviews, coaching opportunities as I might prefer to call them, should be designed around what you are doing best as an employee just as much as they are about what you are doing wrong and I’d like you to improve

Hiring and retaining employees is critical but hiring and retaining highly engaged employees is critical to the success and profitability long term of a business model. Minimizing turnover maximizing effectiveness and impact of employees of a workplace not only helps us make more money it helps us have more friends and enjoy what we do better.  I look forward to talking with you next time as move on to have a conversation about a cost effective continuing education program that has a significant return on investment.