Employee Attitudes & Financial Performance With Blogs & Tags

A study form Northwestern University Linking Organizational Characteristics to Employee Attitudes and Behavior - A Look at the Downstream Effects on Market Response & Financial Performance (pdf). I love these studies. I read a similar one that HBR published last year.

The goal was "...to understand the organizational characteristics that best engender the necessary employee attitudes and behaviors to drive an organization's market and financial success.”

Key findings from the study indicate that there is a “direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and improved financial performance.”

Organizational communication – both upward and downward – is one of the main ingredients to maintaining employee satisfaction. A satisfied employee is an engaged employee. Employee engagement occurs when there is supportive, positive interaction between employee and manager, including goal setting. Other factors for engagement include a cooperative, collaborative organizational culture where employees are encouraged to give “voice to the customer within the organization”.

“A fully cooperative culture feels the need to reach consensus on a single option, where a culture promoting healthy competition provides multiple choices which are then balanced against one another in an attempt to develop an optimal solution.”

You can see how healthy competition can benefit both the organization and its customers; just look at study. It’s easy to further extrapolate that companies whose employees are engaged and focused on the customer, have customers who choose their products, leading to increased customer satisfaction. It is, after all, “an organization's employees who influence the behavior and attitudes of customers, and it is customers who drive an organization's profitability through the purchase and use of its products.” It just goes to show that satisfied customers are less expensive to maintain, they use the product more, and are therefore more profitable. Interestingly enough, I have a poll on my site regarding this very topic; vote or see the current results here: the middle of the right column.

So why don't companies communicate better? I wrote a post, Candor In The Workplace that focuses on how employees can better communicate, inside and outside of the business, to achieve better performance.

Thanks to Trevor Cook from Corporate Engagement for the tip on the report.

More on static, one sided comm!

"Sounds cool " - unconferences... it's not about speakers and audiences and the other usual conference stuff, but about conversation and learning and participation in a Happening Thing." At a recent conference Doc Searls got so frustrated with the panel-audience format that he thought it would make sense to switch the audience and the panel and let the panel listen while the former audience talked.

The problem with most conferences is that the intelligence is sitting in the dark with its hands folded, falling asleep while a bunch of idiots on stage with PowerPoints talking .

Bonus - Preparing to reboot, (good ideas in the commets) Posted by D. Weinberger and the blub on the topic, "The Natural Shape of Knowledge - The digital revolution is enabling knowledge to slip the bonds of the physical which had, silently, shaped it..

Ideas are everywhere! I know there will be plenty of them getting blogged during and after the reboot conference.