Enronshirt Do you have a company logo-identified catalog featuring shirts, hats, key-chains and coffee mugs?

Do you want to know if your employees are engaged with your organization?

I have the definitive measure of employee engagement…

Sales of logo identified merchandise to your employees.

That's right.  To find out if your employer brand is something to brag about and if your employees are happy and proud to work at your company simply track purchases of your logo-identified merchandise.

If you have a great employer brand – folks should want to wear the company colors.  I'm guessing Apple and Zappos does big business in their employee logo store.  AIG – not so much.

If your sales chart looks like this – good for you.

Shirtpurchasesgood

If it looks like this … ya might want to check and see what's going on.

Shirtpurchasesbad

You could also check your purchases by employee tenure – if the newbies are buying the shirts and jackets but the 5-year folks are shunning the store you've got a problem.  If sales go up as tenure goes up that might indicate you're doing a good job.

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  • http://www.bretlsimmons.com Bret Simmons

    Hey, that is a great idea! And if we link the supervisor’s performance evaluation to how many shirts are sold, people will learn to buy a lot of shirt, so we must be really engaged!! Wow, that is so simple, so glad we hired that consultant to help us see it!

  • http://profile.typepad.com/2of6 Paul Hebert

    Not to mention the revenue stream that accompanies the sales! The cost of employee salaries will now come back as income.
    Underneath the sarcasm – I do think that engaged employees would be more likely to want to highlight their affiliation. Not that I’m really suggesting this as a true engagement measure. Just thought it was a funny way to look at it.

  • http://employee-rewards-incentives.blogspot.com/ Kye Swenson

    As part of working in the promotional products industry, I know that giving company merchandise is a great way to motivate employees–aside from measuring their loyalty, it also reinforces your corporate culture. There’s a pretty good case study I read about it–if anyone’s interested you can look at it here: http://employee-rewards-incentives.blogspot.com/2009/07/employees-love-gonzopalooza-backpacks.html

  • http://profile.typepad.com/2of6 Paul Hebert

    Don’t take my irreverent approach to promotional merchandise as an indictment of the industry. I just thought it was funny to connect all the engagement measurement discussion to a weird – but somewhat interesting – indicator of company pride.
    There are a multitude of reasons for using premium logo merch – just not as a proxy for engagement! :)
    Thanks for the comments.

  • http://www.factor168.com Darren Kerr

    I’ve been following your mail outs for sometime Paul and this notion of employing company merchandising as a means of measuring and cultivating staff loyalty and engagement – it is masterful in it’s simplicity. Love it and I will be suggesting this to a number of our corporate clients who are looking at extending their teambuilding experiences into a daily presence. Cool.

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