Employee Radar – Repost

This was originally posted in September of 2007 but it seems to me to be as applicable today as it was 4 years ago.  At that time this site didn’t have as many subscribers or followers so I’m reposting hoping to get some more conversation started around this idea.

We don’t understand our employees as well as we understand our consumers. 

Time and money – lots of both – are spent on the analysis of customers and implementing tactics to get them to be loyal and increase their ongoing engagement with our companies.  But we don’t use the same thinking with employees.

In my experience, most of the time companies look at their employees in huge buckets – two or three demographic segments (male/female, old/young, single/married.)  But we don’t have to.

From an HR perspective – employees are customers and the company is the product.  Why wouldn’t we apply the same thinking and analytics to those customers as we do to our “paying customers?”  I think there is a lot of discussion about connecting with employees – whether that be through training, incentives, benefits, etc.  But I’ve not seen anything that helps an employer truly “see” their employees.

As a professional tasked with helping companies engage and retain their employees, channel partners and consumers, I am keenly interested in knowing what makes people tick.  In the past I would want to know what the major demographic buckets are in order to craft a solution that resonates with the target audience.  These buckets of information were all I had to go on.  I would then create an initiative that resonated with the majority of the audience based on that information.

In today’s world we have the information and the technology to go further.  We have the ability to create initiatives that resonate with a market of “one.”

One-to-One marketing has been around for a while – since Peppers and Rogers first published their book on the subject in 1996.  But I’ve never seen it applied in the employee space.

I see information on “work/life” balance and how that affects employees.  I’m seeing more and more on the need to measure and understand the social connections within an organization as a means to higher performance for the company.  I’m seeing a lot of discussion on the difference between engagement and satisfaction and how that affects a company’s success or failure.  With the coming talent wars (whether you believe it is real or not – there are major changes coming) recruitment and retention are big issues.  There are many, many individual things that HR and Managers in general, need to be aware of to create sustainable performance within an organization.

What I’m not seeing is a comprehensive look at the employee equation.  If you know of one let me in on it.

In the absence of one – or my ignorance of one – here’s an idea.

What does an employee look like on a radar screen?

Let’s create an employee radar. 

What I’m referring to is a graphical representation of an employee that provides a baseline for developing ongoing “interventions” to grow and retain – or weed and eliminate – the appropriate employees for a company.  I use the word intervention in a positive way – not the negative way normally associated with it.

The images below illustrate what I’m suggesting….

This image is a “radar” chart of an employee based on some arbitrary metrics.  The chart however gives one a image of the employee across a variety of elements.  It provides a map for “interventions.”

From a motivation and influence perspective I now have the information I need to put in place a program to drive performance in any one of the areas that improvement is indicated.  The chart would suggest that I need to work with the employee on satisfaction and competency training for current and future jobs.  The chart could indicate that the employee is dissatisfied because they aren’t getting appropriate training for their current job and they don’t see a career path because they don’t have the competencies for any other job in the company. They are engaged but not satisfied.  They are connected (which if they are dissatisfied could be a big problem) but maybe not talking to the right people.

The goal would be to create a personalized plan that results in a radar image that looks like the following….

I’m not suggesting that the image above is the appropriate image.  It may be that at different points in time the image would/should look different. What I am saying is that I don’t know of any proven, ongoing, systematic way of viewing the employee across a variety of metrics that allow a company to create a personalized intervention.

What say you?

Related articles

• Employee Motivation Is About People Connections. Who Knew? (i2i-align.com)
• Why Do We Love to Work at Companies Where We Don’t Have to Work? (i2i-align.com)
• When “Mobile” Recognition Makes Sense (i2i-align.com)