Fun: The Secret Ingredient in Employee Engagement

Western cooking traditionally recognizes four major tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. The Japanese, however, add a fifth taste called unami, or savory flavor. Unami is beloved for its ability to enhance all of the other flavors of a dish. Just like chefs, managers must maintain a delicate balance of key ingredients to maximize their workforce. Ingredients like salaries and benefits, feedback mechanisms, and good training are all important to strengthen Employee Engagement Management (EEM), and even bolster your Customer Engagement. But there is usually one ingredient that is often forgotten. Just what is the unami of the business world? Fun.

Fun is the unexpected ingredient that can enhance your firm’s employee engagement.

Why Focus on the Employee?
Many managers are probably wagging their heads right now, scoffing at the idea of focusing on employees in such hard economic times. It’s hard enough to keep customers these days--why focus on the employee? Because doing so increases Customer Engagement. As PeopleMetrics' Vice President Kate Feather stated in a podcast about the link between EEM and CEM, “If customers see and feel the engagement of the [employees] they’re interacting with, they come away with a better feeling about the organization, and then they’re more inclined to come back in the future, and more inclined to recommend the organization to family and friends.” Customers notice and like engaged employees, partly because engaged employees go above and beyond the call of duty for the customer. Additionally, customers enjoy interacting with engaged employees because it’s just more fun. As Ms. Feather explains, “There’s a real connection between customer and employee behaviors, driven by how much the [sales] experience is memorable and enjoyable, either for the employee, or for the customer.”

To put it plainly, a direct correlation exists between customer engagement and key business indicators like ROI, revenue growth, and return on assets. Furthermore, research indicates that the companies with the most engaged customers also have highly engaged employees.


~Monica Nolan, 2009

To see more Employee Engagement advice Check out the People Metrics Blog