A solid workforce profitability strategy ultimately retains customers. Does your organization or association even consider the value of this strategy?
I didn’t think so. At least not yet.
The majority of organizations view the individuals within their workforce as a group of individual, unrelated, often competitive departmental cost centers, rather than an interactive and collaborative group of revenue generators. Revenue generators dedicated to creating the aggregated set of customer experiences required to both acquire and retain customers.
How many hiring practices continue to be procurement-based, matching individuals to specific task? Like filling knowledge worker talent gaps. Or addressing shortages in the number of seasonal or manual workers performing rote skills.
You know, as well as I do, that this mindset keeps everyone really busy, self-focused, and separated. Humming along independently in job functions. Working in departments targeting some sort of productivity and profitability KPI.
What type of customer experiences does this type of hiring model perpetuate?
The sum of individual worker and departmental profitability is not the equivalent of creating and implementing a workforce profitability strategy.
Chances are that employees in your organization or association are all very busy, working full time, at half the capacity of what they are capable of achieving. On behalf of acquiring, serving and retaining customers.
Because you are underutilizing their creativity and critical thinking skills. As a result, their tasks often reproduce what other colleagues are working on, in other departments. Except that each department continues to work independently, targeting departmentally-specific quotas and KPIs. Instead of customer-retention specific outcomes.
Consequently, the workforce is busy serving specific departmental needs, which looks really good on paper. Except lack of interoperability – communication and collaborative problem-solving – is what retains customers. Your customers really do not care about how productively and profitably you run your organization.
Ultimately, customer retention is an all-hands-on-deck strategy. And that is where most workforces and business models fall short in serving customers better and better over the duration of their relationship with you.
A solid workforce profitability strategy leverages a more collaborative business model.
Daring, innovative, uncharted waters for many of you reading this post? A workforce becomes more profitable when all employees – regardless of titles and paygrades – are regarded as revenue generators. For your customers as well as for your organization.
- Implementing that strategy pokes more than a few holes in departmental silos which, in and of itself, introduces greater profitability to the organization.
- Targeting workloads and job functions on complementary activities – rather than reproducing similar outcomes – is not only a matter of reducing overhead. In fact, the sum of complementary activities is greater than the reduction of the cost of individual activities.
- Because when the concept of the workforce is reimagined, in terms of total workforce profitability, employees engage with each other more. On behalf of identifying, solving and better serving customers.
How focused is your workforce on retaining customers? To learn what is involved in creating a workforce profitability strategy, click on this link and ask me.
Then, do something productive and profitable. Take these next steps.
- Engage me to speak or conduct a workshop at your next corporate or association event. Catalyze your mindset and skill sets!
- Book a 40-minute strategy appointment with me. Learn how to better serve your customers.
- Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column. Never miss another insightful post.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ keynote speaking programs and workshops focus on innovative strategies and tactics for business growth, workforce profitability and professional development. She catalyzes organizations and associations, like yours, to leverage collaborative business models and a profitable workforce, to retain the customers and members you work so hard to win. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Babette’s Playbook of collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Her professional speaker profile appears on the espeakers platform.
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