Rx for Unhappy Customers: More Love for Employees
Today’s workplaces are filled with innumerable challenges for teams to overcome if an organization is going to survive let alone thrive. In this context, the emotions and behaviors of each individual can significantly impact team dynamics, operations, and ultimately productivity. But there exists a powerful force to leverage in the face of these complexities: love. Creating a loving environment for all team members is a wise, strategic approach that can transform how teams operate, serve customers, and respond to adversity.
In the absence of love, indifference and fear take root, leading to troublesome issues such as mistrust, absenteeism, and negativity. Team members operating in a fear-based environment exhibit withdrawal, caution, and withholding of ideas with significant impacts on team collaboration, innovation, and results. In contrast, in a workplace infused with love, team members demonstrate pro-social behaviors, mutual respect, and positive risk-taking which lead to greater creativity, problem-solving, and team productivity.
Choosing love as a core value and practice is also a practical path to customer satisfaction and ultimately company value. Consider research described in the Harvard Business Review by Andrew Chamberlain, Ph.D., chief economist at Glassdoor and director of research at Glassdoor Economic Research, and Daniel Zhao, senior economist and data scientist at Glassdoor. They demonstrated that each one-star improvement in a firm’s Glassdoor rating corresponded to a 1.3 percentage point improvement in customer satisfaction scores. For industries where most employees interface directly with customers, each one-star improvement was correlated to a 3.2-point increase in customer satisfaction.
Several companies stood out as exemplars of this high customer satisfaction and high employee satisfaction: Southwest Airlines, Hilton Hotels, Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Johnson and Johnson. Another study has shown that higher customer satisfaction scores lead to significant increases in long-term market valuation as well. To be clear: more employee satisfaction -> more customer satisfaction -> more company value.
My own primary research demonstrated that human-centered team culture and values along with human-centered leadership behaviors are experienced as more loving and less fearful. These same team and leadership factors are associated with employee engagement and satisfaction in other research. Essentially, when teams and leaders foster a loving experience that is respectful of human beings, those employees create better experiences for customers.
Who wouldn’t want to work in the sweet spot where employee and customer experience and financial performance are optimized? By embracing love, team members can foster such an environment where support, forgiveness, and understanding flourish. Their love can enable individuals to navigate conflicts, offer constructive feedback, and engage in open dialogue without fear of repercussions. As employees feel cared for, understood, and appreciated, the likelihood of customer needs being met dramatically increases. Need the prescription to improve customer service? Then turn your attention to your team members and double down on fostering a loving, human work environment.
The choice is available to each one of us to put love at the center of our work, no matter what our role. By making conscious efforts to express kindness, appreciate others, and create inclusion, we can dismantle fearful indifference and create a workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered. And that is a place where customers will be treated well.
Have you embraced love as a workplace practice? Tell us about it below!
How does love show up in your interactions and decisions?
What have been the impacts on team experience?
And, how has this impacted your customer experience?
To learn more about loving workplaces, listen to To Work: With Love a NEW series airing on the Gut + Science leadership podcast. Find episodes HERE.
Want to know how you and your team are thriving? Take our Thrive Self-Assessment to learn how you are operating on six factors that impact thriving and get recommendations to strengthen your team too.
