Blog Roundup: Employee Engagement Powers Customer Experience

Welcome to our monthly round-up of articles and resources on internal communications, employee experience and employee engagement. We tweet the articles and share on our social channels but in case you missed them here are a few of our favorites.

The modern workplace is shifting  towards employee experience and HR is shifting as well. AdAge recently published a great article, “CMOs, Meet Your New Best Friend: The CHRO.” The article sums up how we have been working at Vignette–helping our clients understand how to meaningfully connect with their employees. This month we kicked off our round-up with commentary on this topic in our latest blog post on “Why Marketing and HR Need To Be Best Friends.”

• Why Marketing and HR Need to be Best Friends—By Gregg Apirian, LinkedIn
  “CMOs are extremely focused on architecting and managing what is commonly called the “customer journey” or “customer experience.” From the customer’s perspective, the relationship with the company should be seamless, simple, and cost effective, with exceptional customer service where the customer always wins. It is a tough proposition to keep up with the ever changing expectations of customers. The key to being ahead of customer expectations is empowering employee engagement. Employees power the customer experience and there are a TON of dots to connect and balance to deliver a seamless and effective customer experience. This all starts with a seamless and engaging employee experience.”

• CMOs, Meet Your New Best Friend: The CHRO Marketing and HR Need to Work More Closely Together
  —By Greg Monaco, @gregmonaco
  “In today’s highly competitive business environment, HR must align with overall company branding to fight the massive talent war. Marketing must leverage every last employee as a company advocate to the outside world. Operating in a vacuum won’t drive excitement for your organization, but symbiosis will. Apple has achieved many milestones in its nearly 40-year history, and scores of business books have focused on its many unprecedentedmarketplace milestones. But the one critical piece of Apple’s history that may be overlooked by companies big and small is the connective tissue that must exist between brand and employee. The additive benefits are immeasurable, but palpable. From an employee engagement perspective, aligning brand and employee diminishes internal friction, because every last corner of the company acts with shared purpose. From a marketing perspective, aligning brand and employee helps to create what many have described in marketing as the “multiplier effect,” or one plus one equals three. Your employees become your best advocates to the outside world.”

• LinkedIn Rolls Out Elevate Content-Sharing Platform—By Kate Maddox
  “Companies Including Visa, Unilever and CEB Are Early Customers. LinkedIn today is rolling out Elevate, a content curation and social sharing platform, designed to help enterprises turn their employees into brand advocates. ‘One thing we’ve been doing at Visa is changing the culture to become one of more permissiveness around social media in general,” said Lucas Mast, VP-corporate social media at Visa, noting that Visa has revised its social media policy, put in place social media guidelines and added more approved social-sharing platforms for its employees.”Thisis yet another opportunity for us to take our best evangelists — our employees — and empower them with content that is safe and approved and fits across a wide range of topics, that they would want to organically share with their social-media audiences,’ Mr. Mast said.”

• How Pandora Creates Amazing Employee Experiences—By Jacob Morgan, @jacobm
  “The Employee experience is about happiness & helping employees fulfill happiness and accomplishment in their lives. Employees that are the happiest both at work and in their lives are the ones that are going to have a strategic advantage compared to other companies. Learn about what Pandora is doing to unleash the employee experience to make it a better work environment for everyone. Kristen shares with me how Pandora is hyper-focusing on integrating very powerful tools to improving the employee experience. Take some time in your day to be sure to listen to Kristen’s view on the overall employee experience. She truly knows what it’s all about and I’m certain you will enjoy and agree with everything she has to say!”

• The 2015 State of Employee Engagement—By Tamara Synder, @EdelmanPR
  “It’s hard to deny that engaged employees are a key competitive differentiator. But how are companies actually using engagement to drive performance? We recently conducted two studies to explore what Internal Communications and Human Resources teams are doing to measure engagement and convert it into a competitive advantage.”