Imbue Consulting -ARTICLES_ The case for company loyalty

Customers are attracted to spirited people. Too often, what they encounter instead are workers offering indifferent, robotic, or rude service. Customers routinely see service employees sleepwalking through their workdays. They might also see other better-intentioned coworkers who are trapped in service systems designed for internal convenience but not customer delight. Customers long to interact with-even relate to-employees who act like there is still a light on inside.
Organizations have a new label for the kind of spirited, motivated employees that customers seek-engaged! No longer is the focus on employee longevity or the expectation that workers will salute the organizational flag. Today it's more about keeping people as passionate and productive as possible. Most organizations would much rather have a fired-up employee for the short term than an uninspired one who's simply collecting a paycheck over the long haul.
Organizations now have metrics that convincingly demonstrate the link between employee engagement and customer loyalty as well as the all-important tie between customer loyalty and profitable growth. Happy employees
make happy customers, and happy customers buy, advocate, forgive, and, most importantly, return. While there are plenty of resources on how to keep score on employee engagement, far fewer resources describe how to raise and sustain that score. Besides, metric mania can seduce leaders into focusing on the scoreboard while losing track of what's happening in the game.
No matter how comprehensive and accurate our modern metrics may be, they will never completely capture the magic and mystery of an engaged and spirited relationship. By focusing too heavily on objective data, tidy calculations, and sterilized reports, leaders are losing touch with the fact that they are putting precious energy on the least important reality concerning the customer, the employee, or the leader.
The life expectancy of the average company today is between forty and fifty years. For instance, of the companies listed as a 1980 Fortune 500 company, only 113 remained on the list for 2007. Yet some companies last for centuries. According to Arie De Geus, author of The Living Company, the most enduring have four things in common:

1. They find ways to keep passion and spirit in the culture.
2. They are sensitive to their environment.
3. They keep a strong sense of identity.
4. They tolerate employee eccentricities and activities on the margin.

In a phrase, they act like living, spirited organisms.

The Nature of Organizational Spirit

Enterprises are born with spirit-an energy or vision that connects them and their products and/or services to the customer. As companies grow, the need for standardization, efficiency, and enhanced productivity ushers in new processes, structures, and procedures. Initially, spirit and bureaucracy coexist. After a time, however, there is a battle between the intuitive, heart-driven visionary and the rational, brain-driven administrator. For many companies, process soundly defeats passion.
Yet to be effective, enterprises must find a way to balance efficiency with enthusiasm. If the rational side routinely trumps the emotional, it encourages employees to become robotic and rules-obsessed.
In insular organizations ruled by a steely-eyed rationality, customers are often viewed as a distraction. Leaders in these companies tend to believe that customers act in a random, illogical, and selfish fashion, too often failing to follow the company's carefully scripted procedures. In short, customers upset the tidiness of organizational order.
Yet customers are vital for any organization. As Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton once remarked, "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."
One of the best ways of ensuring more of those precious rands stay in-house is to implement systems and leadership practices that ensure your organization is dominated not by the dispassionate and detached, but by engaged and commited employees who burn with a fire for serving customers.