Listen and understand, act and convince

Em­ploy­ees feel they are mis­un­der­stood, they are not ful­ly be­hind the cor­po­rate strat­e­gy and in the worst-case sce­nario the com­pa­ny strat­e­gy falls flat. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, this sit­u­a­tion is all too re­al, but it can be avoid­ed with a few sim­ple steps aimed at ac­ti­vat­ing the em­ploy­ees and breath­ing life in­to the brand.

It was a lit­tle more than one year ago that we de­cid­ed to tap in­to the zeit­geist with our fu­ture ini­tia­tive. We car­ried out a sur­vey among CEOs, CMOs, COOs and em­ploy­ees of lead­ing Swiss com­pa­nies to de­ter­mine whether and how vi­sions and strate­gies are re­ceived by em­ploy­ees.

The clever­est strat­e­gy brings noth­ing

43% of the em­ploy­ees we ques­tioned be­lieved that they were ful­ly be­hind the company’s vi­sion, but on­ly 25% of the man­agers thought that their em­ploy­ees knew the com­pa­ny strat­e­gy. And this is pre­cise­ly where the prob­lem lies – how­ev­er bril­liant the strat­e­gy may be, it will fall flat if the em­ploy­ees fail to get ful­ly be­hind it. The con­se­quence of this is a dis­sat­is­fied board­room, un­clear val­ues, a lack of mo­ti­va­tion among the em­ploy­ees and ul­ti­mate­ly less suc­cess.

The em­ploy­ees are the life and soul of the brand

Mo­ti­va­tion comes from in­side. It can­not be forced but rather must be teased out. And this is where the right ac­tion can make a dif­fer­ence – the best ap­proach is to in­te­grate em­ploy­ees in­to process­es and in­volve them in fo­cus groups which, thanks to in­ter­me­di­ate lev­els, open up com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels be­tween the man­age­ment and staff. If em­ploy­ees feel that they are part of a greater whole, they will be ac­ti­vat­ed and con­vey the cor­po­rate val­ues to the out­side world. They will live out the com­pa­ny phi­los­o­phy and breathe life in­to the brand. In this way, process­es can be ad­just­ed in a stream­lined man­ner and con­cepts im­ple­ment­ed with­out fric­tion loss­es. The re­sult is greater ef­fi­cien­cy and suc­cess.