All small businesses care about 3 things.
- Finding customers
- Keeping customers
- Keeping costs low
Finding customers is generally considered a marketing activity but today, your greatest marketers are your employees. If you have passionate people behind your product and services, who better to promote than them?? If they’re not, they don’t believe in you, what they do or both? This is a problem.
Keeping customers is about relationship building and keeping a pulse on the mood and direction and the needs of the marketplace. If your people have the access and the desire to be connected inside and out, they have the knowledge and insights far greater than SEO reports and marketing research to act upon. They have boots on the ground and sharing these insights openly improves everybody’s prospects.
Two big costs in SMBs are turnover and training. Employee turnover is costly from both a financial and cultural standpoint. An exiting employee can disrupt work processes, slowing them significantly and the replacement process involves time for posting, reviewing, interviewing and onboarding before any productivity is gained.
Connected employees don’t leave as often as the disconnected. Having a good friend, seeing how your work connects to the purpose, knowing where you stand and where the company is going is all what a social org is about. It’s open and transparent. Invaluable. Connected employees are also able to learn continuously, in the flow of their work. And people learn far more through others by sharing, observing and conversing than formal methods.
If this is true and these are the 3 most important focuses, then an investment in transparency and openness to ensure greater connection can be the easiest and most effective way to achieve them.
