Internationally recognized speaker, author, consultant, and an expert in the area of customer experience, Joseph Michelli, is back on the CBT Automotive Network and this time we talk about employee experience and the role they play in the overall success of your company.
Jim Fitzpatrick asked Michelli a series of questions to better understand how to support your staff in a way that enhances their growth and in turn your dealerships.
To start things off Jim asked Michelli to explain how a successful business greatly depends on its employees.
Michelli explains, “Well, bottom line, there’s research out there from the University of Michigan that shows a linear correlation between improving the employer experience, how that then flows out to an improved connection to the customer. And ultimately how that flows out to profits. Now obviously this isn’t causal, but this is a reciprocal relationship between the way you treat your people and the way they treat your customers.”
That leads us to learn more about the importance of the process of hiring the right fit for your dealership’s culture and some important factors to take into consideration during that process. Michelli believes it starts with understanding your culture first.
“Well, I mean, I think the key is knowing what your culture is and making sure that you’re hiring people who are gonna thrive in that culture. You take a company like Zappos, which I’ve written about. They screen for people in such a careful way, and then once they bring them onboard they talk a lot about their culture, and if people don’t fit, they ask them to self-select out and they’ll pay them $2,000 to leave.” says Michelli.
So what do employees really want from their employers? Michelli says it comes down to three simple things, “mastery, autonomy, and purpose.” He explains if you give people the opportunity to learn and grow, extend themselves so they can master the universe around them, if you give them some control over what they do or when they do it or who they do it with, and the timelines by which they should get it done. If you connect them to a purpose larger than themselves, at the end of the day all of us want to have felt as though we made a contribution to the worlds around us.”
For more from Joseph Michelli on how to create an inspiring environment for your dealership staff, watch the interview video above.
