For more than a decade, organizations have been helping their employees improve their Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills. People at all organizational levels - from executives to administrative staff - experience the same emotions even though the challenges, pressures and demands they face at various organizational levels are quite different. People become internally self-managed and capable of making their greatest contributions when they develop their EI skills. And as they work in that zone of peak performance, so does the organization. The examples below detail how the development of EI skills can benefit various business professionals such as sales people, customer service representatives and technical professionals (i.e., analysts, engineers, information technologists, scientists, etc.).
Sales People:
Frequently, Sales People interact with demanding customers and prospects. They often face adversarial discussions over features, price, schedules, delivery, etc. As a result of these situations, the sales person and the customer can feel anxious, fearful, frustrated and sometimes angry. This can lead to a downward spiral of negative emotions where sales people are unmotivated, customers are unsatisfied and sales decline.
When sales people enhance their EI skills, they become more capable of controlling or managing themselves and thus the situation. The likelihood of the customer "pushing their buttons" diminishes. They are more able stay focused on the key issues and not "give-away-the-store". Research has revealed that optimism is a critical sales trait in that the more optimistic a sales person is, the higher their volume and sales dollars. Optimism leads to persistence which leads to more sales. Enhanced EI skills enable the sales person to empathize with the customer allowing for better communication and faster, more effective problem-solving. Consequently, the strong positive customer relationships that are developed ensure better cooperation and higher sales when problems do arise.
Customer Service Representatives:
Throughout their day, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) continuously deal with frustrated and sometimes angry customers. Through no fault of their own, they can find themselves being verbally abused. The customer's anger, frustration and rage can cause representatives to become nervous, mad, disgusted, and angry themselves. The CS supervisor may be required to intervene if the representative does not have a high level of EI skills to prevent the discussion from escalating. Or worse, inadequate skills may cause the company to lose that customer. When a customer becomes upset, he or she typically tells 10-15 friends about the poor treatment.
With enhanced EI skills, CSRs can easily manage their emotional reactiveness to angry customers, maintaining a polite, calm, and sincere attitude and conversation with customers. Loyal customers tell their friends. Higher customer loyalty leads to higher profitability.
Technical Professionals:
On a daily basis, Technical Professionals are required to do more with less faster, better, and cheaper. To complete their projects, they must work long, hard hours. They are challenged to work with many people from different functions, to create and innovate, and do tasks, in many cases, they would like to avoid. As a result, technical professionals may feel resentful, agitated, frustrated, anxious, and stressed-out much of the day. They may experience what is known as "emotional hijacking" which is a physiological response in the brain brought on by negative emotions that literally keeps people from thinking clearly. Creativity is blocked, communication is hampered, and more mistakes and errors are made.
Enhancing the Technical Professional's EI skills provides them with what they never were taught in school. They build interpersonal skills that allow them to get other technical colleagues to help them when they need it through learning how to manage their own emotional reactiveness to people and situations. Enhancing EI skills increases the likelihood that projects are completed on schedule, using the best, innovative thinking available.
Results:
Business professionals have achieved some impressive results as a result of attending EI training programs. Participants have reported a range of 20% to 40% reduction in stress and worry, 20% to 35% increase in personal productivity, 15% to 35% increased teamwork and similar improvements in personal motivation, management of emotional reactiveness, creativity, work/life balance and more. These increases can translate into positive return on investment for the organization.
In these turbulent times, negative emotions can be like a stealth virus, contributing to the high cost of turnover and potentially costing your company millions of dollars annually. Implementing an emotionally intelligent retention strategy is key to preventing an outbreak. You can safeguard your people by helping them develop their emotional intelligence skills. This contributes to the development of a positive emotional climate, minimizing the contagious nature of the virus. The strategy will require more than a fair compensation package and must go beyond transparent attempts to placate unhappy employees.
The High Cost of Turnover
Countless articles and books have been written about the direct and indirect costs of turnover. The cost of replacing a worker whose skills are in high demand can hit up to 1.5 times his annual salary. At minimum, the cost to replace any worker is about 20 percent of his annual salary.
It's difficult to track the indirect costs of high turnover which can be staggering. For example, if a supervisor is spending even part of his day conducting exit interviews, interviewing candidates, or posting jobs on the web, that's time away from doing his regular work. That's costly. Additionally, disgruntled employees may sabotage the company by causing immeasurable damage to client relationships, resulting in lost customers. And now the company must spend extra time and money trying to woo those customers back.
What Do Workers Really Want?
As the war for talent heats up, many HR professionals say that retaining workers means figuring out what employees want. They suggest customizing job descriptions and perks for each worker so that they will say, "No thanks," when recruiters call them. Figuring out what perks each individual employee wants from job time sharing to on-the-job child care can be daunting. Also, it's the wrong place to start. Attempting to indulge the unique wants and needs of every employee creates plenty of stress for supervisors, managers and human resource professionals and can be overwhelming. And even if you give workers what you think they want, they may bail on you anyway. Underneath it all, employees want the same thing.
Every employee, whether he or she is able to put it into words or not, wants to feel certain things:
- They want to feel secure (if they perform well, they will keep their job).
- They want to feel appreciated for their contributions.
- They want to feel that their immediate boss cares about them as a person.
- They want to feel fulfilled in the work they do.
The foundation upon which to build a successful employee retention strategy is that of creating a positive emotional environment - creating, through the behaviors of every manager and supervisor, an emotional climate that makes people want to work at your company. They want an emotionally intelligent employer, and in particular, an emotionally intelligent leader to guide them.
A positive emotional climate is not one in which everyone always pretends to be happy and problems are ignored, nor is it one where there are no conflicts or stresses. But it is one that when problems arise, they are dealt with in a fair and respectful way, a way that allows people to disagree and still demonstrate sincere care for one another.
Sounds great, right? But just how do you create a positive emotional climate that increases employee satisfaction and employee loyalty, which leads to better retention?
Where Do You Start?
Start at the top. The top leaders' attitudes and behaviors directly affect employee satisfaction, productivity and loyalty. These, in turn, directly affect customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability. Employee satisfaction is directly driven by how employees are treated, first by their immediate boss, and second by other leaders in the organization. And job satisfaction is about attitudes and emotions - how employees feel.
OK, so I'm a supervisor or manager or executive. And I'm supposed to behave in a way that's caring and positive toward my people. I guess I'm supposed to be immune to the pressure and stress of leading? No!
You have feelings and emotions, too! So what should you do? You should enhance what is known as your Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills. EI is your ability to acquire and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others to help you make decisions about what to say or do (or not say or do). An emotionally intelligent person has developed skills in five basic competencies: emotional self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, emotional self-motivation, empathy and nurturing relationships.
These competencies, when developed and practiced, can safeguard an individual and an organization against the virus of negative emotions that can cause dissatisfaction and turnover. They can help an organization retain its most valuable resource - its people!
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