Is Employee Loyalty as Important as Customer Loyalty?

Picture this: You have created something people need or want. You believe in it whole heartedly because it is your creation. You are so successful that you need to bring on other people to help you deliver your creation to all of the people who need or want it. Will they deliver it with the enthusiasm and passion with which you deliver it? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you have any control over that? Yes.

If you build loyalty in your employees, they will build loyalty in your customers. If you share the big picture, they will get it and share in the dream. Your success is their success and vice versa.

If you’ve ever experienced bad customer service, you have encountered a person who does not fully understand and embrace what the purpose of their role is within the larger structure of the organization with which they are connected. Employers need to make every employee understand their contributions to the big picture. Understand and embrace.

In college I worked at a small sports bar and grille on the West Side of Cincinnati. At the time, I thought it was a really fun place to work. Looking back I realize it had and still has an extremely unique culture, one that large corporations spend millions of dollars every year trying to recreate. The business itself has seen its successes and failures but the employee loyalty and therefore customer loyalty has always remained intact. What is the secret?

It took me years to figure it out. It’s a mixture of a few things really. The first thing is they include every employee in hiring decisions. They hire mainly internal referrals and ask for and utilize feedback. The second thing is they reward hard work with better hours which means more money. This is immediate recognition of the hardest working employees by management and loyalty towards those hard workers through reward. The third thing is they train employees extremely well and include everyone in the training process. It isn’t one person’s job to train a new employee, it is every employee’s job.

Interestingly, the sports bar and grille closed and reopened with a new name at a new location with all the same employees and all the same customers. If that isn’t a testament to employee and customer loyalty, I don’t know what is.

Creating a culture of employee loyalty is the most efficient way to create customer loyalty.