Employees are the power base in a multi utility world

By successfully engaging its employees, the multi utility that transforms our homes in the future will be the one that successfully reinvents the way it runs its workplace today.

Traditional utilities are striving to reinvent themselves, embracing telecoms, entertainment and broadband, reaching out to partner with innovative technology and financial service providers while fighting off new rivals offering cut price competition.

With the freedom to diversify comes the discipline needed to succeed, and it follows that the customer service levels of traditional utilities will have to meet and exceed the benchmarks set by modern customers who compare historic providers to younger, more engaged and innovative competitors.

And there’s the problem. In late April, Scottish Power landed a bill for £18 million, the third largest in the energy regulator’s history, for late billing, inadequate call handling and complaint resolution. Earlier in the year, Britain’s big six energy suppliers, British Gas, EDF, Eon, Npower, SSE and Scottish Power all trailed behind their smaller competitors in a 2016 customer satisfaction survey by Which?. Scottish Power came second to last in front of Npower with a customer score of 44 per cent. Ovo, which is already offering its millennial fan base a broadband service alongside its cut price energy, scored 82 per cent.

Customers have to be impressed, won over and retained by utilities that employ tens of thousands of people, are often owned by larger firms, formed from mergers, to which other components have been bolted over time. To that confusion we can expect another wave of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations.

The best way for such firms to impress increasingly demanding customers, let alone regulators, peers, partners and shareholders, is to make ambassadors of their workers, instead of risking their becoming detractors. Utilities in the cross hairs of change will fail to impress with a workforce of disconnected, demotivated or even disheartened employees. Nobody knows more about the customer or makes a bigger impression than a customer facing employee.

Shifts in emphasis from organisations with stature can wrong foot young pretenders, modernising their service, just as staid central government democratised its services through gov.uk, and to similar applause. Scottish Power, for instance, is no upstart. It is one of the best established energy operators in the UK, with 5.3 million customers and 9,500 employees. To differentiate itself, attract new partners and wow its customers, it could publicly set itself the target of converting the 1 million complaints it received in the last few years into 1 million messages of praise, making it not only an energy powerhouse, and not just a vocal, consumer champion, but a beacon of successful employee engagement.

Year on year, Gallup research has shown how employee engagement drives growth, citing it as an important predictor of company performance. Disaffected employees, on the hand, in all sectors, do the opposite. The bigger the enterprise, the bigger the problem. Gallup says only 30 per cent of those in America holding down full time jobs are engaged in their work, at a cost of $450 – $550 billion per year. In the UK, Qualtrics recently found that UK workers think 36 per cent of their working day is unproductive.

Companies that align their workforces, ensuring employees all face the same direction, do so by engaging with them, and rapidly become the employers to aspire to, not to put up with, for whom people want to work, instead of having to. Those that go one step further, and align the employee with the customer do even better, because both parties are two sides of the same coin, each expecting their views to be taken seriously, and in the sharing economy, each as eager to engage. Neither should be taken for granted, and both should be given a voice.

We see best practice, for instance, in the car sector, which links individual salesmen, nationwide dealers and franchised firms to corporate HQ, giving senior management continuous, real time feedback on employee sentiment, satisfaction and employee opinion, which is then cross referenced with customer feedback.

Each sector has its own performance metrics. For the car maker, passenger safety and robust build quality come first. In a commoditised utility, it’s compliance – tackling mis-selling, strong complaints handling and customer care. The trick for the Utility is to articulate the successes of its own performance metrics in the same way the car maker does when he uses them to wow his customers with a 70,000 mile warranty.

Strong companies succeed by bringing associates together, increasingly with the application of powerful, affordable and simple to use platforms that grasp the employee experience in real time, with automated and anonymous analytics. Common dashboards provide transparency across silos, enable management to seize on failings in the customer supply chain, spotlight, compare and contrast pockets of high or low staff engagement across disciplines and understand the reasons why.

Simple to use, inexpensive and immensely powerful engagement software also informs change, as scientific insight enables CIOs and HRs to adapt workplace culture, educating employees about the company’s tech strategy, asking what training they would like to join in the revolution and what ideas they would like to share.

Utilities that want to champion their customers must first rate the cost of employee demotivation and disengagement as highly as the cost of consumer dissatisfaction, and find new ways to motivate their people. Those that do will soon realise that the interrelationship between contented customers and engaged employees becomes a robust, profitable and virtuous circle.