Where should your focus be?

Employee engagement doesn’t just happen, but when your employees are truly engaged, you’ll find their motivation to do their best explodes. Productivity booms, staff retention rockets, and absenteeism collapses. The benefits to the bottom line are tangible.

To reap these benefits, your organization must sell itself to its employees, just as it sells products and services to its customers. The best-selling organizations no longer sell by telling customers what they are buying and how it was made. They instill passion in their customers, by connecting to their customers’ inner beliefs and values.

The key to sell products and services is to understand why your customers buy your products, and answer that need first. Find your customers before you sell your product or service.

The same principle holds true in high-performing organizations. If you want engaged employees who are highly motivated in their work, connect your why to theirs: develop an employee engagement strategy that connects your organization’s purpose to your employees’ own values. This should be your prime focus. From here, the what and how becomes the method of achieving the why.

Align your prime focus

Have you ever wondered why Apple is the world’s number one in cell phone sales, and how their sales snowball year after year? Why is it that they have such a large and loyal customer base that is happy to pay premium prices for new cell phones and tablets?

It’s because Apple connects with people at the most meaningful level. They share a common purpose. People with the same values and beliefs connect with Apple’s reason for being. The result is loyal customers who make repeat purchases and are motivated to become brand advocates.

Apple doesn’t start by telling people how great its products are. Its sales pitch starts by telling people why. As Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “We believe in giving people the ability to do things they could not otherwise do, to allow them to create things they couldn’t otherwise create.”

Apple aligns its prime focus with that of its employees. It says, ‘Hey, we want you to be the best you can be, and to create your dreams. That’s why we make the products we do.’

When your sense of purpose is in alignment, your prime focus becomes the motivator of engagement – and the circle is completed when that engagement motivates higher performance.

When was the last time you analyzed your prime focus? Our Prime Focus Assessment takes you through the eight elements that must be in place and aligned to deliver prime performance, and helps you to understand where you and your organization are on this journey.