Why Employee Enablement is Important for Your Business

Todd Kunsman

Marketing Team Lead

10 minute read

Why employee enablement is important to your business.

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Employee Enablement & Your Business

Learn why employee enablement is important for your business and how your company can get on the right path.

When you think about ways to better transform your workforce, you tend to think about improving employee engagement (or at least you should be).

After all, employees can contribute more to a business than just what their job duties entail.

By this, I mean they can be actual brand advocates for your company, boost productivity and retention while helping your company produce better results (lead increase, revenue-boosting, web traffic, etc.).

Yet, while employee engagement and engaging employees tend to be the common topics, you may be overlooking the process of employee enablement.

Once you have engaged employees who are vested in your company, how do you keep your team focused and committed to ensuring they stay engaged?

This is why employee enablement is important to understand.
 

What is Employee Enablement?

Before we can really dive into the process and importance of employee enablement, it makes sense to clarify exactly what it is.

With employee enablement, you are moving employees beyond the stage of just being engaged with the company goals and their interest in the brand.

Instead, you provide the guidance and then empower employees to continue to learn, develop, and get the necessary training to continue providing quality results.

If your employees are not enabled, they cannot be expected to perform at a superior level because they have not been provided the right tools, training material, resources, or even have the necessary skills.

Many times companies focus on employee engagement and wonder how employee enablement is different.

The difference between these two terms is simply:

Employee enablement gives employees the ability to continue performing high-level job functions, while employee engagement ensures your team is dedicated to the company vision and overall goals.
 
employee enablement
 

Why Employee Enablement Matters for Your Company

Now that we covered the definition and difference from employee engagement, let’s dive into how employee enablement impacts revenue, turnover, and performance.
 

Revenue

In an Aon Hewitt report, for every 1% increase in employee engagement, you can expect to see an additional 0.6% growth in sales for an organization.
 
A major reason employee enablement is important for your company is the impact it can have on company revenue.

When it comes down to any business decision or basis for measurement, what revenue is and how it can grow is always a top priority.

By enabling employees with the right tools, assets, learning material, and continuing to give them opportunities for growth, you are greatly increasing skill sets and productivity.

Which of course, in turn, can lead to a positive impact on overall revenue.

Think of it this way.

Employees who are now engaged with the company goals, are happy with leadership, have the right tools to perform their jobs, and are being enabled to have a higher job performance will exceed any expectations.

An example is your company has a new initiative to get employees active on their social media accounts.

The plan is to develop an employee advocacy plan that will help generate traffic and boost leads, which can impact sales.

Yet, without simple social media policies, an employee advocacy tool, and helping educate, employees may be stuck not knowing what to share, how to share, and when to share.

Thus, frustrating employees who were told about this new initiative and are willing to participate, but have no clear way of doing so as they have not be enabled by their company.

Time is wasted asking questions, productivity is delayed, engagement may be lost, and the initiative of increasing web traffic and generating quality leads that can turn into sales has also been delayed.

This is just one example, as it can apply to multiple departments and/or areas of a company.

But imagine not enabling any employees and what impact that can have.

It may not completely reverse revenue, but can stall it, increase other costs, or leave missed opportunities for new growth.
 

Turnover

Companies want good employees who are engaged to stay with the company and continue to deliver results.

Yet, without enablement, your company can be setting itself up for high turnover. Which also can have a negative effect on overall revenue.

It’s not easy to put a completely accurate number of costs associated with turnover because most businesses don’t have a good system to keep track of these costs.

However, there are some interesting samples on the web.

For instance, in this Huffington Post article, they use this formula to help calculate:

 

employee enablement formula

 

The article then provides this formula with numbers:

“If you are a 150 person company with 11% annual turnover, and you spend $25k on per person on hiring, $10k on each of turnover and development, and lose $50k of productivity opportunity cost on average when refilling a role, then your annual cost of turnover would be about $1.57 million.

Reducing this by just 20%, for example, would immediately yield over $300k in value. And that says nothing of an emotional headache and cultural drain felt from losing great people.”

And that formula may include even more costs like productivity loss and errors from new employees as they start to be trained in their new position.

But as you can see, by not enabling your employees to succeed along with improving employee engagement, your turnover rate can increase and your revenue can be impacted.
 

Employee Performance

As you might already have learned from the above info, employee enablement is also greatly important for the overall performance of employees.

Again, similar to the turnover, employee performance also can affect company revenue.

If more employees start exceeding expectations and reach a high-level status of performance, your company output will greatly increase and positively affect customer interactions and sales.

More than likely, your company will already have some top performers who were not necessarily enabled.

By providing average employees enablement, you can now increase the number of high-level employees and improve company performance.
 

What Leadership Can Do About Employee Enablement

Since employee effectiveness is important to the success of your company, here is what you and other leaders of the company can do.

  • Ensure employees have the right learning materials and tools that further enhance their skills and value in the workplace. The example of social media and employee advocacy, tool like EveryoneSocial.
  • Spend a significant amount of time, energy, and resources following up and reinforcing learning and engagement principles. Whether that is from department leads or professionals brought in.
  • Incentives for employee growth/performance recognition. Understand how gamifying your business can help keep engagement moving to get more employees ready for enablement.

Remember: employees that are excited about your company vision and values, but are not enabled to do their job, will lead to frustration rather than translating into exceptional experiences.
 

Final Thoughts

Employee enablement is an essential piece for your company and the benefits to revenue, lead generation, and employee retention are no-brainers.

Yet, many times we only think about employee engagement and forget that in order to keep employees engaged that we have to then continue to enable them.

Leadership should remember to provide the necessary tools, training, and resources that will ultimately develop employee skill sets and help them grow within their career.

And remember – when your employees are enabled, they will create outstanding experiences that give your business an advantage that positively affects revenue, employee performance, and retention.
 

Want to improve employee engagement and enable employees at the same time? See how employee advocacy software can help while improving brand visibility and marketing reach. Get your personal demo.

 


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