HR professionals should “think outside the square” when it comes to developing a good HR strategy that links engagement and brand with customer service and business outcomes, according to Kennards Hire.
“Brand and culture need to come together and we work closely with HR in inspiring the hearts and minds of our people in engaging our customers,” said Kennards’ brand & culture manager, Manelle Merhi.
“When you bring HR and marketing together, beautiful things can happen because it’s your people who deliver on your brand promise to customers.
“So it’s about how we actually communicate and position that message in a creative way, where we’re connecting with them at a human level and inspiring them to engage.”
Engagement is key to the business and brand success of Kennards, according to its CEO Allen Besseling, who said there is a direct correlation between factors such as internal engagement and external customer satisfaction.
“The way we drive a difference in our people is through engagement, and the way we drive engagement is through them understanding what our values are”
Early top-line analysis of engagement change over the past year, versus comparable HR KPI changes, suggests that there is a good correlation between increases in engagement score and associated drops in LTISR and staff turnover rates, and he said this aligns with external research making the link between engagement and business outcomes and other related KPIs.
Kennards’ revenues grew 8.7 per cent to $252 million for the 2013 financial year, at a time when industry revenue is projected to decline sharply by 6 per cent during 2014-15, in response to the winding back of investment into mineral and energy developments on the completion of major projects.
The industry’s performance is also forecast to continue to deteriorate over the next three years, in line with the contraction of capital expenditure into resource related infrastructure projects, according to IBISWorld.
“Our performance year-on-year is significant,” said Besseling.
“This comes at a time where our competitors are in decline, and the vast majority of them, particularly our major competitors, are in a period of retraction. But we keep growing consistently.”
There are a number of keys to the competitive advantages that help deliver sustainable and successful growth for Kennards, and Besseling said the primary ones are derived through its employees.
“People are our key differentiator,” he said.
“The way we drive a difference in our people is through engagement, and the way we drive engagement is through them understanding what our values are, what our brand stands for and understanding our goals – what we want to be best at.”
For the full story on how Kennards drives business success through engaging its people and customers, see the next issue of Inside HR magazine.
