Higher Purpose Podcast 94: Employee Experience and Engagement with Santiago Jaramillo
How can you unlock the true potential of your people in a way that’s good for them and good for business? Join us on this episode with our guest Santiago Jaramillo, the CEO and Co-Founder of Emplify. Today we’re talking about employee experience, employee engagement, and why ping pong tables in the break room aren’t going to cut it.
Spinning plates
As leaders and business owners, we’re keeping a lot of plates spinning — so much so that we end up neglecting employee engagement. But the secret to keeping that employee engagement plate spinning is to realize that it’s not a plate at all. It’s much more foundational and embedded inside of each plate itself.
Santiago tells the story of the moment he realized he’d dropped the ball on his company’s employee engagement, and what he did to turn things around.
Unlocking your potential
Emplify uses data to help business leaders make better decisions and create better and more engaging work environments, with the purpose of helping all people unlock their full potential at work. How do we create an environment that allows you to become a better version of yourself?
We spend half our waking lives at work, and that very much impacts our lives. It’s really difficult for somebody to live a fulfilled and meaningful life when much of their time is spent with an energy-sucking force. This impacts friends and family, and from that, the impact ripples out into society. So one of the ways we can influence the world is by creating better, more human work environments.
Good for business
Santiago shares the story of a manufacturing business that would turn over 100% of their team every single year. Those are massive costs. When they interviewed their employees, their employees revealed that their backs hurt from moving heavy metal sheets every day to get them ready for welding, instead of spending their time welding. One $60,000 investment into a forklift later, the team went from being the lowest engaged in the company to the second most engaged team, they produced more, and helped the company earn an extra 3.8 million dollars every year with the same exact labor costs.
The magic of employee engagement is that it’s not just the right thing to do because it’s good for people. It’s also better for business. If done right, it can be very profitable.
Defining engagement
It’s head, heart, and hands: an employee’s intellectual and emotional connection with their work that causes them to strive with their hands after the company’s goals and mission. If their head and heart are all in, then they want to pursue what the company is about with their full and best self.
Have you ever seen someone innovate in a company who’s had their mind and heart checked out? People have to care deeply to come up with new solutions.
Employee engagement vs employee satisfaction
The goal isn’t employee satisfaction. It’s employee engagement. Engaged employees lean in and put their full hearts and minds into the job. Satisfied employees lean back, and do the bare minimum to keep reaping the benefits and rewards of the job.
It’s not about leadership catering to every whim of their employees. It’s about finding what actions we can take to make people’s lives better and help the business win. And to find that solution, you have to carefully diagnose the problem: a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.
Resources for Santiago Jaramillo
LinkedIn | Twitter | Email: santiago@emplify.com
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