There\u2019s no denying it, \u201cengagement\u201d is popular in business right now. First came an appreciation for and focus on user engagement, an outcome of our digitally-centered time. Then came an appreciation for employee engagement, a metric that\u2019s become increasingly important as companies realize that engagement correlates with productivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both are necessary. If you aren\u2019t focused on the activity, culture, and energy \u2014 the human stuff \u2014that\u2019s happening internally you can\u2019t authentically create anything human-centered for your customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now that businesses have come around to the fact that customer engagement is the key to growing sales and employee engagement is the key to productive workplaces, what\u2019s next? Where else can organizations and individuals focus to make business more human?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next engagement frontier is with each other: With clients and team members.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This means stepping out of our \u201cswim lanes\u201d at times. It means investing in people, not just your output. And it means bringing humanity to all interactions and seeing all people as individuals, not as project roles or job titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The engagement we foster in meatspace with our clients and colleagues requires attention, commitment, and awareness. Why? The secret to successful work relationships isn\u2019t in delivering the best work all the time with no mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The secret to good business relationships is in the amount of effort we\u2019re willing to put into the actual relationship.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Think of your most successful and rewarding personal relationships: They\u2019re the ones that you invest in. Take your life partner as an example. If you stop taking time to talk or stop doing things together apart from the absolute minimum, you stop being interested and interesting to them. And your relationship wanes; it becomes a set of motions. (We all know date nights are important for a reason.) This happens at work, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Client relationships get stale if we don\u2019t actively contribute to and shape them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translating that into business means not letting the process take over emotional space. The steps we take to get work done can\u2019t replace the emotional energy required to know how those steps are being received and if they\u2019re the right steps for the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cognitive intelligence can\u2019t replace emotional intelligence. The success we have with our clients is all about how we engage them beyond the must-dos. In the agency business, this responsibility often falls on people with titles like Account Director or Project Lead. But that\u2019s not scalable or effective. Every person on every team on every project has to engage with all the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Engagement is sensing what should happen, not what\u2019s \u201csupposed\u201d to happen.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a strategist who makes herself available to a client to help solve a problem that wasn\u2019t \u201cin scope\u201d but that was preventing the client from moving forward. It\u2019s sensing someone needed help and showing up when it was needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a tech lead who partners with the client-side technologist to experiment with and explore new technologies apart from what\u2019s required for the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s an owner who routinely shares articles and has in-depth conversations with a client about not just the work we\u2019re doing, but also about the digital industry and its industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a software developer who goes to a client\u2019s office to walk through tech documents to ensure the client understands the details and the consequences of those details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step outside the process to interact with clients and each other.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When we let the process drive, our relationships become focused on deliverables. We stop talking to each other and paying attention to the non-verbal communication. Deliverables aren\u2019t a relationship, they\u2019re a to-do list. And people don\u2019t respond well to feeling like a to-do list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People want to know you actually care about them. You can show this by investing in a personal relationship with them. Personal doesn\u2019t mean intimate, familiar, or inappropriate. Just a relationship in which you actually care about the person and their individual needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason engagement works for businesses when it comes to customers and employees is because people like being treated like people. The same is true for all the people inside those business. Personal interactions don\u2019t require a ton of energy and, at the end of the day, they show our humanity. Small human gestures make people feel connected and cared about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we are human it doesn\u2019t matter if we screw up or fall down (which we will, that\u2019s human, too) because we will be engaged with the people around us, and they will recognize our commitment and dedication to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s no denying it, \u201cengagement\u201d is popular in business right now. First came an appreciation for and focus on user engagement, an outcome of our digitally-centered time. Then came an appreciation for employee engagement, a metric that\u2019s become increasingly important as companies realize that engagement correlates with productivity. Both are necessary. If you aren\u2019t focused […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":2496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,56],"tags":[],"coauthors":[84],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experience-design","category-strategy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n