Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement is the level of commitment an employee has towards the organization. The primary behaviors of engaged employees are: speaking positively about the organization to coworkers, potential employees and customers, having a strong desire to be a member of the organization, and exerting extra effort to contribute to the organization’s success.

Many studies have shown a direct correlation between a company’s financial performance and its level of employee engagement. As the percentage of actively engaged employees increases, so does the company’s performance.

So how are American businesses performing in regards to employee engagement?

The Gallup Management Journal's last semi-annual Employee Engagement Index reports that 54% of employees are not engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged at work and only 29% are actively engaged.

According to Gallup, less than 1 in 3 employees in America considers themselves to be actively engaged in their job. Are you surprised by these numbers?

So what are the major cause of employee disengagement? According to the Gallup Organization the most frequently mentioned issues that employees say cause disengagement are:

• Poor management-uncaring and unprofessional managers;
overworking staff; no respect, not listening, putting people in
wrong jobs; speed over quality; poor manager selection
processes.

• Lack of career growth and advancement opportunities: no
perceivable career paths; not posting job openings or filling
from within; favoritism or unfair promotions.

• Poor communication: problems communicating top-down and
between departments; after mergers; between facilities.

• Lack of recognition.

• Lack of training: nonexistent or superficial training; nothing
for new hires, managers, or to move up.

• Lack of tools and resources: insufficient, malfunctioning,
outdated, equipment/supplies; overwork without relief.

• Lack of teamwork-poor coworker cooperation/commitment;
lack of interdepartmental coordination.

The impact of employee disengagement is a bottom line issue. Gallup statistics show that unhappy workers cost the American business economy up to $350 billion annually in lost productivity!

Are you actively engaged? How much is employee disengagement costing our company?

I’d love know your thoughts. Tony@repowell.net

Tony Christensen
www.repowell.net

Setting the Pace

It's one thing to be good at what you do, it's an entirely another thing to be the best. To be the best means that you are the example and standard that an industry looks to. A business typically reaches this level of performance through basing its success on what it accomplishes on behalf of its customers.

R.E. Powell Distributing is driven to deliver unmatched value to our customers, and this drive is propelling us to the forefront of our industry. Our innovative customer focused solutions are changing the way businesses buy their petroleum products. This commitment to innovation and customer focus can be seen with the recent launch of our Market-Based Inventory Management and Price Risk Management Programs.

Market-Based Inventory Program
Working in partnership with our customers, R.E. Powell leverages industry expertise and state of the art technologies to deliver fuel to the customer at the optimal time. R.E. Powell's Logistics Team, monitors tank levels, prices, product allocations, and overall market conditions. With this information in hand the Logistics Team then makes purchasing and sourcing decisions on behalf of the customer. This kind of accurate and rapid monitoring of key data points can translate into savings of four cents or more per gallon for our customers.

Price Risk Management Program
If fuel costs are a significant portion of a business' operating costs, their profitability can be significantly impacted by large fluctuations in fuel pricess. Armed with market-leading information and years of industry experience, our Price Risk Management Team works closely with our customers to help them develop a fuel purchasing and hedging strategy that lets them sleep at night.

Setting the Pace
We are setting the pace in our industry by focusing on the needs of our customers, and through developing innovative cost saving solutions. It's one thing to be good at what you do, it's entirely another thing to be the best. I want to thank all our team members for their efforts in making us the best.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. tony@repowell.net

Tony Christensen
www.repowell.net

Value Creation

An effective business starts with a vision of what it wants to become and ends with value creation. Competing in a competitive marketplace is difficult, and to survive and prosper long term, a company must develop and use its capabilities to create, real, sustainable, superior value for its customers and society as a whole. It requires a company to anticipate and profitably satisfy customer needs.

Let’s take a look at an example. How many of you own an Apple IPod? I would venture to guess that approximately 1 in 10 of you own an IPOD. (I recently saw a statistic that 11% of Americans own an IPod). Our family currently has three IPods, and we love them. How did Apple come up with this cool gadget? Did someone go up to Apple and tell them that they wanted Apple to develop a sleek, stylish, device that could store digital music and video files, and they would like the device to be able to sync up to a website that allows users to easily download millions of songs? Probably not. So how did they come up with the concept?

Apple understood their customer’s wants and needs. This understanding came from rich customer relationships that had been developed through years of product development, testing, and feedback. I would assume that Apple spends a large amount of money surveying customers and potential customers to get a clearer picture of their true wants and needs. Apple probably also has a clear understanding of its own internal capabilities. With this in mind, they anticipated what their customers would want, and developed a product that profitably satisfies these needs and wants. That’s value creation.

Do we have examples of anticipating and profitably satisfying customer needs? We do. Recently the sales team closed a large sale. Several months earlier, this account had been identified as a large sales opportunity. Many team members were involved in this particular sales process, and their efforts were rewarded with the acquisition of this account’s business. During their last monthly meeting, the sales team had an opportunity to analyze their performance on this sale. The key question that was raised was, “What led to the successful outcome of this particular sales process?” Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.

Takeaway 1: We need to understand the customer needs.
This prospect had similar needs to many other large, regional consumers of fuel, lubricants, and propane. These key needs can be summarized as follows:

• The prospect was focused on cost saving solutions.

• The prospect wanted to consolidate suppliers as much as possible.

• The prospect expected its vendors to package their proposals in a concise and
professional way.

• The prospect was open to new ideas, and was hungry for easy to understand market- based information.

Takeaway 2: We need to understand our strengths.
Customers are smart, and they can see through half-baked promises. Fortunately, for R.E. Powell, many of our strengths aligned with this prospects needs. These strengths include: A team of experienced professionals that could audit their operations and help them identify cost saving solutions.

• A supplier that can supply products to a large geographical area, so as to limit the total number of suppliers that they need to deal with.

• A supplier that can provide easy to understand, market-based information that can be used to make informed buying decisions.

• A supplier that can package their findings and solutions into a concise and professional looking proposal.

Takeaway 3: Prepare before the game.
By developing strong relationships with many of our large, regional customers, we knew that these type of customers have specific needs that need to be addressed. This knowledge had led us to adapt our strengths to meet these needs. Over the last couple of years we had made the following adjustments:

• Added new sales professionals to our team that are experts in their specific field.

• Expanded our distribution areas.

• Improved our ability to gather and disseminate market-based information.

• Improved our proposal writing and presentation skills.

We had anticipated and profitably satisfied the customer’s needs. That’s Value Creation.

What are your thoughts?

Tony