Strong employee engagement is proven to drive profitability and revenue growth. Organisations with highly engaged people enjoy an 18% increase* in sales and 23% higher profitability*.
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To strengthen employee engagement, focus more on "how" you can nurture and nourish these essential behaviours which are critical for success:
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Autonomy: Empower your people to do their work their way to foster accountability and deeper levels of engagement.
Relationships: Invest in how your people show up and treat each other through authentic, adult-adult interactions.
Trust: Identify and close organisational say-do gaps to prevent trust from being eroded. Why wouldn't you do these things?

Your people are making decisions and taking actions across your organisation - day in, day out - that impact your profitability and growth. Engaged employees demonstrate higher levels of accountability and application of discretionary effort. They thrive during the good times and are more resilient during the bad.

In summary, focus on "how" to strengthen employee engagement to build competitive advantage.

* Gallup Meta Analysis Report

Inspired employees are productive employees. Compared to their 'satisfied' peers, 'inspired' employees are 125% more productive* through the application of discretionary effort.

But productivity without profitability is an exercise in futility. So it is vital to focus on "how" you inspire employees to sustain new ways of working:
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Purpose: connect your people to their personal vision and purpose, how that relates to their job and your organisation's vision. This enables people to make meaning of what they do.
Coaching: inspire people with the belief that they have everything they need and more to get wherever they want to go, unleashing that potential on the organisation.
Feedback: deliver feedback in service of the other person, without judgement, in an adult space.

Why wouldn't you do these things? Your people have a choice to go above and beyond in their role or apply the minimum effort required to stay employed, and this impacts your productivity.

But beware the temptation to buy training for the latest time management technique, or purchase the hottest SaaS-based productivity app. They're not bad or wrong, but they're both just "what" things that can be drawn down through your organisation's L&D or IT budget.

In summary, focus on "how" to inspire employees to improve productivity and drive top line growth.
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* Bain & Company with the Economist Intelligence Unit

Increasing focus on the functions that centre around the customer is vital. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not focused on the customer* while 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services†. This is enabled by those who raise market awareness and engagement, connect with new clients and existing clients to sell the value, and ensure client value is constantly being met and exceeded.

Increasing focus on the functions that centre around the customer is vital. When a company is truly customer-centric, every decision and action is done with customers in mind‡. Lots of the ideas out there focus on "what" you could be doing, here are some different approaches focusing more on "how" you're doing things differently:

Curiosity: be curious about how you're communicating the customers' definition of value.
Empathy: without judgement, look at how you're building meaningful connections.
Safety: reflecting on how safe and open the culture is to make course corrections.

Notice how all these things are within your control and, with different choices, can be held up to the light giving clarity on areas where market share can be increased.

It's interesting to see that by paying attention to how things are being done many opportunities present themselves. What will help in these situations is not adding more or different "what" to people's work days, but more about "how" these areas are being approached. Spend some time deeply thinking about them, it's surprising how quickly thinking can revert to "what"; it's ok for it to be difficult and uncomfortable in the "how" space. Things soon start to become clearer!

In summary, the key is not to do more "what" but to choose carefully what is done and "how" it is done. By focusing on the "how", the "what" will take care of itself.
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* Deloitte Customer-centricity and embedding it into your organisation’s DNA
† Salesforce.com State of the connected customer report
‡ Forbes What does it mean to be customer-centric In 2021