The Importance of Knowing Your Employees

To make your business successful, it is extremely important that you know your customers well.

You need to understand market dynamics, be aware of current and upcoming trends, and build detailed buyer personas, among many other things, to be able to create value for your customers.

👀 Take a look at Top 11 Employee Engagement Ideas

Get to Know Your Employees

While knowing your customers is a well-recognized and common business practice, knowing your employees is a lesser-known virtue, even though it could be argued that knowing your employees is every bit as important as understanding your customers.

If you don’t know your employees, how can you know your customers? Or rather, if you don’t know your employees, does it even matter if you know your customers?

Employees are any company’s most important resource and the better you know them, the better you are able to keep them happy, engaged, and help them reach their fullest potential.

Even if you knew your customers extremely well, if you don’t know how to connect with your employees first, you might miss out on opportunities to build trust and convey essential information to your employees, hence also negatively influencing your customer relationships.

Given the paramount value of employees, it is staggering to see how atrocious the global employee engagement statistics are these days. Studies show that only 13% of the global workforce is engaged, which is causing companies serious problems, and they don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

The answer is not simple, but luckily it is easy to get started on the right path.

To improve employee engagement, you need to know what makes employees engaged in the first place. But as employee engagement is a two-way street, you also need to help them know you, and constantly keep reminding them why they became employees at your company in the first place.

Related: Employee Engagement: 8 Statistics You Need to Know

What Can You Do to Know Your Employees Better?

You can conduct employee surveys and interviews, improve your employee onboarding and exit discussions, and you can utilize softwares that are designed to help you improve employee engagement, like our internal content hub called Haiilo.

Haiilo helps you get to know your employees by offering personalized channel subscriptions, which enables you to see what topics are interesting to your employees. We enable your employees to provide content suggestions to the platform, which helps you understand what type of content resonates with them.

We also offer metrics which help you understand what kind of professional content your employees like to consume, engage with, and share.

Furthermore, you can also create polls on Haiilo for getting input from your employees on company matters ranging from charity donations to the upcoming offsite location and office artwork.

A lot of initiatives and softwares are designed to either help you know your employees or to help your employees to know you, but previously there hasn’t really been a closed loop solution that would offer a way to do both.

With Haiilo, you can make sure the right content reaches the right employee at the right time to create an informed workforce, but you can also learn a lot about and from your employees.

Whether you are in the B2B or B2C sector, offering services or making products, it’s never a bad idea to get to know your employees better, because only by knowing your employees can you truly know your customers.