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What benefits in terms of building employee engagement have you seen, if any, based upon your experience of recruiting employees with your chosen emotional intelligence characteristics?
Our team is made up of highly motivated individuals who have great capacity to focus and have high levels of tact, empathy and trust. The benefits we receive in terms of building employee engagement include strong relationship building with colleagues from across all departments within the institution; a drive for self-development that benefits the team and customers; a pride in their work and the ability to identify and suggest improvements to processes and procedures.
Has emotional intelligence brought you closer to recognising the students’ needs?
Students’ needs are many and varied. They come from a broad spectrum of cultural and economic backgrounds, and from just about every country in the world. Having enhanced EI capability within the team hasn’t particularly impacted on the ability of staff to recognise the needs of students as such, but it does mean that they can deal with cases on an individual basis, providing assistance and information in a way that makes the student feel that the University genuinely cares about their situation and wants to support them.
In your opinion, how would other Universities benefit by implementing emotional intelligence as part of their customer service strategy?
With the introduction of higher tuition fees for University courses in 2012, the Higher Education sector now finds itself in a competitive market where good academic courses alone are not sufficient to attract new customers. Prospective students, and increasingly their parents, are looking at the whole package that an institution has to offer, including quality of facilities and services, employment prospects, and actually how good the whole experience is going to be of studying at that University.
Universities are looking towards service excellence as a means of differentiating themselves in the sector as a University of choice, and employing staff with high EI capability in service delivery roles means that students don’t just get an efficient service, they get a service that makes them feel valued and gives them an experience in life that they will remember and tell others about. This helps to build the
Emotional Intelligence: Nature or Nurture?