EDITORIAL FEATURE
Every Employee is the Key
to Your Company’s Reputation and Success
By Rita Santamaria
In the words of General Norman Schwarzkopf:
“
I think that there is one really fundamental military truth and that’s that
you can add up the correlation of
forces, you can look at the number of
tanks, you can look at the number of airplanes, you can look at all these factors of
military might and put them together; but
unless the soldier on the ground or the airman in the air has the will to win, has the
strength of character to go into battle... all
the rest of that stuff is irrelevant.”
It is each of our employees or associates in
the company who, together, make our busi-
ness continue to grow. Our website can be
the most up to date, google SEO awesome,
our brochures filled with colorful graphics,
and our ads so inspiring and purposeful that
you want to tear them out and tape them to
a wall; but our individual colleagues must be
customer friendly to the point of making our
customers feel like they are well received in
an environment that is appreciative of their
business. All the beautiful bells and whistles
we have invested in time and resources mean
nothing if the “soldier” greeting the customer as they enter or call on our business has
a negative attitude or demonstrates negative
body language.
Training a new hire has to be centered
on the actual tasks necessary for their
individual key responsibilities but the
overriding evaluation during training
is attitude. Attitude can make or break
a customer relationship and eventually
close the operations of a company.
Here are some attitudes that are
universally considered undesirable:
•
Talking over the person who is trying
to talk
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