In the late 1990s, the training and development arm of one of the world's largest automotive manufacturing firms hired The Gallup Organization to transform its workforce. In partnership with the Gallup, the client implemented a change initiative designed to increase business performance by increasing employee engagement levels. The goal was to refocus managers and associates on these performance management fundamentals: employee engagement, customer engagement, and strengths development. Since then, more than 4,000 of the client's managers and employees have attended the Gallup Great Manager and Great Associate Programs to learn new strategies and metrics for improving employee engagement and workgroup performance.
Following the success of the initial engagement, corporate university leaders launched a performance improvement program geared towards the company's dealership network. Their objectives were to discover the degree to which dealer employee engagement drives customer engagement, dealer profitability, and world-class brand performance and to offer dealers an integrated performance management system. This system would provide them with the tools and education needed to optimize employee and customer engagement ( HumanSigma).
To begin, Gallup measured employee and customer engagement at a group of selected dealerships. Follow-up Business Impact Analysis determined that:
- Dealerships with the highest employee engagement significantly outperformed dealerships with the least employee engagement, generating a difference in gross profit for new vehicles of about $275 per vehicle. Further analysis showed that boosting employee engagement could result in an increase of gross profit per dealer of more than $300,000 per year.
- Dealers with high employee engagement or Q 12 scores also received high customer engagement or CE 11 scores. More importantly, "optimized" dealerships - those with high scores for both employee and customer engagement - had significantly higher dealer profitability: The difference in gross profit for new vehicles was about $400 at optimized dealerships. Based on annual average new vehicle sales, dealers that could increase employee engagement could see an increase in annual gross profit of almost $500,000 per dealer.
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