Jim Clifton, the president of Gallup, wrote a great book called The Coming Jobs War. In the book, he describes that one thing moves a society forward and that is the willingness of people to work and the creation of jobs. There are 7 billion people in the world today and the economy is global. This is a great competitive stage. I am an entrepreneur at heart and my job is to start and grow companies that create jobs. I really want to understand and take advantage of human performance.

One thing that makes businesses grow is employee and customer engagement. Human Sigma talks about this interaction specifically.

Why is this important to me?

I am not doing this summary to waste your time. My vision is to provide concise action steps you can take right now to improve your life. According to Gallup, 9% of employees are ENGAGED, 71% are OFFLINE, and 20% are ACTIVELY OFFLINE. To put this in perspective, let’s do some simple calculations. Let’s say your business generates $50 million in revenue per year and there are 5 million impressions. Impressions are calls, emails, website visits, or anything where your people touch a customer, lead, or prospect. Each print in this example is worth $10. Remember that 20% of your people are ACTIVELY offline, which means impressions will be negative. The lost business potential of 20% negative impressions is $10 million in lost revenue per year. The math looks like this: 5 million impressions x 20% Negative x $10.

As you can see, there is a real need to improve these statistics, and smart companies are doing just that. If you want to laugh a little, watch the movie Office Space. The movie is funny in a painful way because a lot of the actions actually take place in the corporate world.

Human Sigma is divided into 15 more chapters and is packed with detailed information. With so much information and limited time, I’d like to describe the what, why, and how to improve customer and employee engagement based on the research in this book.

1. What – Terminator Management – What is the problem? Human Sigma talks about the Terminator School of Management. If you consider the industrial revolution, you understand the problem that transcends left-brain repetitive tasks and right-brain creative work. Henry Ford dominated MASS Production. He needed physical work. At the time, this required strict management control and a reduction in the freedom of workers. I can attest to this because I worked at a car factor for 4 months and it is NOT an easy job. The shift starts at 6 am; you get two 10 minute breaks and a lunch. This work is highly repetitive and left-wing in nature.

2. Six Sigma – This is a process to improve processes. This has worked wonders in manufacturing because it’s all about machines, tolerances, and supply chain. The improvements made in the last 25 years have been amazing, but this does not work for human engineering.

3. Right Brain: Work in the information age is creative by nature. According to Gallup, 89% of the value of the Fortune 500 consists of intangible assets. This means things like talented people, intellectual property, goodwill, and customers. These things cannot be handled the old-fashioned way. Have you ever wondered why Van Halen or Guns and Roses had problems? Managing creative talent with old-school management tactics doesn’t work.

Let’s dive into why and look at four impacts.

1. Why: Let’s now dive into more detail and why this needs to change and why customer-employee engagement is crucial to competitive advantage. One important factor is the fact that companies with more engaged team members grow 2.6 times faster than their counterparts. This advantage combines over time for amazing results. Every organization needs to master this if it wants to be alive in the future.

2. Why: It is impossible to legislate genuine human interaction. Have you ever called a company to be answered by a representative abroad? They proceed to tell you that his name is John, which you know is not true. This simple act puts the customer in a state of mistrust from the start. How about being stuck in voicemail hell for the first 10 minutes of your call not counting the wait time? Once he finds an agent to help him, they’re so programmed that the help doesn’t leave him feeling good about the company.

3. Why – Cost Centers. I never understood why multi-billion dollar companies would see frontline team members as a necessary evil. These people interact with customers. Customer service call centers are still notoriously bad after all these years. They must be given tools, autonomy and directional freedom.

4. Why – Financial impact. As noted above, improving and focusing on joint employee and customer engagement is positively correlated with bottom line impact. Increase engagement and organizations will grow faster and be more profitable.

Let’s take a look at four things you can do right now.

1. How – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Customers and employees have the same hierarchy of needs. Companies that take advantage of this can transform engagement. The human being has a need for self-realization. Achieving this from a business perspective is doable once the front line has the freedoms and training to do so.

2. How – Do to others. Treat customers and employees the way you want to be treated. Here is a simple test that you can use to magnify the problems. It’s called the granny test. Compare these two statements: “Sorry, but that’s our policy, no refunds after 10 days” with “Sorry, but this is our policy, no refunds after 10 days, Grandma.” Using Grandma at the end of your company policies shines a light on how stupid they really are.

3. How – Customers want relationships. Customer satisfaction is not enough. To generate real engagement you need customer loyalty and for that you need to build relationships. People don’t want to engage with actively disengaged employees, so you need to empower your people to be engaged.

4. How – Hire well. This is really the basic move for any organization. If you’re hiring for customer-oriented people, then you need to find bubbly, friendly, personable, and intelligent people. If you take the time to hire at that point, the how becomes more of an organization change rather than trying to change people.

Human Sigma is a great book that really sheds light on the customer-employee engagement model. This should be a must read for organizations that want to scale and grow.

I hope you found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is that performance is tied to engagement. Focus on employee and customer engagement and make it your mission to improve it. If you do this, the money, growth, and success of the business will follow. You’ll see results like more customer advocates, less employee turnover, and more referral businesses.