Developing a strong corporate culture and empowering employees to do their job well are two key ingredients to inspiring “enthusiastic employees,” according to Douglas A. Klein, president of Sirota Survey Intelligence LLC.

A recent survey by Sirota found that 14% of varied organizations boast “enthusiastic employees,” while 56% of companies admit that workers are merely satisfied with their employment, Klein said. When enthusiastic employees become “merely satisfied,” he added, institutions have a harder time recruiting and retaining people and their efforts will lead to “merely satisfied customers,” he said.

Klein spoke Wednesday at BAI’s Retail Delivery Conference & Expo in a presentation entitled “Creating the Enthusiastic Employee.” He was joined onstage by Paul Holden, senior vice president for human resources at Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. and Thomas (Tripp) Welch, III, section head for information management and process support at the Mayo Clinic, headquartered in Rochester, Minn.

Klein, whose Purchase, N.Y.-based consultancy is focused on human capital and leadership issues, said common “myths” prevail about employment. One is that people on the frontline don’t much like their jobs.

Most of the time, Klein said, this is not the case. But such misperceptions often guide managers in their behavior toward employees, wearing down the workers’ enthusiasm, he said.

Rather than trying to motivate employees to do their jobs—they’re already willing and eager to do that—companies should create a corporate culture that lets employees “know what they stand for,” Klein said. He cited both Bank of America and the Mayo Clinic as companies where “the culture is extremely strong and extremely employee-focused,” which has a positive effect on retention and recruitment.

The Mayo Clinic, for example, has employee turnover of less than 10% a year, Klein said. As a result, it is able to fill open positions by word of mouth rather than advertising, he said.

Klein said it’s also essential for companies to create an environment where employees can be expected to solve problems without direction from higher up. “One mythology is that you only treat people with the level of discretion or decision-making commensurate with the job,” Klein said. “Instead, we should give them the autonomy and discretion to do their job well.”

He cited the example of auto plants where assembly line workers have the ability to halt production if they notice something amiss. The need for such frontline autonomy is particularly relevant to banking, where customer service has become a key point of differentiation for institutions, Klein said.

Ultimately, companies need to keep in mind that “employees join companies enthusiastically” and the culture they experience will either bolster that initial enthusiasm or cause it to wane, he said.

For more about the need to empower employees on the frontlines, see the comments of business strategist Gary Hamel in “Reinventing Management by Empowering Employees” in the November/December 2006 issue of BAI’s Banking Strategies.

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