HR In Action: Higher Employee Engagement Equals Higher Unit Sales

A few years ago, Fiat Chrylser’s global chiefs made the decision to restructure and change how the business was run in a bid to boost sales internationally. As well as repositioning the brand identities and aggressively marketing their products, part of the new approach included a strategy to actively improve employee engagement among all levels of its workforce.

This plan was wholeheartedly embraced by Fiat Chrysler Australia CEO Veronica Johns with excellent results. As a developed market with only 2.2 per cent annual growth, Australia was a particularly challenging sales environment for the company’s five brands – Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Fiat and Alfa Romeo – but sales results have steadily grown over the past three years.

The improved results are largely due to the focus on improving employee engagement, according to Mietta Gibson, head of HR at Fiat Chrysler Australia.

“There is definitely a strong link between employee engagement and the business and sales growth we’ve experienced,” she said.

Gibson is in a position to see the link first-hand – as part of the management team, she works closely with the business’ directors in attracting, developing and retaining talent and drives discussions around team structures, resourcing, capability gaps and workforce planning.

“HR doesn’t have capacity to hand-hold and to manage every single person in the business, so we need to focus on the people managers and to ensure they are equipped to keep their staff at the top of their game. That’s very much the direction we’ve taken,” Gibson told InsideHR.

“We used to sell 10,000 cars per year; that’s the Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge brands for a decade. That was in 2010, when our employee engagement score was 43 per cent. In 2012 we sold almost 23,000 cars with a score of 81 per cent. We get them involved in the business with really engaging work, and combined with the staff updates, they see that they’re part of a dynamic fast-paced workforce. That’s been a big key to the employee engagement success.”

“Last year we sold 34,000 with a score of 86 per cent, so we’ve got strong growth plans to keep going on that track with our best result in the Aon Hewitt Best Employers study [steady at 86 per cent].”

The company also managed to get great results from the notoriously difficult to motivate Generation Y.

“Gen Y is often seen as the most challenging group to engage and motivate. First thing is, we certainly keep them very busy – not too busy in terms of repetitive tasks, but we challenge them and we give them challenging work from day one. We actually scored 100 per cent engagement for the 25- to 34-year-old group in our most recent employee engagement survey.”

This great result for Fiat Chrysler just goes to show that employee engagement is a strategy well worth investing in.

Sourced via InsideHR. For the full interview with Gibson see the next issue of Inside HR magazine.