Accenture study found that less than half (40 percent) of consumers who had received a promise from a business in a given year felt it was not delivered, while about 62 percent of respondents experienced multiple broken promises from the same business. This might not be new that companies are struggling to keep their commitments due to various challenges. Trust in business is low and broken commitments appear to be a significant cause. No wonder, companies keep losing customers and employees start seeking new opportunity elsewhere.
See also: Balancing the Promise and Pitfalls of Human Capital Analytics
Is your business doing well at keeping promises? If no, it is time to change your strategy. Elizabeth Doty in her book showed some evidence that many business professionals place a high value on keeping their words. The trust gained from promises kept also lasts longer and can drive more profits. If you need some insights to do better in staying and acting true to commitment, here are three tips for you to practice.
Oftentimes, an organisation is committed to bringing peace, creating more jobs, as well as supporting communities that align with your company’s goals. But these promises are often left behind because the cost is far greater than the promise. A survey published in City Lab found that in 2015, $45 billion relocation expenses paid by state and local governments are a deadweight loss. In other words, states give away more money to business due to promises for no obvious economic reasons.
To avoid losing trust from the community and society, you can take tangible steps to become more rooted in communities by showing how you will tackle their problem and provide a real plan. For example, do research about the community first before delivering a commitment to helping them. Once you discover their problem that is aligned with your business, you can start building a plan and publish it to them. By doing so, the community can put more trust in you as you have ripe plan to execute.
Customers are now expecting companies to do business that mirrors their values – and business does commit to this as well. The problem is, customers keep asking more which could be hard for businesses to stay within their expectation, which then results is disloyalty, avoidance, even boycott.
However, if you want to take your commitment seriously, you can begin by stepping deeper even if you need to deal with the mud as long as it is still within your business goals. This means that a corporate should take public stands in alignment with their corporate values on issues that matter to their customers. CEOs should be ready to involve in every debate or political issues by taking sides in some conversations that mirror customer’s values.
Internally, firms promise to provide satisfying and fulfilling culture to employees. Some firms also commit to develop their employee’s professional career by providing upskilling or reskilling program but researches and reports found the other way around. To showcase, burnout rates have escalated in recent years with nearly a third of corporate staff admitted that their stress level is high to unsustainably high at work. There is also employee disengagement rate that showed no progression to slow down.
To tackle this problem and keep the commitment, companies must start resetting norms around what’s availability to respond to any form of communications outside work hours. Executives must first give an example of this model and continue the practice.
Read also: More than Just a Feedback: Better Employee Engagement Strategy
