Why Hiring an Inspiration Manager Can Boost Your People Profit Chain

Businesses are a gathering of people. It’s those people who create value. And it’s by doing so that they consequently make money as a company. An inspiration manager takes care and improves this people-profit chain.

People profit chain: from people to profits.

The idea behind the people-profit chain is simple and demonstrated in several research projects (Heskett, Kiger):

“A company’s employees can drive higher customer satisfaction which in turn leads to profitability. Companies who can make the employee customer connection create a competitive advantage.”

As the above quote demonstrates, the people profit chain is all about the relationship between employee satisfaction, customer loyalty and profits.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that this process is by far practised at work within companies with a strong customer focus. Not rarely these organizations ingrain customer service in basically everything: processes, IT, leadership and people management.

Putting people first (both customers and employees) is part of their “organizational DNA”.

Of course, everything starts with hiring the right people. But once you have hired those you need to work on employee engagement. An inspiration manager helps to build engaged employees. But what exactly is an inspiration manager? And what does he do?

Inspiration Manager: a visionary leader to boost people-profit chain.

First of all, an inspiration manager understands the links in the people-profit chain. The inspiration manager realizes that employees and customers are not just assets with targets.

He looks at revenue as a by-product of great customer service which can only be achieved by motivated employees. He measures and manages the relationships between the links in a company’s people-profit chain.

Consequently he designs strategies and tactics in order to strengthen these links.

This way of thinking asks for a special kind of leadership, one that stresses the importance of each customer and employee. But the leader needs to act upon this focus.

The inspiration manager’s job involves active participation at every stage in every business process, so to fully understand the people-profit chain and to envision actions that improve employee happiness.

Because in the end, the inspiration manager is there to make the employees happy and engaged so that they can ensure a better customer experience. But the reverse also holds true: happy customers create a more favourable working environment – which in turn again leads to more engaged employees.

Inspiration manager and leadership behaviour

The inspiration manager:

• has an overall vision of the organization and is able to communicate it clearly; he/she is a story teller,
• coordinates the employees in order to realize the vision,
• identifies the employee needs and strives to meet them,
• treats employees as customers,
• defines HR as Human Relations, not Human Resources,
• bridges the gap between HR, marketing and the board.

Drive your business with people

We at 4P square drive our own business with people. We do rely on the people-profit chain. And that’s exactly why we believe this “business model” works.

We strive to attract top talent in marketing and sales and drive their engagement through brilliant projects, good incentives, career and educational plans, training sessions, etc.

But next to the HR-part, we inspire our team members so that they gladly capitalize on customer satisfaction. The inspirational part is a great collaboration between our marketing, communication and HR people.