Looking to deliver better customer service this year? Investing in your employees can help improve customer satisfaction and result in higher profits for your company. Small business owners need to consider taking a people-centric approach in their business.

It’s time to implement employee engagement, satisfaction, and recognition strategies that involve employees in ways that translate into value for the organization. Experts offer three employee engagement trends for 2017 workplaces to help you attract, connect, and hold onto the best workers.

Customer Engagement

Make hearing and understanding the voice of the customer a focus throughout your organization.  The initial step to accomplish this will come from first building and nurturing employee satisfaction. To truly meet the needs of your customers, you must first meet the needs of your employees.

Consider executing a short workplace survey to determine the wants of your employees. Use this as an annual benchmarking tool to measure the success of implemented tactics and engagement levels.

Trust in the Workplace

A key to increasing satisfaction requires creating a culture of trustworthiness. A recent survey by Harvey Nash/ KPMG CIOs found that 93 percent of employees believe trust in their direct manager/supervisor is imperative to remaining satisfied at work.

Additionally, employees rate achieving that all-important work-life balance as essential to their retention. Small business owners need to foster inclusiveness by making accommodations for flexible schedules or work from home opportunities.

Personal Skills Development

Consider offering in addition to job skills development, a mentoring program. More and more employees are looking for help with their personal skills through personal leadership. They want effectiveness development from someone that is relevant and relatable to their lives. Plus, mentorship benefits the mentee and the mentor, as found in a Sun Microsystems survey both partners reported greater work satisfaction.

In the simplest terms — satisfied employees leads to satisfied customers.