Jenny
Schade's
Making It Count
Seven
Steps to Ignite
Employee Engagement
How to overcome data doom
and gloom.
It was
a dark and stormy day at the retail giant's corporate headquarters.
I walked into my client's office and sensed despair. Her desk
was piled high with reams of survey data, benchmark comparisons,
and ominous-looking charts.
"The
employee survey results are in," she said glumly. "Engagement
is really low – we're below the benchmark on almost every
key measure. Now what do we do? It's my job to fix this!"
Employee
engagement or commitment is obviously critical. I don't
need to cite the countless studies linking employee engagement with outcomes
such as productivity and retention. Common sense makes the case for desiring
strong engagement equally clear. Obviously, if employees are not finding
meaning in their work, do not understand how what they are doing contributes
to the organization's goals and are considering leaving the company,
something needs to change.
While
surveys are very effective at flagging low morale, they are notoriously
poor at identifying solutions for improvement. Having encountered
this situation with my retail giant clients as well as others feeling
overwhelmed
by poor survey findings with no clear ideas about how to make improvements,
I have developed the following Seven Steps to Ignite Employee Engagement:
Engagement
Step One:
Get input from your people.
They
know what's contributing to the low engagement and have good ideas
about how to fix
it. They just need to be asked – in the right way. I'm
not talking about having your communications or human resources professionals
run employee focus groups. For interviews with employees about a sensitive
subject such as engagement, you need an outside consultant that employees
feel they can trust to preserve their confidentiality. After all, how
honest would you be about your intent-to-stay at your organization
if
you knew the interviewer represented the company?
You need
a skilled interviewer who knows how to help employees speak openly
while obtaining the input you need to move the business forward.
In fact, our clients find that the benefits of the interviews begin
as soon as discussions are being scheduled. Again and again we hear, "I'm
impressed that they've hired you to talk with us. That tells me
they do care." Of course, the interviews alone won't suffice.
It's critical to acknowledge and follow up on identified issues.
Failure to do so could lower morale even further.
The interviews
are also an ideal opportunity to ask employees for their ideas about
making improvements. It is very important to ask for specifics.
For example, if employees feel bogged down by too many administrative
processes, ask what specific processes are most troublesome and how
they could be eliminated or improved. You will be amazed at the wealth
of
ideas generated across interviews.
Engagement
Step Two:
Address the cause – don't blame.
As
you seek to understand why employees are feeling so negative, you
may learn about people and actions that make you angry and upset.
Resist
the temptation to confront individuals about specific events. That
kind of confrontation will lead to a backlash of blame that will
only make
employees reticent about speaking up in the future. Instead, focus
on what about your culture or system is spawning negative behavior.
Address
the cause to enable improvement.
Engagement
Step Three:
Don't get hung up on survey benchmarks.
Your company
is unique – with its own culture, strategy and goals.
If your employee survey results indicate a pattern of low satisfaction
levels, you know there is a need for improvement. Being five percent
lower than the benchmark or seven percent higher doesn't change
that. If 60% of your employees indicate that they intend to stay with
your company and the benchmark is 52%, should you breath easily? If
you do, you may miss an opportunity to reach an even higher level of
engagement.
I can
say this as a consultant who seriously considered creating a database
about ten years ago so that I could compare client results
with a benchmark.
I realized, however, that this approach would eliminate my ability
to focus on the uniqueness of my clients and force us to ask a series
of
generic questions that could be compared to the benchmark. More important
than any benchmark comparisons are considerations of recent events
within your company and industry. Have you just laid off 10% of your
workforce?
Is your industry facing a tremendous increase in global competition?
If so, it would be unrealistic to expect employee attitudes to have
improved during the past year and it's not particularly helpful
to compare your company to other organizations and industries in vastly
different
situations.
Engagement
Step Four:
Be honest about the findings with employees.
One leader
of an organization struggling with low engagement announced
to
his employees after hearing about findings from our interviews,
"I'm ashamed. How did we get here?" When I heard him, I knew he was
going to triumph over the situation and get things back on track.
He
was willing to deal honestly with the issues and with his own employees
to make improvements.
When
communicating survey and interview findings, be straightforward.
Resist the urge to package employees' input under a catchy theme,
e.g. "The ABC's of Engagement." Every time I interview
employees on sensitive subjects such as engagement, I get feedback that
employees are talking to each other during the process and that they
want to hear what comes out of the interviews. One employee told me, "I'm
going to tell you what's really going on here because you've
spoken with several of my friends. They said you're all right."
Employees
know what they told the interviewer and if important issues are omitted
from what is shared with them or packaged in a cutesy way,
they will know it and distrust the organization. Obviously, this
will not help improve engagement. It's important to candidly report
the key issues that emerge in research and then announce an action
plan to make improvements.
Engagement
Step Five:
Implement interventions.
After
the survey findings are in, and employees are interviewed to identify
interventions, the
hard part really begins. It's critical to make some changes. Does
this sound obvious? Unfortunately, there are organizations that,
upon completion of the research and identification of interventions,
do not
proceed with the most difficult part – implementing change. Some
companies make plans to re-survey their employees one year after the
original survey to gauge improvement, even though they have done nothing
differently since the original survey. That is a recipe for disaster!
If a company has identified engagement issues after a baseline survey
and does nothing about them, I can guarantee conditions will be worse
one year later.
While
sharing the survey findings with employees is an important step in
the process, it is not enough on its own. It is absolutely critical
to commit to making changes and then to proceed with implementation
before
any follow-up research is conducted.
Engagement
Step Six:
Involve senior leadership in the research and intervention
process.
Engagement
is a serious business. This is one of those subjects that employees
need to hear about from leadership. Leaders need to
encourage employees to participate in the research. Leaders need
to communicate
research findings. And leaders need to wholeheartedly endorse and
participate in interventions.
In fact,
leadership is most likely going to need to make and model new behaviors
in order for change to cascade down through the organization.
For example, we worked with one organization whose goal was to significantly
increase innovation; however, employees felt their company's
culture inhibited sharing ideas. For this culture to change, it was
critical
to work individually with members of leadership to provide them with
input about behaving in ways that conveyed trust and openness to their
teams.
Engagement
Step Seven:
After interventions have been implemented, conduct follow-up
research to gauge progress.
Give yourself
a year to 18 months for change to be effective, and then re-survey
employees and conduct
interviews for further depth. Some clients are impatient with waiting
this long, but we encourage giving the organization time to really
make some improvements.
However,
this guideline doesn't mean that employee feedback comes
to a standstill until the next research phase. This is where conducting
your own internal conversations becomes extremely valuable. Encourage
leaders and managers to ask employees for input. Have leaders meet
with groups of 50-60 employees at a time for updates and frank discussions.
Ask managers to check in with their direct reports to learn how things
are going. Overall, set a tone of ongoing dialogue to get feedback
and
make adjustments to keep the engagement process on track.
The news
that employee engagement is low is always difficult to hear, but
it is most
definitely not a terminal diagnosis. Involving leadership and employees
at every level in improving the organization is a revitalizing
experience with a powerful return. 
Jenny
Schade is president of JRS Consulting, Inc., a firm that helps organizations
build leading brands and efficiently
attract and motivate employees and customers. Subscribe
to the free JRS
newsletter on www.jrsconsulting.net/newsletter.html
© JRS Consulting, Inc. 2007
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