Global Employee Engagement Research conducted by Hewitt Associates in 2008 found the following:
- About half of all organisations make "no significant" change (less than +/- three percent points) in employee engagement year on year
- About one in six organisations experience a decline in employee engagement
- The average increase is only five percentage points
Considering that, in Asia alone, almost 1,000 companies per year participate in the Hewitt Best Employers research, these are pretty somber facts.
So where does it all go wrong? How does so much good intent and desire to enhance employee engagement - both for the benefit of the employee and the profit of business - end up with such mediocre results?
The answer lies in the old adage - proper planning prevents poor performance.
The truth is that we all know people have the same Universal Drivers of Engagement (safety, personal growth, effective leaders - to name but a few). There may be small variances in the extent to which people want these things, and there is also a need to measure and manage each individual's unique Motivational Drivers; but, broadly speaking, measuring and managing employee engagement is no longer rocket science.
The really significant difference lies not in what is known, but in how well this information is acted upon.
Top performing organisations treat employee engagement as a constant and cyclical stream of work that is absolutely critical to achieving the objectives of the organisation.
They constantly seek to understand their results through questioning the meaning and relevance of the information. Employee engagement data is treated as valuable business intelligence that can be leveraged to deliver immediate uplifts in business performance.
They act quickly when they identify opportunities - remembering that data rapidly looses currency over time. In order to achieve this, people know who is accountable and who will be held responsible long before the results of any measurement are available. No time is lost wondering what to do about the facts that emerge from the survey. Everything is well planned in advance.
The success in this approach lies in the mindset of the leaders of the organisation. In top performing organisations control and ownership of employee engagement rests at the very top. If the leaders aren't going to hold themselves accountable they understand that it is unreasonable to expect anything better from anyone else. Because they own and control the process they can be more responsive and agile to the business intelligence emerging from the survey - this agility means they can seize opportunities without waiting for decisions from others.
When the different approaches of these top performing organisations are analyzed in detail, seven common practices emerge. Although varying slightly from business to business in their application, as a template for successfully and effectively planning for and measuring employee engagement, they are invaluable to most organisations.
The seven practices are:
1. Hold your leaders accountable and responsible for both the results of the survey and the action planning and implementation process.
2. Align actions emerging from the employee engagement survey with the current activity of the business and existing strategies as much as possible. Success comes from playing to and accentuating your strengths - not from reinventing the wheel after every survey.
3. Focus on what matters. Analyse the information and prioritise so that you only tackle a few things at once. Remember, success breeds success - the more you put 'runs on the board' the more momentum you'll gather and the more employees will engage actively with improving their own engagement. The opposite of this is biting off more than you can chew and paralysis by analysis. Neither looks good or adds any value to the business.
4. Design a comprehensive and disciplined 'Engagement Improvement Process' (EIP) well BEFORE you conduct any sort of survey - and certainly well before getting any results or information to act on. Such a process needn't be complicated. Simply understand who is accountable and responsible for what, have a plan in place to act on the information as it emerges (including booking times in people's diaries well in advance), and ensure the relevant people have all the skills they need to carry out their duties before they're called upon. It's incredible to think that anyone would run their business any other way - but many still behave reactively during employee engagement surveying.
5. Measure frequently, in line with existing business performance measurement cycles, and act promptly. Most companies spend a lot of money on employee engagement surveys and then let the value diminish slowly over time. Remember, engagement data is built on employee perceptions, which change rapidly over time. Acting on data that is more than three months old is dubious practice. Acting on data that is six months old could arguably be described as pointless.
6. Communicate, communicate and communicate. Employee engagement data is built on perceptions. These perceptions can be managed by clear, open, honest and two way communication. Failure to communicate leaves 'space' for employees to fill with their own communication. Manage the messages flowing around your business, or the messages flowing around your business will manage you.
The most critical message that must emerge from your engagement survey is the connection of your post measurement action to the information provided by employees in the survey. This is a matter of courtesy to thank employees for their time and helps them to connect their contribution to the ongoing improvement of the business. Once again, it is incredible to think that any business wouldn't do this most simple of things, but many businesses fail completely in this task.
7. Involve as many employees as possible in the action planning and the implementation of these plans. When things happen 'around' people they usually struggle to connect with them. In contrast, involving your employees in the process will emotionally invest them in the required success, a practice that will almost certainly guarantee better outcomes for all involved.
Experience shows that proper planning usually prevents poor performance. Equally, failing to plan is almost always the equivalent of planning to fail. Despite this, organisations all over the world continue to 'stumble through' their employee engagement surveys oblivious to the opportunity cost such an approach has on their business.
Whether it is overconfidence or just a lack of forethought is not clear. What is clear is that there's a better way to measure and manage employee engagement. By thinking through why they're undertaking the measurement in the first place, and then planning what to do with the information well in advance, the true potential of employee engagement can be realised for many more businesses... and if these businesses took up this challenge the world would be a better place to work for each and every one of us.
David E Clarke is the former Head of Employee Engagement and Organisational Culture at Hewitt Associates in Australia. He worked as part of the global panel of experts conducting employee research, including the Hewitt Best Employers Research and an in-depth study of the global leading culture measurement and management tools.
He has deep subject matter expertise in employee engagement, organisational culture measurement and transformation, as well as communications effectiveness to stakeholder groups internal to an organisation.
David is now based in the UK and can be reached on +44 7745 682 808 or via email at:
If you'd like to discuss the content of this article please feel free to contact David at any time.
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