Employee engagement is a topic that floods LinkedIn discussions. There are, it seems, hundreds of blogs written about it every week, yet there’s still a gap between the theoretical and practical benefit of engagement. What gives?
MAYBE THE WHOLE CURRENT PRACTICE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IS WRONG.
THE CURRENT EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT PROCESS LOOKS SOMETHING LIKE THIS:
- Buy/build survey
- Communicate and extol the virtues of survey and engagement
- Launch survey
- Harangue people to take survey
- Wait 3 to 6 months (sometime much longer) to get results
- Massage data to present to senior leaders
- Get tacit commitment from said senior leaders to follow through
- Roll out results to organization
- Ask managers or department heads to review scores with teams
- Harangue teams for action plans
- Send out bi-annual engagement reminders
- Start process over the following year
There is a great deal of effort put in by a small group of managers regarding engagement, but those are the ones doing well anyway. For the most part, engagement is seen as another HR Program – and is met with immediate malaise.
What if we are starting employee engagement at the wrong point? What if the whole practice is wrong?
WHAT IF THE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT PROCESS LOOKED MORE LIKE THIS:
During senior leadership planning for the upcoming fiscal year, identify a key business goal that is achieved only through people (or at least primarily), such as:
- Increasing current customer sales
- Reducing in customer attrition
- Decreasing production errors
Link engagement to reaching key business goals. This may take some research and discussion with thought leaders in the field, but the causal data is out there. After determining goals, try the following to make engagement really work for your organization:
- Make sure the business goal is one that impacts many leaders
- Create an annual engagement plan that outlines actions and tools to be developed to support leaders
- Create communication, tools, etc. prior to the survey roll out – or even before selection
- Select engagement champions in each business unit to drive engagement at the local level
- Select or build survey
- Launch survey
- Get results within one month – any vendor worth their salt can do this
- Present findings and recommendations to senior leaders and roll out specific results to each manager the same day
- Discuss, work on, communicate, and integrate engagement throughout the year – remember that it’s linked to a key business goal
- Put the emphasis on what happens after the survey, not in the survey
- Link engagement to business results
- Make engagement a daily conversation
Doing this shifts engagement from an impersonal program to a discussion of “how we do business.” It’s not another thing to do, but an integral part of how a manager is successful.
What do you think? How have you seen engagement make an organization more profitable or productive?
Picture thanks to http://www.epicparent.tv/top-5-parenting-mistakes/
