Category Archives: Engagement

Engagement

Engaging Today’s Workforce

engagement

Given the widespread challenges of hiring and retaining talent, it’s no surprise that leaders are taking a harder look at how to engage their people.

It’s likely we have all seen the data indicating that increasing employee engagement is a good thing:

  • Gallup: Only 33% of American employees are engaged at work (as of this post), and the 67% not engaged costs the nation over $500 billion per year in lost productivity
  • Towers Perrin: Companies with engaged employees have higher net profit margins
  • Kenexa Research: Engaged companies have 5 times higher shareholder returns over 5 years

Possibly of greater importance are some of the additional documented positive benefits of engaged workers, which include lower turnover, better safety, fewer product defects and shrinkage, reduced absenteeism, higher productivity, and better customer satisfaction metrics.

The key question, of course, is how to best go about it!

Gallup offers a wide range of research on the subject, and The Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides many free resources, tools, and advice that could be of use.

In addition, our white paper “Engagement Around the Work” might also provide some good insights into going beyond “engagement for engagement’s sake” and give you a straightforward process, guidelines, and clear targets for leveraging the relationship between engagement and productivity.

Developing People, Employee Development, Engagement

The “R” Factor

In a past newsletter, Senior Associate Ellen Kendall shared some thought-provoking perspective on the importance of relationships in the workplace – a perspective that has proven to be very accurate over the past two-or-so years.

Somehow along the evolutionary path of business and commerce, it appears some of us became increasingly enamored with the efficiency that a mechanistic and impersonal focus could bring us, and concentrated on using the “hands” of employees at the neglect of
employing their hearts and minds.

We created command and control hierarchical organizations and an emphasis on functional competency and silos. In the process, we lost sight of the human need for connection and interaction and minimized the importance of productive and meaningful relationships.

Or, said another way, in the words of Don Corleone in the movie, The Godfather, “It’s not personal, it’s business.”

But for many the pendulum is swinging back, as more of us are finding that the old attitude about separating business from personal issues no longer serves us well.

In fact, there is increasing belief that becoming more personal in the workplace might actually work to the advantage of organizations; and topics such as trust, interpersonal relationships, engagement, coaching, mentoring, and values-based leadership are now critical in an increasing number of organizations.

Similarly, it is becoming more evident that relationships, and the quality of relationships in the workplace, do matter. For example, Mike Morrison, VP and Dean of Toyota University in an interview went so far as to boldly say, “My message to leaders is actually quite simple: It’s the relationship… stupid!”

He went on to suggest that human capital is useless without relationships — particularly in our fast-paced, global economy — and that leaders can be best measured by their ability to create social capital or the sum total of all their relationships.

“It is through this network of relationships that their work is conducted,” Morrison stated. “As leaders, we need to be relentless relationship-builders and be 100 times more deliberate about relating to people.

“Work is much more relational than it was twenty years ago, when you could have narrow, clearly defined jobs. Those jobs don’t exist anymore… today we get work done through others… in today’s world we achieve results primarily through relationships.”

Morrison concluded that relationships are truly the most effective pathway to the highest levels of commitment, creativity, and performance within organizations. The reason is that positive
relationships have a transformational impact on the individual. They draw out the best in each of us.

Management guru Peter F. Drucker also commented on the need to focus on workplace relationships.

“Increasingly, command and control is being replaced by or intermixed with all kinds of relationships,” he said.

“Alliances, joint ventures, minority participations, partnerships, know-how, and marketing agreements… these are all relationships in which no one controls and no one commands. These relationships have to be based on a common understanding of objectives, policies, and strategies; on teamwork; and on persuasion — or they don’t work at all”.

Spring boarding off of these respected viewpoints, we’ll take a deeper dive into the value of the “R” factor in our next post.

Engagement, Leadership

Leadership Best Practices Too: A Simple Solution?

Continuing our previous post’s theme of leadership, a recent Gallup article cited the fact that approximately 70% of the US workforce is either detached from their work or “miserable” during their workday!

The solution is, as the saying goes, simple but not necessarily easy: managers need to be better listeners, coaches, and collaborators.

“Great managers help colleagues learn and grow, recognize their colleagues for doing great work, and make them truly feel cared about. In environments like this, workers thrive.”

The question then posed refers to shareholder capitalists, and asks if they would embrace this perspective?

“How does this impact the bottom line?” they’d ask.

Well, as it turns out, “it pays to have thriving workers!

Based on Gallup research and several of our posts on the topic of workforce or employee engagement, business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with
miserable workers.

Additionally, teams with thriving workers see significantly lower absenteeism, turnover and accidents; they also see higher customer loyalty.

As the article points out, “Wellbeing at work isn’t at odds with anyone’s agenda. Executives everywhere should want the world’s workers to thrive. And helping the world’s workers thrive starts with listening to them.”

Continuous Improvement, Engagement, Talent retention

Retaining Talent Through Engagement

Continuing the theme of “retaining talent” from our previous post, we have found the combination of productivity and engagement drives many things, including employee retention.

In reality, and like most things in business or in life, it’s the ongoing execution, work, measurement, and improvement projects (which sounds remarkably similar to Deming’s Plan—Do—Study—Act cycle) that will yield better performance results as well as higher levels of employee engagement.

In fact, we have found engagement can be a bi-product of productivity, as opposed to the other-way-around, which is the more accepted ‘conventional wisdom’ opinion.

Thus, it is by taking a formalized approach to creating a workplace culture that is linked with team productivity, performance, and job satisfaction that an organization will achieve the fore-mentioned levels of performance gains, engagement, and talent retention.

In a white paper shared in the past, we described an approach that aligns nicely with the ISO 10018 People Involvement and Competence guidelines. It incorporates Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) as well as Continuous People Involvement (CPI), so we call it CPI².

ISO 10018 and the concept of CPI² will require a formalized plan for improving the work and the workplace… a formalized plan for helping people to achieve higher-levels of productivity and job satisfaction, which will yield better business performance as well as the “skyrocketing” levels of engagement we all strive to attain.

To achieve optimum results, a system for gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing data must be developed, followed by a rigorous method of priority-setting to decide what to work on.

People at all levels must be involved; they must be educated, empowered, and engaged so that the concept of improving both their work and their workplace becomes cultural, and so they become emotionally-invested in their work and workplace.

Supporting this perspective is research conducted this past year by Dale Carnegie and MSW Research, which revealed that although there are many factors that impact employee engagement, there are three key drivers:

  1. Relationship with immediate supervisor
  2. Belief in senior leadership
  3. Pride in working for the company

Recognizing these drivers as “targeted outcomes” is a good first step for business leaders who would like to initiate and document (a-la ISO 10018) a formalized approach to engaging people into their organization’s quality and improvement system.

Developing People, Engagement

A Good Question About Retaining Talent

retain

We all know that unwanted workforce turnover is disruptive and costly*. In a recent article, fuse, a workforce management firm, shares four of the most common reasons employees opt to leave a job. It’s likely we know these reasons as well…

But the good question posed in the article is whether or not we are taking proactive steps to avoid unwanted turnover!

In case you’d like a quick refresher, the article identified the following as the most common reasons employees leave:

  • Poor relationship with their manager
  • No clear path forward
  • Good work isn’t valued
  • The job doesn’t promote work-life balance

With a little forethought and planning, it shouldn’t be difficult to avoid these pitfalls; and, as the article states, “With the market for skilled talent becoming more and more competitive, smart employers will take stock and do whatever it takes to keep their best and brightest satisfied.”

To add additional perspective, when Gallup announced that the percentage of engaged workers had, for the first time in a very long time, increased just before the pandemic, their research showed that the primary reason for the increase (from 30% to 36%) was that organizations had made improvements in their approach to developing people.

  • the cost of replacing employees is somewhere between 90-200% of their annual salary based on a recent SHRM study!
Engagement

Guess Who’s Trying to Sink Your Boat!

crew team

At a Gallup presentation the audience was asked to imagine their business was a ten-person crew boat.

The speaker then went on to share data (at the time) indicating approximately 30% of the US workforce fell into the “engaged” category, which meant that they were invested in their work and workplace, that they made a strong discretionary effort, and worked at a very productive level.

If these people were on your crew boat, they would be diligently ‘manning their oars.’

We were then informed that just over half of the US workforce fell into the disengaged category. These people were not highly-motivated and, though they made a fair effort each day, they were more likely to do only what had to be done – and sometimes less!

If these people were on your crew boat, they would occasionally dip their oars in the water but mostly sit idle looking at the scenery.

The remainder of the nation’s workforce, we were told, fell into the actively disengaged category. These people tend to undermine the work, spread rumors, call out sick at higher rates and do only the bare minimum.

If they were on your crew boat, they would most likely be trying to sink it!

Makes a strong case for implementing a formalized engagement plan, wouldn’t you say?

Engagement, Onboarding, Process Improvement

Developing Teams – Start the Engagement Process Early

Onboarding

When engaged in continuous improvement (CI) it’s important to frequently assess our approach, starting with the foundation.

When it comes to engaging employees, the process begins with onboarding, which is the process for welcoming new employees. Among other things, onboarding is an opportunity to make new hires feel confident in their decision to accept the position as well as in their new role and team.

Despite the fact that onboarding sets the tone for the rest of your new employee’s experience at your company, and despite the fact that effective onboarding has a strong impact on retention and productivity levels, data shared by SHRM, Indeed, and others indicates that over 80% of businesses don’t have a very good onboarding plan.

If you’d like to improve your employee onboarding process you might start by considering the following best practices:

  • Start communicating before your new hire’s first day
  • Prepare well in advance
  • Set up the employee’s workspace before they arrive
  • Send out a new employee announcement including name, role, etc. If done by email, cc them
  • Pair new employees with a peer mentor / “buddy”
  • Ask new employees for their feedback early-on in the process and several months into the process
Engagement, Rewards and Recognition

Rewards & Recognition Fundamentals

rewards and recognition

Rewarding or recognizing members of the workforce is a standard component of most employee engagement efforts, but the way in which organizations approach the practice can vary.

In fact, during a discussion with our Partners in Improvement, we uncovered a variety of approaches to rewards and recognition programs. Some, like a service award, are very predictable; if you reach an anniversary, you are likely to receive one. Many other recognition programs include an element of surprise when exceptional service is spotted. Some rewards cost the organization little or nothing — such as a thank you note or a special parking place. Others are quite costly, such as a one year lease on a car or a $20,000 ‘President’s Award.’

Similarly, some programs are for teams, and others are for individuals.

Many of the rewards and recognition are after the fact, while some are announced and hyped in advance in order to encourage people to try for them.

But despite the variety of implementations, the objectives were really quite simple. An organization implements a reward and recognition program for one of these three reasons:

  • To increase the recipient’s satisfaction and happiness (and hopefully engagement) with the organization and his or her role within it
  • To motivate continuation of certain types of behaviors and accomplishments
  • To motivate people to work to achieve certain measurable results.

However, regardless of purpose, the amazing variety of program types allowed us to explore the benefits and unexpected drawbacks of each, which will be the subject of our next post.

Continuous Improvement, Engagement

A ‘must have’ for today’s successful business

must_have

There was a time when engaged employees were a ‘nice to have’ asset, but there were no formal processes for achieving engagement and the prevailing approaches yielded few, if any, measurable results.

Fortunately, as summarized in an article by Engagement Strategies Media, things have changed and engagement is now recognized as a competitive edge.

“With sales growth slowing and competition continuing to grow in many industries, market share goes to those organizations that “wow” not only their customers but all of the people involved with their businesses,” the article said.

“Research consistently confirms that talented “wowed” employees help create “wow” experiences for customers.”

Another fact that has changed the playing field for achieving higher levels of employee engagement is that there are formalized, proven methods for doing so.

One such approach is Engagement Around the Work, which is based on engagement with a purpose. With a clear objective of building and sustaining a high-performing culture in a measurable way, Engagement Around the Work involves specific steps for achieving a culture of engagement that is inextricably linked with team productivity, performance and job satisfaction. It incorporates a clear objective of engaging people around the one thing they all have in common—and the one thing that can bring about increased profitability and a sustainable competitive edge—the work.

You can read our free white paper about this approach here.

Employee Development, Engagement

managers’ critical impact on productivity, engagement, and retention

managers drive engagement

In a recent presentation, Gallup shared some powerful data on why an organization’s managers are so important.

“Managers are the heart of your organization,” they said. “Managers communicate and uphold the standards of your culture and your brand. They can make or break any change initiative. Nearly every problem and achievement in your organization can be tied back to the quality of your managers.”

During the presentation, Workplace Expert Patrick Mieritz referenced Gallup survey results indicating managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement!

If you’re wondering why this statistic is so significant, consider their findings on how highly engaged business units and teams impact typical “negative” outcomes:

  • 81% decrease in absenteeism
  • 43% decrease in turnover within low turnover organizations
  • 18% decrease in turnover within high turnover organizations
  • 28% decrease in shrinkage (theft)
  • 64% decrease in safety incidents (accidents)
  • 41% decrease in quality defects

Their research also shows that highly engaged teams have a significant impact on “positive” outcomes as well:

  • 10% increase in customer loyalty
  • 18% increase in sales productivity
  • 14% increase in overall productivity
  • 23% increase in profitability
  • 66% increase in well-being (thriving)
  • 13% increase in organizational citizenship (participation)

Managerial Best Practices
If you’d like to increase the effectiveness of your organization’s managers or your personal managerial effort, a good first step is to identify or confirm the things that are important to your workforce; and beware, employee expectations have shifted since the onset of the pandemic.

As motivation expert Daniel Pink explained, “People really want three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”

Or as famed statistician W. Edwards Deming often said, and a fact that still rings true today, “People are entitled to joy in work.”

So, what’s to be done?

We all know that, at the organizational or senior management level, offering more flexible work arrangements (when possible), reviewing pay scales, and improving on-boarding/team development programs are steps in the right direction.

But, if you’re wondering about actionable ways in which mid- or front-line managers can increase engagement, productivity, and retention levels, you might also consider the following best practices:

  • Set clear expectations. Approximately half of all US employees say they know what is expected from them at work. To improve on this, SHRM suggests managers should emphasize objectives, set expectations early, make goals measurable, and give meaningful feedback (only 26% of US workers say the feedback they receive is helpful). Gallup adds a note to this by suggesting managers give meaningful and frequent feedback, indicating that workers who receive weekly meaningful feedback from their managers are 2.7 times more likely to be engaged in their work.
  • Create a culture of clear accountability. This does not mean taking a “do it or else” stance, but rather a motivational approach that includes open communication, recognition, and awareness.
  • Motivate each employee individually. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that works.
  • Coach and develop people based on their strengths. Gallup says that 66% of employees who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their strengths or positive characteristics are engaged. Focusing on strengths has also proved an effective way to ensure people are placed in the right roles; and providing ongoing development to team members has proved to have a significant impact on increasing engagement levels while reducing turnover.
  • Overcommunicate! Leaders who maintain open and frequent communication, who show an interest in their teams, who share stories of success and vision, and who remind people of the mission tend to foster higher levels of engagement.