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After the Survey: Five Steps to Greater Engagement
After the Survey: Five Steps to Greater Engagement
Sara Zeff-Geber Senior Partner, Ph.D
“Companies with the highest levels of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees than companies with lower levels of engagement.” - From the Towers Perrin 2007-2008 Global Workforce Study
As businesses begin to emerge from a recessionary cocoon, the spotlight is on engagement and increased retention. It’s hard to argue with the concepts…they’ve been around a long time. Frederick Herzberg alluded to them in the 60s, in his seminal work on motivation theory. In the 70s Peter Drucker introduced the idea of encouraging employees toward having “managerial vision,” Tom Peters peppered his 1984 chronicles of company success with stories of “rabid employee engagement,” and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner encouraged leaders in the 90s to “enable others” and “lead with heart.” Yes, we have known for decades that to have an engaged workforce the values, policies and practices of the organization need to support an engagement culture.
However, while it’s noble to extol the virtues of leaders who actively seek to engage their workforce and companies who reward those leaders for their efforts, mere acknowledgement of what’s right won’t change your policies or practices. It’s not obvious where to begin in 2010 if, following a round of layoffs and cutbacks, you have a workforce that is currently leaning toward apathy and discontent. Whether you have recently done a company-wide survey and unearthed some disturbing trends or you simply suspect that employees are not feeling a sense of commitment and connection to the organization and their work, the following five steps should provide a lens and a process for tackling the situation.
Assess the damage. If you regularly conduct an employee climate survey, what are the results telling you? Where are the problem spots? The survey, if it is constructed properly, should shine a light on areas that need addressing. If you have not been doing a yearly survey, now might be a great year to give it a try. It’s the best way to take the pulse of the organization on a regular basis.
Review your communication systems. Do people feel like they know what’s happening? Analyze your information management and communication systems. Are you providing people with the information they need to do their jobs and contribute to the organization’s success in a meaningful way? Your survey should tell you what areas of communication have broken down and give you some good hints about where to intervene.
Take a hard look at how you are developing your leaders. Were those activities a casualty of the budget cutbacks of the past few years? How long has it been since you offered your leaders an opportunity to add to their skill set? Or to get re-motivated about their jobs? Without outside development opportunities, your leadership team will become like a dynasty that condones marriage only within the family: the weaknesses will be perpetuated; the strengths will die out, breeding dysfunction within the ranks and on the bench.
Reconsider how you are managing the performance of your team. How are your leaders managing the performance of their team? Is there a strong system for tying team and individual objectives to the organization’s goals and strategic plan? Are your employees getting the feedback they need to continuously grow and improve their value to the company? Are leaders being offered a 360-degree perspective on their performance? Strong performance feedback and management systems are integral to a high-performing workforce. No matter the size of your company, these systems are critical.
Reward, recognize and advance. Yes, money is important to all of us, but once an individual believes s/he is trading a day’s work for a fair wage, the focus shifts. Human beings need to be excited about their contributions. Every job, no matter what it entails, needs to have elements of challenge and fascination. And every task can be improved upon. Given the opportunity, most employees will happily provide input into how their work could be done faster, better, and/or cheaper. But if no one is actively soliciting that information, the silence can be deafening. Allowing employees to have influence over their work recognizes them for the talent they bring to it. Rewarding employees for their efforts will pay dividends to the organization in the long run. These early indicators of initiative and big-picture thinking should be ample evidence of where star talent resides and help you populate robust development programs and succession plans. Actively discussing advancement opportunities when they arise, and promoting from within wherever possible will help keep those key employees onboard when hiring heats up again.
The economy is starting to turn around and as hiring heats up, so will attrition. Once you have done the research outlined above, get your leadership team together, analyze the problem, and create a plan to make the necessary changes before you start hemorrhaging key employees. Take a hard look at whether the current policies and practices support the culture you would like to foster. Are the company values being actively supported by employees? Have you lost sight of the original vision? These will be important questions to answer as you move forward.
A critical element of the above strategy is conducting a yearly employee climate or engagement survey. Doing it once a decade does not provide you with patterns or trends to evaluate – probably the most important aspect of the survey. Once you have the data, the next step is to do something with it. Conducting an annual survey, then allowing it to gather dust on a shelf is worse than not surveying at all! Make distribution of results and improvement plans part of your yearly state-of-the-company message to employees. Then watch your retention numbers march up and to the right with every passing year.