What does it take to foster a truly engaged workforce?

Employee Engagement remains the elusive El Dorado for businesses and human resource professionals who are continuously trying to capitalize on their available talent. Sadly though, global surveys by organizations like Gallup and CEB have consistently presented discouraging results. 

Gallup in fact calls it the “global employee engagement crisis”. The numbers definitely indicate that.  According to their 2016 survey, 87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged at work. This is the reality even when the financial returns of an engaged workforce is evident. Gallup’s research goes on to reveal that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share. Companies in the top quartile in employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10 percent on customer ratings, 22 percent in profitability, and 21 percent in productivity. They also saw significantly lower turnover (25 percent in high-turnover organizations, 65 percent in low-turnover organizations), shrinkage (28 percent), and absenteeism (37 percent) and fewer safety incidents (48 percent), patient safety incidents (41 percent), and quality defects (41 percent).

So, why do most organizations find employee engagement a challenge and what can they do about it? This is the question we asked a host of employee engagement experts globally. The insights they shared had some prominent themes that all organizations need to keep in mind while designing their employee engagement strategies.

According to Michael Beck, “Although there are many important competencies a leader must have to be highly effective, three leadership competencies that have the greatest positive effect on people and their levels of engagement are — when leaders treat people like "people" and not just ‘resources’; when they give people autonomy; and when they show sincere appreciation.” 

How can this be practically achieved? Priya Bates suggest some focus areas — “Training and communicating is essential to ensure that once a plan is built, employees are instinctively aware that it exists; understand its intention; respond appropriate; and rally behind it. Understand that organizations must ensure there are alignments versus disconnects. Recognizing the wrong behavior can have devastating consequences. And finally, successful organizations with engaged employees are accountable for results. They encourage transparent conversation and dialogue and benefit from the trust that is needed to drive the discretionary effort they are looking for from employees. They are also experts at helping employees share their stories.”

What is clear is that the engagement system has less of a focus on ownership (by Human Resources, Communication, Information Technology, Executives) and more focus on integration and collaboration in order to function. 

In the present scenario, where there are many vendors offering a number of versions of employee engagement surveys, organizations need to get smart about what they are measuring, and what they are doing with all that data. Once again, the issue of trust becomes important. David Zinger says, “When we make data more personal and owned first by the very person creating it, we need to step up fully and address issues of honesty, trust, and psychological safety in organizations where we no longer hide behind anonymous data gathering approaches. New engagement technologies will function as a trigger to focus on building bonds of trust between individuals and organizations because the organization will not have access to the data without trust. The new currency for data collection for employee engagement will be human trust not large survey consulting fees.”

That does not mean we ignore technology though, which can act as a great tool to drive intended results. According to Lewis Garrad, managing technology is the bigger issue, “While the way we measure employee engagement is well established, and the technology we have to measure it is advancing rapidly, the most common issue that organizations face is a complete lack of action and follow up on employee feedback. Indeed, this is a great way to frustrate people — ask them for their ideas about what they would like to improve and then proceed to do nothing with them. The reasons that organizations struggle with follow-ups ranges from issues related to management capability and intention… The most effective way to address this though is to stop designing employee feedback and engagement survey programs as measurement tools, and start designing them as programs to drive better people management and a more adaptive workforce. When looking at it this way, it is easy to see that very positive feedback can be just as disappointing as negative – because without constructive criticism about leadership, operational efficiency and talent issues, how will the organization improve?”

It is essential to understand that the domain of employee engagement ranges from initiatives for employee wellbeing, to innovate methods of enabling day-to-day work. Dr. Debolina Dutta says, “Investment in employee wellbeing has been found to pay back manifold, with one direct result being the billions of dollars in savings due to absence of cost reduction. Effectiveness and efficiency measures for these need to be reported to ensure strong adoption, effective ROI and higher engagement.” Dutta also goes on to suggest actions for what can be done within each of these domains. “In the domain of wellbeing, simply offering ergonomic seating, gym facilities and for many, transportation services do not suffice anymore, as these are becoming the new hygiene levels. Increased focus on health has seen an increase in organizations providing wearable devises such as Fitbits and pedometers, increasing trend of standing desks, juice bars, standing meetings and “walk-the-talk” meetings, cycle-to-work schemes, subsidized gym members, periodic health checkups, on-site group classes (Yoga, Zumba, aerobics, meditation, mindfulness classes etc.).”

A lot can simply happen by valuing employees. And once again we emphasize the point of appreciation — as separate from merely rewards. According to Margy Bresslour, “people who give appreciations benefit as well. There is evidence that sharing positive messages with others promote a feeling of happiness in the person delivering the message. The results are simple and intuitive — there’s a tremendous amount to gain by appreciating those around you in the workplace. We all want to know that we are valued and appreciated. When you actively appreciate and take an interest in the qualities, characteristics, and work of the people around you, you develop a culture where people love to work and are fully engaged, and where your customers and clients enjoy doing business.”

The message is clear. Employee engagement surveys are a trend, but we need to look one step further. According to Lewis, organizations are anyway “overly focused on measurement rather than action. If the next ten years are spent addressing such issues, then we might actually see some progress on making companies a better place to work.”  Priya Bates wraps it up rather well when she says that the future of engagement is not about a quick fix to make people happy but about taking a step back and imagining what is truly possible when people, processes and systems work together to accomplish great things. While one cannot deny that this will continue to remain a tricky issue in the years to come, we do hope that some of these strategies shared by our experts will help you in your journey of fixing the employee engagement conundrum. 

Personal Tracking – An engagement enhancing tool - David Zinger, An Employee Engagement Speaker, Educator and Author

References
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/163130/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx