During my time as an employee, and more recently as a consultant I’ve worked with numerous organisations to help them improve their levels of employee engagement. Through these many experiences I’ve studied what’s working well – and not so well, and many organisations are making the same mistakes. Across organisations, industry sectors and national boundaries, variations on a number of common problems come up time and time again.
Here’s my baker’s dozen of the key issues I’ve found:
- Failure to identify and agree the business case at senior levels.
Some business leaders pursue engagement because "it’s the right thing to do." That might work in the short term but when business pressures increase or worse still, when the prime sponsor of the work moves on, commitment to it often dissipates. It’s important to have a robust business case, with clear business benefits so that it’s grounded in sound business logic rather than ethereal generalisations. The view that some leaders still have that employee engagement is ‘pink and fluffy’ is caused by poor articulation of the hard business benefits.
Learning No 1 – Always identify the business case and secure senior level agreement to it. - Inadequate articulation of the purpose of engagement i.e. What should employees engage with?
An extension of point 1 above, every organisation should be clear about what they want employees to engage with. Employee Engagement shouldn’t be about creating ‘happy’ employees. It should instead be about creating engagement with the purpose of the organisation and generating commitment to help achieve it’s business objectives. This implies of course that the organisation must have a clear strategy and that senior people can articulate and explain these to others.
Learning No 2 – Clearly articulate the purpose of engagement in your organisation i.e. "What we mean by engagement is…" - Confusing employee satisfaction (and the factors influencing it) with engagement.
Employee satisfaction does not equal engagement. It is very likely that engagement cannot occur without satisfaction and it’s often necessary to address the issues preventing satisfaction at the outset of an employee engagement programme. But it’s important to remember that the factors causing satisfaction are hygiene factors rather than those which cause deeper commitment to the organisation and motivation to help it succeed.
Learning No 3 – Understand both satisfaction and engagement and the relationship between each state.
4. Making HR responsible for engagement.
Whilst it may be sensible for HR to ‘own’ engagement activity it cannot be responsible for engagement across the organisation. Ownership has to be within the organisation and across all areas of it. It starts with leaders, whose role in engaging their people is critical, so a good start point is to ensure that leaders accept and feel responsible. Rational and emotional elements are important. As an aside, it’s interesting to consider whether leaders feel responsible for their area only or for the organisation as a whole. Typically engagement progresses as leaders sense of cross functional responsibility increases.
Learning No 4 – Ensure ownership lies with and across the organisation.
5. Viewing it as something that ‘management’ does to everyone else in the organisation.
Traditional organisations were, and many still are, characterised by a culture driven by parent / child behaviours. Management believe their role is to tell and direct people who work for them and they in turn do as they’re told (and no more) and usually look for the ‘ catch’ in whatever it is that they’re told. Those behaviours just won’t produce engagement. Instead everyone must feel valued and able to contribute fully. These are pre-requisites to feeling involved.
Learning No 5 – Ensure everyone is involved and feels able to contribute.
6. Making it all about a survey and / or about the score of the survey.
In some organisations it’s all about doing a staff survey, and then maybe, taking a few actions based on the scores. For others the only important thing is the score. An example of this, illustrating a very narrow and introspective view is that some organisations are happy providing their score is higher than an external benchmark. And if it’s not, then they change the benchmark! I read a comment somewhere last week that suggested that this is like being sick but pretending it’s ok because others are even sicker!
Learning No 6 – Make the survey nothing more than an assessment at a particular moment in time. Instead make it about the relationship between employee and their work and everything that contributes to or impacts it.
7. Assuming you can improve engagement directly.
People are complicated. When groups of people come together the organisational cultures that emerge can be even more complicated and difficult to understand, and change. It’s not like shifting the track and changing the direction – as a signal operator might do with a train. There’s rarely a direct link between cause and effect so there’s no lever to pull which will produce a guaranteed response. Instead it’s about taking actions which affect the environment in which people work so that the conditions are more conducive to engagement. You can’t make them engaged, but you can create conditions in which they are more likely to choose to be engaged.
Learning No 7 – Seek to change the conditions and environment in which people work, and the meaning people attach to their work such that people are more likely to choose to engage.
8. Adopting a ‘one-size fits all’ approach.
It’s worth reiterating the above. People are complicated. And we’re all different. So it just doesn’t make sense to expect everyone in an organisation to respond in the same way to actions intended to improve engagement. A better idea is to be flexible and provide a framework within which people with diverse thoughts, ideas, beliefs and so on can choose to engage.
Learning No 8 – Allow for diverse thoughts, ideas and beliefs by providing a framework within which more people are likely to engage.
9. Failing to take a planned and coordinated approach.
Engagement doesn’t just happen. It requires a series of actions which create (as previously stated) an environment in which people are more likely to choose to engage with and commit to the achievement of the organisations purpose and objectives. Nothing corrodes engagement like inconsistency and over promising and under delivering. To prevent both, actions need to be carefully aligned and rigorously delivered.
Learning No 9 – Produce a roadmap, a schedule of activity designed to achieve your engagement objectives and then rigorously deliver it.
10. Not realising that it requires behavioural change (as well as changes to policies, benefits, conditions etc) and supporting people to change.
The reason engagement is so valuable is that it produces changes in behaviour that are helpful to the organisation and produce improved performance as a result. But before these changes can occur, prior changes in behaviour need to create the right environment in which it can emerge. Organisations should be clear on what behaviours are needed and then support people to make those changes. This is why some of the most successful engagement programmes are inextricably linked to the espoused values and behaviours of the organisation – they’re clear on what behaviours are important and do all they can to embed them.
Learning No 10 – Identify the desired behaviours and support people to ‘live’ them.
11. Not planning holistically so that all elements of the employee experience are aligned to create the conditions in which engagement can emerge.
As hinted at in point 9 above, the actions taken to create an environment in which people choose to be engaged must be intentionally designed and carefully aligned. Inconsistency and contradiction should be prevented at all costs. The positive impact of one action can easily be reversed by the unintentional inconsistency of another.
Learning No 11 – Take a holistic approach, intentionally design and align everything that contributes to engagement.
12. Expecting immediate results and changing approach when there isn’t an immediate improvement or, worse still, giving up on the programme altogether.
Improvements in satisfaction can happen quite quickly as issues impacting it are resolved. As described in point 3 above, satisfaction is more about hygiene factors and as issues are addressed satisfaction can change almost instantly. But engagement is a deeper construct. It takes time to develop numerous contributory factors that need to come together and be experienced over a more prolonged period. So look for changes in satisfaction first, expect slow initial progress with engagement but know that if you are doing the rights things progress will accelerate.
Learning No 11 – Consider engagement as a long term commitment.
13. Closing down the programme (or project) when it’s ‘done’.
Organisations are complex systems. Change in one part of the system can produce unexpected consequences in another. As change is constantly occurring and impacting the organisation, challenges to the development (or maintenance) of employee engagement are also occurring all the time. And this means that constant attention is essential.
Learning No 13 – Embed engagement in and through everything the organisation does, permanently.
Employee Engagement may have been around for more than 20 years but it’s clear that organisations are still struggling to meaningfully engage their people. Learning from the mistakes made in other organisations may be a good place to start if you’re planning your engagement programme or seeking to re-energise it in 2013. Engagement is complex, but it needn’t be difficult!
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019
