Employee Engagement

Most approaches to measuring and managing employee engagement today are flawed. Traditional engagement approaches provide a quick fix, but lack long-term benefits and potentially ignore up to 65% of the reasons why employees disengage.

There are five imperatives for building Engagement Capital at your organization. Following these five imperatives ensures that you are incorporating the right engagement measures into your analysis, refocusing engagement strategies on drivers that generate the greatest impact over time, and using engagement to make strategic business decisions.

 

 

Assess Employee Engagement

Common strategies for measuring employee engagement evaluate employees' attitudes in the moment. While helpful, this does not provide a full assessment of engagement capital.

Create a holistic measure of engagement that includes not only employees' perceptions of their present experiences but also their perceptions of past events and their confidence in their future employment experiences. The best organizations use this complete measure of employee engagement to inform talent management and business decisions.

Understand the Importance of Employee Engagement

One in five HR leaders struggles to establish how engagement leads to better talent outcomes. Use CLC HR research to demonstrate how engagement influences business and talent outcomes.

Measure and Benchmark Engagement

Less than half of HR leaders believe their engagement measures accurately predict turnover and employee performance. Engagement metrics often fall short because they only account for current engagement levels. By gathering employee engagement metrics based on past events, present experiences, and future expectations, you can better diagnose your at-risk employee segments and identify targeted engagement solutions.

Benchmark and Monitor Engagement Trends

Compare your organizations' engagement and employee turnover against similar organizations and employee segments to understand the relative effectiveness of your engagement initiatives. Follow engagement trends on a quarterly basis with our interactive charts and regional data to forestall potential risks to engagement at your workforce.

Assess How Engagement Levels Affect Business Decisions

Most organizations fail to use engagement data strategically and primarily use it to foresee talent retention risks. Instead, use engagement data as a critical input to strategic decision making.

 

 

Create and Execute an Action Plan

Many organizations do not create sustainable engagement—or engagement capital. Too often, organizations focus on engagement drivers that only increase employees' immediate levels of engagement.

Instead of only prioritizing quick win tactics to increase your organization’s engagement score, identify and implement engagement initiatives that achieve immediate engagement improvements and sustain engagement over time. After assessing your employees' engagement through a workforce survey, focus groups, or an exit survey:

1.      Determine the most important employee segments to focus on by assessing their criticality to business success and their engagement levels.

2.      Evaluate and prioritize engagement initiatives against organizational objectives by their ability to generate immediate improvements in engagement and sustain impact across time.

3.      Implement action plans by communicating next steps, roles, and responsibilities to key stakeholders.

Determine Critical Employee Segments

Engagement across different employee populations, such as high potential talent, senior leaders, underperformers, and hourly workers, could vary within one organization. Some of these employee segments may be more critical than others in helping the organization drive its strategic objectives and therefore may require specialized attention and engagement tactics. Furthermore, limited resources for engagement initiatives make it necessary for organizations to optimize resource allocation.

When organizations rely on one-size-fits-all engagement initiatives, they inevitably over- or under-invest in some employee populations. Rather than distributing engagement resources equally across all employees, identify workforce segments most critical to achieving your organization's outcomes and tailor action plans to address each workforce segment's unique needs.

Identify Critical Employee Segments

Organizations do not realize optimal returns from engagement action plans because they fail to prioritize investments by critical employee segments. Instead, first identify workforce segments that are vital to the organization's success. Then, prioritize segments that exhibit low levels of engagement.

Engage Critical Employee Segments

Seventy-eight percent of organizations effectively identify engagement challenges, but only 46% select the right strategies to effectively address those challenges. This mismatch occurs because of a reliance on a "one-size-fits-all" approach, which requires the same engagement tactics to be applied across the organization. Instead, direct engagement efforts at workforce segments that are critical to the business and are at high risk for low engagement.

Select Initiatives That Build Sustainable Engagement

Most organizations (91%) plan to increase or maintain current investment levels for engagement, but only 20% believe their engagement efforts drive organizational outcomes. Many organizations invest in engagement initiatives that provide immediate impact, but do not sustain engagement over time. Instead, prepare the necessary foundation for your organization's engagement initiatives by focusing on seven critical areas.

The Seven Focus Areas for Building Engagement Capital

1. Organizational Values: Foster Employee Ownership and Protection of Values

Relying on top-down communication strategies to connect employees to the organizations' values fails to build sustainable employee engagement. Instead, build strong employee-organization connections by involving employees in the development and maintenance of values.

2. Work Environment: Enable Employees to Demonstrate Obvious Impact on the Organization

More than two-thirds of employees lack opportunities to contribute to the success of their organization. Rather than relying solely on employee suggestion programs, give employees opportunities to also select and own initiatives for improving organizational performance.

3. Employee Networks: Build Relevant Connections That Help Employees Execute Work Successfully

On average, 60% of employees experience disruptive changes to their team or direct manager each year that decrease engagement capital. Ease these disruptions by establishing and extending employee networks to include peers beyond immediate teammates who can provide career guidance and job support.

4. Career Management: Align Employees to Jobs by Capabilities and Interests, Then Leverage Peers to Support Career Steps

Organizations can create disengagement by over-promising and under-delivering against employees' career expectations. Define achievable career opportunities based not only on employee interests, but also on skills and experience.

5. Rewards: Include Noncash Awards in Rewards Strategy

Noncash awards, cash bonuses, and at-market compensation raises have similar effects on engagement capital across time. Best practice organizations focus on non-cash awards to motivate employees and use monetary rewards to support strategic talent objectives, such as retention of critical talent or high potential employees.

6. Performance Management: Foster Peer-to-Peer Informal Feedback

Organizations struggle to achieve desired employee performance outcomes because they over-focus on performance management systems and rely primarily on manager-delivered feedback. Focus instead on increasing employee understanding of the process, belief in fairness and credibility of the process, and informal peer-to-peer feedback.

7. Role Clarity: Leverage Teams to Translate Goals into Day-to-Day Work

Employees that have a clear understanding of how their roles align to organizational objectives put forth 33% more discretionary effort. To improve employees' connection to the organization, don't just encourage managers to explain that connection; enable peers to help each other understand how goals and roles set by the organization translate into day-to-day work.

Execute Engagement Action Plans

Executing on the engagement action plan requires two key components:

l   Communication: Communicate action plans effectively to critical stakeholders, rather than just distributing engagement data.

l   Accountability: Ensure that leaders follow through on action plans by supplementing "hard" accountability measures with "soft" accountability tactics, such as using peer relationships to encourage action.

Communicate Engagement Action Plans

Organizations often inform stakeholders of engagement initiatives through engagement survey results, but do not effectively communicate how the organization will take action against engagement challenges. Inform critical stakeholders of important milestones, target timeframes, and their accountability for tasks in the action plan to ensure owners follow through on engagement objectives.

Create Accountability for the Action Plan

Fewer than 30% of business leaders are formally accountable for engagement outcomes, hindering organizations from implementing and completing engagement action plans. To ensure line-leaders execute against action plans, HR must improve the effectiveness and commitment of leaders through "hard" accountability measures supplemented with "soft" accountability tactics, such as using peer relationships to encourage action.

 

 

Build Manager, Peer, and Organization Capabilities

Engaging employees is not solely an HR endeavor, and most organizations realize that managers are critical to maintaining and improving employee engagement. While managers are important players in engagement efforts, the success of engagement action plans also hinges on the involvement of other people—peers and the broader organization.

For an even greater impact on engagement capital over time, diversify the individuals involved in managing employee engagement rather than focusing on the manager alone. This approach requires aligning the right 'agents'—organization, peers, and manager—to the right engagement areas for which they have the greatest impact.

 

Focus Managers on the Right Activities

Getting managers to commit to building their team's engagement is not easy. Most organizations invest primarily in manager training and implementation support to increase commitment. Despite these investments, many line managers still do not understand how engagement improves business outcomes and are reluctant to perform engagement activities.

Improve manager commitment to engagement by showing them how employee engagement can help them achieve their business goals. Successful organizations look beyond training and implementation support to involve managers in the design, creation, and delivery of engagement initiatives.

Build Manager Commitment to Engagement

Managers resist ownership for their team's engagement because they do not understand how engagement will help them achieve business goals. Rather than simply reporting engagement scores and trends, demonstrate the real impact that engagement has on both talent and business outcomes.

Increase Manager Effectiveness at Engaging Employees

Eight-one percent of managers and line leaders fail to achieve superior talent outcomes because they lack commitment to and are ineffective at engaging employees. Instead of over-investing in manager training, focus on helping managers apply their existing business skills to the most important engagement activities.

Support Managers in Engaging Employees

The quality of HR-line manager interactions drives two-thirds of engagement program effectiveness. Yet, only 33% of line managers find HR partners to be effective in their role. Focus on the business relevance and accessibility of engagement programs—not comprehensiveness—to improve HR-line partnership and execution of HR programs.

 

Use Peers to Drive Engagement

Peers can play a major role in owning and driving engagement. In fact, peers can impact engagement capital by an average of 6%. However, most organizations tend to rely primarily on managers, who may have limited time or limited skills, to engage employees.

To maximize your impact on engagement, involve peers in critical engagement activities. For example, peers can help their peers translate the organization’s goals into day-to-day work and provide useful in-the-moment feedback.

Support Peer Efforts to Engage Employees

While many engagement-related activities can be driven by the manager or the organization, peers are particularly effective at translating objectives into action, generating enthusiasm about longer-term career opportunities, and delivering informal feedback. In some instances, peers may be even more influential than managers—for example, informal feedback delivered through peers has a 60% greater impact on engagement capital than informal feedback from a direct manager.

 

Provide Organization Support That Drives Engagement

Organizations help set a foundation for engagement throughout the workforce, but delegate the majority of engagement responsibilities to managers. Instead, provide organization-based support that drives engagement, such as career-pathing, defining roles, distributing responsibilities, and building connections to the organization's vision, through centralized channels, including corporate communications channels, and senior leaders.

Increase the Organization's Effectiveness at Engaging Employees

Best-in-class organizations not only leverage managers and peers to engage the workforce, but also direct-to-employee or centrally owned initiatives to maintain and improve engagement. As it has traditionally done, the organization should continue to define roles and distribute responsibilities across the workforce to demonstrate its commitment to investing in employees' future with the organization. Senior leaders must also play an integral part in helping employees build a stronger connection to the organization, and in turn building and sustaining engagement capital.