All Your Questions about Employee Engagement Answered – Part 1

We recently hosted a series of webinars on the topic of employee engagement across the globe. You can watch a replay of the APAC webinar entitled “Keys to Employee Engagement in Asia Pacific” here. The US and EMEA versions entitled “How Great Leaders Drive Results through Employee Engagement” can be found here and here, respectively . Participants were highly active in all regions and filled the chat boxes with questions; while we answered as many as we could in the allotted time, we just could not get to all of them. In this blog post, Ellen Foley and I address many of the outstanding questions from across the globe.

1. How can you coach your managers/leaders to develop good climate and trust?

Helping leaders develop good climate and trust is a development process that takes place over time.  We recommend the following steps:

1. Provide practical leadership development, including best practices, to help the leader understand what “good” looks like.
2. Use an assessment instrument to focus the leader on his or her gaps.
3. Have the leader identify the specific opportunities they have to use best practices to build good climate and trust in the day-to-day rhythm of their work.
4. Provide coaching, positive reinforcement and recognition to the leader as they try out the best practices and have success improving on their specific gaps.

2. Employees say they want training, team building, social activities, etc. and we organise all that and then people don’t want to come. How should we deal with this? How do we make employees appreciate what we’ve done?

It is not uncommon for HR professionals to be frustrated by employees who do not seem to appreciate or participate in the organisation’s engagement efforts — particularly when activities take a lot of energy and resources to plan and execute.  This challenge highlights the difference between company-wide engagement effort and individually-focused engagement efforts.  Corporate engagement efforts, while having some impact on employees, are blunt instruments.  That is, they have to be so broad that it is nearly impossible that they will appeal to the majority of employees.  In contrast, individual efforts, managed by leaders at the work team and employee level, are much more targeted and effective instruments for driving employee engagement.  One way we have seen organisations successfully balance these two types of activities is to minimise the corporate-wide activities and share some of the budget for these types of activities out to managers to use for targeted activities with their teams.

3. In a conservative working environment where open communication is not the standard, how do you encourage employee engagement?

This can certainly be a challenge, particularly in some Asian companies, as communication is a key component in employee engagement.  How you define “open” is important to this discussion.  Open communication does not mean sharing every bit of information with employees.  In fact, in many situations it is not appropriate to do so.  However, in situations where confidential information cannot be shared with employees, managers who communicate with empathy and authenticity are still able to build trust and engagement with their employees.  In addition, we recommend managers focus on understanding the specific engagement needs of their teams by looking at the Climate Dimensions – clarity, commitment, standards, responsibility, recognition, teamwork – and also by recognising and attending to the various engagement needs of individual employees.

4. In relation to the profit improvements tied to employee engagement mentioned in the research (Gallup, Aon Hewitt, Harvard), are the profit improvements constant across all regions?  How to they measure the correlation from these studies to profit numbers?

Each of these studies measured different aspects of Engagement with different populations.  Some break out global data and others do not.  We like them as context for the importance of the business conversation about employee engagement.  Here are the links to each study which should help you understand each in more detail.

5. How much faith can you place in the accuracy of these engagement levels (Gallup, Aon Hewitt, Forum) in Asia Pacific? Considering they are based on employees’ agree / disagree responses to 12 questions?

No survey is 100% accurate, and the absolute percentages are not really the most important message in these numbers.  The fact that survey after survey, using different questions and scales, show a fairly similar level of engagement both globally and for the region, gives us confidence in concluding there is significant room for improvement for employee engagement both in Asia Pacific and around the globe.  That said, what is really most important is the level of engagement in your company, which may be very different than the global or regional numbers.

6.  How do you measure if leaders do what they say? Still need feedback from their staffs, right? If you do 360 degree, it will be time consuming.

You are right, anonymous 360 surveys can be somewhat time consuming; however, they are truly the best way to identify and measure over time what leaders do in the workplace to build or erode employee engagement.  Other methods we have seen work well include:

• targeted “skip level” employee meetings/interviews to gather data from employees,
• measuring over time the downstream results of strong or poor engagement, such as employee turnover rates in a work group or promotions from a work group, or
• in-field observation and coaching of managers by expert coaches.

7. There are some top leaders who don’t care about best practices, how do we deal with these?

With sceptical leaders it is best to start with a strong business case to help them understand the impact employee engagement can have on the business, for example, share the research data, do some small case studies from your own company comparing results from leaders who engage employees and those who don’t, share company data on the cost to replace a lost employee.  That said, we know climate, which drives employee engagement, is a local phenomenon; therefore, regardless of the top leaders’ opinions, you can still have a strong impact on employee engagement by focusing on the behaviour of leaders throughout the organisation.  The most effective leaders do not see the behaviour of the leaders above them as barriers to their own ability to engage their teams – they take ownership for their own workplace and apply best practices to build a strong climate, trust, and engagement through their interactions with individuals and teams every day.

8. When the manager does not respond, or perhaps feels threatened by employee engagement, what do we do? Especially when they are also a performer who contributes to the bottom-line?

The best way to reinforce the importance of employee engagement to the organisation is to build metrics into the KPI’s for all managers, and hold managers accountable for meeting them through your performance management process.  High performers often have a high need for achievement and may naturally respond to the challenge of a specific goal.  It’s also important to create reward and recognition structures that reinforce the types of behaviours that result in high engagement – this ensures both the definition of excellence in engagement, and the importance of engagement to the organisation, are clear.

9. What if the manager of other teams doesn’t listen to us?  As HR, we can only recommend, not demanding to change, correct?

You’re right, HR is not in a position to dictate to the organisation; however, HR is an important influencer and supporter of excellence in employee engagement in the organisation.  Think about it as a long-term change effort and give it the time and energy change requires.  Some of the responses to earlier questions apply here as well, and applied over time, should help with your change effort:

• Build the business case for employee engagement
• Build engagement into your manager KPI’s
• Focus on developing individual leaders, then create and share real success stories of managers
• Enrol these successful managers as informal change agents to influence their peers

Thanks, again, to all of the webinar participants who asked questions and contributed their comments during the live sessions. To view the webinars on-demand, please click here.  To speak with someone at Forum about the employee engagement challenges in your organisation and how we may be able to help, contact your region today.