Smart Manager Advisor – HR ADVICE CENTRE

Why Your Employee Engagement Programs Failed

Have you participated in the annual “employee engagement survey fail”? That’s where employers conduct yet another engagement survey, hoping that this year’s results will be better than last year’s, only to be disappointed once again.

Paying the Price of Low Employee Engagement

If you can relate to this, you also probably experience the pain of one or more of the following consequences of low engagement:

Costly turnover, especially the loss of mission critical, hard-to-replace talent
Employee relations issues taking up managers’ time and energy
Employees showing lack of initiative requiring managers to “babysit”
No “We’re all in this together” spirit…which leads to turf battles, silos, and overall lack of teamwork
Low morale resulting in less-than-stellar customer service

While it’s No Consolation, You’re Not Alone

Despite employers investing tremendous sums of money on improving employee engagement, employees remain largely disengaged across the globe. Very little has changed since Gallup started measuring employee engagement in the 1990s.

From the recent Gallup State of the American Workplace report:

While the state of the U.S. economy has changed substantially since 2000, the state of the American workplace has not. Currently, 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is engaged in their work, and the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is roughly 2- to-1, meaning that the vast majority of U.S. workers (70 percent) are not reaching their full potential.”

How does this happen?

Why, despite all the time, effort, and money invested, does employee engagement not improve? More importantly, what do YOU need to do to improve engagement in your organization?

Four Things to Do Immediately

The following list—while far from exhaustive—identifies some of the most powerful things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your employee engagement improvement efforts.

Examine whether you are making the four “failure guaranteed” mistakes employers make, despite knowing better:

Not reporting the results of your survey
Not reporting the results in a timely manner
Not making any changes based on employee feedback
Not explaining the reasoning behind why some input was not acted upon

Identify if you are guilty of the “employee engagement deal killer”; mistakes that lead to low engagement, along with a resentful, cynical workforce, such as:

Employees don’t understand the big picture—Research shows that only 4 out of 10 employees know their employer’s goals, key initiatives, and other aspects of the big picture. How can we expect employees to be engaged, if they don’t understand what they’re contributing to?

Employees don’t understand how specifically they contribute to the big picture—When employees don’t understand how they matter, and what they can do to make the biggest difference, they don’t have the passion and commitment of those who have a line of sight between their actions and the big picture.

Employees feel unappreciated—This is one of the biggest sources of employee disengagement and low morale, and one of the most easily solved problems, and it costs nothing.

Managers are unresponsive, teaching employees not to care—Unresponsiveness takes many forms, including not responding to emails and voice mails, not responding to requests, and not indicating they received time-sensitive material they had requested from a direct report. This last form of unresponsiveness—and thoughtlessness—is especially off putting to the employee who moved mountains to make the deadline and is now left wondering “Did they not get it? Do I follow-up and seem like a nag?” Unresponsiveness leads to the attitude “If you don’t care about me…why should I care about you?”
Stop treating employee engagement as an aggregated statistic, and learn how to individualize the employee experience. This could be a game-changer for your organization. While it’s important to understand overall engagement levels in your organization, in the end, employee engagement is an individual experience.

Just because your organization—or a department—receives a particular score on an engagement driver such as “My opinions and input matters”, doesn’t mean it’s true for an individual employee. When that employee is a high value, hard-to-replace employee, this distinction becomes even more critical.

At the micro level, employee engagement being an individual experience means that each employee has their own “engagement recipe” of drivers and causes of disengagement. Boosting engagement requires understanding each employee’s unique recipe and then co-creating a work experience that satisfies those drivers.

When this happens, not only will employee engagement levels rise, but each employee will be far more productive and will generate far greater economic value.

How to Manage a Negative Employee

You know the one: he comes in grumpy, and within minutes the atmosphere of the entire office has sunk like a brick. No one wants to work with him, no one likes to talk to him, and people go out of their way to avoid him in the halls.

Negative employees can wreak havoc on a small business. They not only decrease the productivity of everyone else, but they make your team dread coming into work. Negatively is like any virus: it spreads easily.

Start By Talking With Them

If you haven’t approached them before, start by talking with them about their attitude. They might have a specific reason why they’ve been so unhappy, and if you can fix it easily this is the best way to turn them around.

Ask them specific questions.

Is their attitude related to something specific at work? Are they having problems at home? Are they too stressed out with their tasks? Finding the root cause is important. Of course, if they’re just a negative person in general you won’t be able to do much.

Keep It Private

It’s important not to chastise the person in front of others. When you talk to them about their attitude, do it in the privacy of your office. No one likes an audience when they’ve done something wrong, and making it public will likely make them act out even more.

Clearly Communicate Your Expectations

Make sure the employee knows that their attitude is unacceptable. Everyone in your business should be treated with courtesy and respect. If they don’t have something nice or constructive to say, then they should keep quiet. Many negative employees start or perpetuate gossip in a company. And, gossip is incredibly toxic. If this person is contributing to the gossip mill, then they need to stop immediately. Gossip creates animosity, tension, and stress, and your team doesn’t need that.

Communicate Consequences

It’s important to be clear that there will be consequences if they don’t change their behaviour. If there’s no improvement after a certain time period, you might have to let them go. The threat of job loss can be a strong motivator for change, so if all else fails then make sure they know this is an option.

The Characteristics of a Good Leadership Team

The ultimate measure of a senior leadership team’s success is the organization’s results. And yet some companies, due to favourable market conditions, do quite well in spite of their dysfunctional leadership teams. Imagine what could happen if the team at the top could get its act together. Is your leadership team effective? Evaluate them on these nine attributes.

A meaningful purpose: They have a clear and compelling reason to work together. Executive team members are each responsible for a specific company function. One could argue the CEO should be the glue that coordinates the activities, but everyone’s primary concern should be their area of responsibility. In high-performance teams, a commitment to the team’s purpose should be at least as important as the commitment to the purpose for the area each member leads.
Shared goals: The team needs to focus on a set of outcomes that all members are committed to achieving and that require contribution by everyone. If it’s truly a team goal, everyone will feel equally responsible for its achievement. These are not necessarily the same as the company’s goals.
The right mix: Team members have complementary skills, experiences, and styles necessary for fulfilling the necessary roles and responsibilities. People know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and aversions. They use this knowledge to create synergy. Members see the value of each person’s presence on the team. There’s a sense of equality among all the players.
Strong interpersonal relationships: People can be themselves because they genuinely like each other and will do what they can to look out for and support their team-mates. Members trust each other and are trustworthy. The cohesiveness of the team is obvious to people outside the group.
Helpful operating principles: These agreed upon ways of working together might include a shared set of values, processes for making decisions, ways of communicating within the team and to other employees, and tracking activities.
Problem solving: The team recognizes when a problem exists, analyzes it, identifies alternatives, and works through conflicts. Once the decision is made, everyone commits to supporting it. Often this is best demonstrated by someone’s willingness to raise a thorny issue in the first place and in the members’ willingness to fully engage in finding a resolution to the problem.
High levels of candour: People say what needs saying in a direct and respectful manner. Members are receptive to hearing tough messages without becoming defensive. Heated discussions are viewed not as a problem but rather as a positive activity as long as the discussion stays focused on issues or behaviours rather than on personalities.
Mutual accountability: Members hold themselves and others to the commitments they have made. While the CEO often has the primary responsibility for holding employees accountable for keeping their promises, each person shares in this activity.
Measuring the important: Effective teams track those things that are most important to their success— progress on key initiatives, performance results, or even behaviours expected of each other and take action when things are not meeting expectations. Carve out time at your next executive off-site meeting to discuss the effectiveness of the team and determine how to strengthen its performance.

What do your employees really think?

Because employees have a huge impact on the bottom line, companies need to ensure their workforce is engaged and committed. Numerous studies have linked employee loyalty, customer loyalty, and financial results with one another.

Employee dissatisfaction leads to lower productivity and higher turnover, having a significant impact on organizational performance. Therefore, anything that can reduce the investment of time and money currently channeled into sourcing, hiring, and training new employees is beneficial.

Enterprise surveys enable business leaders to find out what their employees really think and what issues need to be addressed. Through the survey, the organization can communicate to employees that their opinions matter and so increase employee morale, understand key organizational issues, and build an engaged workforce. Carrying out a well-orchestrated survey — and listening, consulting, and acting on the results over time — will have a positive effect on a company’s bottom line.

An enterprise survey is a structured process in which staff can openly discuss their opinions of the organization without fear of reprisal. They can review key areas that the organization has deemed important (e.g., culture, company strategy, career development, reward systems, training, onboarding, orientation, and customer service) and provide input and ideas on what is working well and what is not. The aim is to present staff with a method that encourages them to give honest answers on a variety of topics in a manner that they find comfortable.

Why conduct an enterprise survey

Would you like to uncover key organizational issues that would lead to demonstrable improvements? Do you want your workforce to provide feedback and suggestions on how to improve and feel more engaged and committed to your company?

Employee engagement is a central goal of a smart company that understands that is only as good as its employees and that there is great value in knowing their opinions, drivers, and behaviours. Numerous studies have established that a moderate increase in employee engagement can garner huge returns for a company. Being aware of what employees are saying about their work experience provides insight into a company’s key issues and makes available crucial information that can be positively applied to the future.

An organization can reap many benefits from conducting an enterprise survey:

It’s a strategic organizational tool to identify important issues.
It provides an assessment of current organizational culture and gauges the level of employee engagement.
It allows employees to communicate views and concerns.
It isolates the root causes of such continuing problems as high turnover or low productivity.
It enables companies to find solutions to issues that will lead to profitable improvements.
It fosters stronger employee relations by creating an environment of openness and trust.
Empowered employees lead to higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, improved productivity, better customer service, improved morale, and measurable savings.

How to conduct an enterprise survey

To implement an enterprise survey, you must plan — to create governance policy, clarify objectives, establish timelines, allocate resources, identify topics, and define a reporting structure. Once you have dealt with these elements, you need to develop survey items with the input of key constituents. You must also address administrative details, including who will receive the survey, communication, and timing, and then create your plan of action to analyze and identify priorities. Over time, you implement and monitor key recommendations, ensuring that you provide regular updates and communicate progress.

Your organization must keep your employees informed through all phases of the survey, including preparation, data collection, action planning, and implementation. You need to develop a communication plan to get out the key messages — objectives and rationale, timeframe, importance of participation, how results will be reported, and action priorities identified add implemented. Be sure to allow for two-way communication.

Explain suggestions that cannot be implemented in a timely manner and tie changes that are made back to the survey. Communicating effectively throughout the process establishes a solid foundation for future surveys.

When employees see the changes that take place as a result of their feedback, they will understand the connection between that and their response, leading to an improvement in future survey scores.

Timing the enterprise survey

If you conduct a survey only once, you lose the survey’s value in monitoring progress over time and uncovering new or developing issues. If you conduct surveys too often, fatigue can occur. To be effective, you should schedule the survey process so that any initiatives that come out of it can be incorporated into the business planning cycle.

Once it has been distributed, allow enough time for staff to consider their responses before completing the survey. Providing the opportunity to fill it out while at work will increases response rates.

Once collected and compiled, release the data to all employees without delay to signal that the information collected matters and that management has given it high priority.

Action planning and implementing results

There is little point in conducting enterprise surveys unless the information is going to be used to make your company more effective. Without action and follow through, there is no value.

The results need to be analyzed and presented in an efficient and cost-effective manner. How do you keep on top of the volume of information without letting the process weigh you down? How do you respect privacy issues? Effective evaluation of enterprise survey outcomes requires you to identify trends and patterns of key issues perceived by the workforce. Benchmarking the results from one period to the next enables you to compare valid data and opens the opportunity to monitor progress.

Outsourcing

Many dedicated HR departments do not have the time or skill to gather or analyze the data or implement the recommendations they reveal. Outsourcing an enterprise survey frees up the time of internal resources by enabling a third-party provider to oversee the design, facilitate planning, provide guidance, and implement and coordinate the survey in a way that minimizes demands on employees and their managers.

As well, employees who are not fully engaged will not provide honest input unless an external advisor assists in prioritizing results based on objective, statistically reliable data. To ensure that your organization capitalizes on the potential rooted within the results, a third-party provider is ideal.

Results

A well-designed and implemented process will guarantee that the concerns identified by your enterprise survey are the right ones. Equipped with this crucial information, your company will be in a position to address key issues, which will result in greater employee engagement.

By managing it properly, using the right resources, asking the right questions, processing and responding to the answers, and using the information to create necessary change, you can convert enterprise surveys into one of the most valuable management tools your company has.

Smart Hiring Practices

Have you ever been charmed by an applicant? Hired a friend or family member and been disappointed? Kept poor performers long after they should have been asked to leave? Added up the costs of making a poor hiring decision?

Why is our gut feel about people such a poor indicator of success? Most of us want to like the people we meet: We naturally look for positive attributes and try to see a fit where one may not exist. However, in hiring, it is important to reduce our subjective opinions and develop better predictors of future success.

Research tells us that past behaviour is one of the most reliable predictors of future behaviour. Using techniques to uncover past behaviours — a behavioural-based process — will enable you to successfully recruit new team members who can perform well in the job and who fit your organizational culture.

The process begins with the development of a well-researched position description and culminates with a behaviourally-based interview process.

Create a well-researched job description

To create an effective job description, define:

Where the position fits into the larger organization
The outcomes of the position and the tasks required to produce them
The physical requirements of a job
The mental attitudes, unique skills, and competencies required
The expected performance standards

The two types of competencies are technical and behavioural. We tend to hire people based on their technical competencies — how long they have been doing a particular task, how much training they have, whether they are qualified in a particular skill, and so on. However, we tend to terminate people based on their behavioural competencies — how they act on the job. To determine your preferred behavioural competencies, make a list of the personal attributes of your top performers or others who have performed well in the job that you are filling. What were they like? Describe their style, values, and attitudes. Now you are beginning to develop an understanding of their behavioural competencies.

Job descriptions should be linked to performance — what the new employees are supposed to do and the standards by which they will be measured.

Ask yourself, “If my hires perform well, what results should we see? How could we tell if they were effective?” Now you are beginning to craft some useful performance measures. Ask the right people the right questions

Recruitment is the process of encouraging the appropriate applicants to apply for the job. Make sure your recruitment process reaches a wide audience. Don’t discount the importance of social media: Many jobs are advertised on Facebook and Linked-In, as well as online sites like Craigslist and CareerBuilder.com. Research the sites that might draw the best applicants for your opening.

In your job advertisement, be very specific about the competencies you are looking for. If you are looking for a high-energy individual who is self-reliant, able to work independently, and make quick and accurate decisions, then say so.

When you interview, don’t be fooled by a charming and friendly applicant. Be prepared with a process that helps you understand how an applicant has responded to key situations in the past.

It is very important to ask the same questions of each applicant to provide consistency between applicants and increase the validity and reliability of the interview. Develop a list of questions, keeping them short and realistic. Design questions that ask for examples of past behaviour. For example, “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a really difficult customer. What did you do and what was the outcome?”

For each question you develop, make sure you have also determined what you believe is an accurate or effective answer. Judge your candidate against what you have decided is the kind of answer that fits your organization.

Be careful not to use leading questions, as this may prime applicants to give you the answers they think you want. An example of this is: “We think it is important to call customers by their first name. What is your approach to addressing customers by name?” Avoid trick questions or hypothetical questions like: “Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” These have little bearing on a person’s ability to do the job, unless you are scoring them on creative thinking.

Finally, always respond to all applicants, even if it is just to say that you received their résumé but have chosen other candidates for an interview. Remember, every step of the application and interview process reflects on your company and a chance to build or tarnish your reputation. The recruitment and selection process should demonstrate your professionalism at every turn.