an unstoppable employee engagement strategy for 2016

7/26/2019 An Unstoppable Employee Engagement Strategy for 2016

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20/04/2016 An Unstoppable Employee Engagement Strategy for 2016 | Billy Bob Brigmon | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unstoppable-employee-engagement-strategy-2016-billy-bob-brigmon?forceNoSplash=true 1/5

An Unstoppable Employee Engagement Strategy

for 2016

Employee engagement is hot! There is more hype surrounding employee

engagement than ever before. According to Deloittes 2015 Global Human Capital

Trendssurvey, employee engagement and culture issues exploded onto the scene,

rising to become the number one challenge companies face around the world.

Smart, well-financed, vendors are pouring into this marketoffering innovative

solutions for transforming the employee experience through open, anonymous,

employee feedback.

Over the last few years, the most common strategy for improving employee

engagement has been to increase the frequency of employee engagement surveys.

HR leaders have used employee engagement survey results primarily as an early-

warning system for engagement problems.

But, just as the hype is reaching its peak, some of the early adopters of

employee engagement surveys are jumping off the bandwagon. KPMG

made headlinesrecently when they announced they are phasing out employee

engagement surveys. Robert Bolton, the lead partner of KPMGs Global HR

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Transformation Center of Excellence, had this to say about employee engagement

surveys:

There is a massive industry behind the belief that if a company drives

up engagement, productivity will increase. In reality, engagement is

an ill-defined term. And measuring it once or twice a year with some

static survey is not very scientific, no matter how its dressed up toappear so."

It turns out that senior executives have plenty of problems to manage already.

An early-warning system that helps surface more problems, more frequently, is

not the kind of help that CEOs want from their Chief HR Officers. It seems as

though many have forgotten that employee engagement is simply a

means to an end, not the end itself.

Dr. Jim Harter, Gallups Chief Scientist of Employee Engagement, believes that

too much focus on the survey scores produces greatly inflated engagement scores

that create a false comfort: Reporting high numbers seems to make a lot

of leaders feel good, but those wont get them where they need to be."

Galluphas been measuring employee engagement since 2000. Their reports

divide employees into of three categories: Engaged, Not Engaged, andActively

Disengaged. Most strategies for improving employee engagement are focused on

investments that hope to move employees from the less engaged categories intothe engaged category. This approach is expensive, risky, and slow. If you want

to use employee engagement to directly contribute to 2016 business

impact, then your strategy should focus on mobilizing your most

engaged employees.

Lets explore each of these groups to better understand the rationale for this

strategy:

If your business model depends on your retaining actively disengaged employees,

then your business is in big trouble. Your company would love to see a lot of

voluntary attrition among this group of employees, but these employees do not

leave voluntarily. If they had better options for employment, they

wouldnt be camped out at the water cooler spreading seeds of

discontent among their peers. Their responses to employee engagement

surveys are pretty easy to spot. They answer every question as negatively as

possible and then use open-ended comments to take personal shots at senior

leaders. Their feedback is not constructive. Disregard it. If you have an

unusually high percentage of actively disengaged employees (Gallups numbers
http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspxhttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-engagement-isnt-getting-better-gallup-shares-mark-c-crowley


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are usually around 18%), then you have a problem, but it still wouldnt change our

recommendation to first focus on mobilizing your engaged employees.

The assumption behind a lot of the investments in employee engagement is that t

With just a little persuasion, they can be pulled into the "engaged employee

club". If this were true, I think we'd see employee engagement initiativesproducing quicker impact.

Going into 2015, Deloitte foundthat employee engagement was a top priority for

87% of companies globally.

The investment pouring into this space is unprecedented

and yet the numbers, according to Galluparen't moving.

In fact, they haven't really moved since the turn of the century.

Even if Chief HR Officers can convince their C-Suite colleagues that growing the

number of

engaged employees will lead to business impact, they can't promise that their

recommendations will work. In a recent Deloitte surveyamong 80 of the most

advanced users of engagement surveys, only half believe their executives know

how to build a culture of engagement. (It was actually a much lower percentage

for the broader survey population.) Employees check out for a lot of

reasons, only some of which are related to your workplace culture.

Building a culture of engagement is a worthwhile endeavor, but its a long-term

investment.

In order to earn the patience of the CEO to pursue these long-term culture

investments, you need to leverage engagement to directly impact the business in

the short-term. The next group is your best opportunity for immediate business

impact...

In spite of all the flaws in your organization, theseemployees are engaged anyway.

Most employee engagement initiatives take these committed employees for grant

Churn among this group of employees is particularly expensive because they make

Every company wants these employees and you should assume that ot

This group isn't comprised of whiners, so there may not be any warnings before th

Yet,your company probably knows very little about this group.

There are many definitions of employee engagement but most of them

involve discretionary effort - an employees willingness to contribute above and

beyond their job description. Marc Woods, whowrote a book based on the

results of his research on discretionary effort, said, Employees have far

more potential to contribute to their organization than even their managers
https://www.i-l-m.com/Insight/Edge/2013/May/discretionary-effort-going-the-extra-milehttp://dupress.com/articles/employee-engagement-strategies/https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-engagement-isnt-getting-better-gallup-shares-mark-c-crowley?trk=v-feedhttp://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/introduction-human-capital-trends.html


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imagine. Why wouldnt you want to create an environment in which

discretionary effort is able to flourish? The discretionary effort of your

most engaged employees is a tremendous resource that you can tap

into for immediate business impact in 2016.

Employee surveys are still an effective feedback system, but the design of those

surveys must adapt for this purpose. Many employee engagement surveys are

designed to learn why unengaged employees are not engaged. Learning the

percentage of employees that are unengaged and their reasons for lack of

engagement is interesting, but not particularly useful for generating 2016

business impact. Asking more business-centric questions gives

employees an opportunity to demonstrate they are engaged while also

producing more actionable feedback for management. Those employees

that provide thoughtful, solution-oriented responses to business-centric

questions are self-selecting as engaged employees. Separate those responses

(expect 10%-20% of total survey population) from the other responses and

prioritize your next actions based on what youve learned from this community.

If your survey platform enables targeted follow up, then we recommend follow up

surveys throughout the year that only go to the engaged community. Some of

those targeted follow ups should give your engaged community opportunities to

opt-in to collaborative virtual forums and facilitated workshops. By choosing to

sign up for these collaborative opportunities, the members of your engaged

community have the option to move out of anonymity and make themselves

known to your leadership team. Once employees learn that the path to

internal influence begins with submitting valuable feedback, you'll see

employees adopt an entirely different attitude towards surveys.

Dr. John Kotter is a Harvard Business School professor and NY Times best-

selling author, regarded by many as the authority on leadership and change.

Kotters 8 Step Process for Leading Change begins with Create a Sense of

Urgency. Heres his advice for creating a sense of urgency:
http://www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/


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Written by

Would you recruit traitors (actively disengaged) or pacifists (not engaged) to join

your army of volunteers? To get widespread support for your

employee engagement strategy, you need to demonstrate a sense of

urgency for creating business impact. Mobilizing your employees who are

already engaged is an unstoppable strategy for rapid business impact.

How would you deploy an urgent army of volunteers in yourcompany? I look forward to your comments. Please share with others who have

a point of view on employee engagement.

Billy Bob Brigmon is Founder and CEO of mpathy. We design and execute high-

impact employee feedback campaigns. To learn more about how mpathy

uses anonymous employee feedback with targeted follow-ups to

mobilize engaged employees, click here.

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an unstoppable employee engagement strategy for 2016

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