Nigel McPolin CEO | ETIMES2

Bottom-Up Employee Engagement

7 STEPS TO IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Introduction Time after time we read research stating that Employee Engagement is high on the priority list for organizations. The key question for many of these organizations concerns how they can devise an engagement strategy that brings maximum return, both in terms of engagement levels and also in productivity and contribution. This challenge is made more difficult as employee engagement as concept, is evolving as our understanding of it deepens. We are now understanding that we can’t ‘do engagement unto employees’ as that conflicts with the ethos of engagement. We know that for an engaged culture to take root and be sustainable, we need to involve all individual employees in devising, creating and shaping this engaged culture. As a result, there is a definite movement towards ‘bottom up’ engagement. Bottom Up Engagement I wrote about this evolution on 30th June 2015 in my LinkedIn blog (Employee Engagement: A Bottom Up Approach) following a recent article in Forbes, suggesting that an engaged workforce cannot be achieved solely by top down corporate initiatives. Employee engagement is a deeply personal and individual experience. It is driven by emotion and is the result of the individual’s whole experience of working with your organization. These experiences have been accumulating since the day s/he read your job advertisement and decided to apply. So, it then is reasonable to assume that any engagement building initiative designed and rolled out by an organization needs to connect with each individual. It needs to connect with each individual’s experiences, expectations, aspirations and feelings about working in your organization. Generic engagement initiatives such as dress down Fridays, or permission to decorate his/her desk etc. are fun and help to create a happy environment but won’t achieve the results you are seeking. It is important to consider two points when thinking about disengaged employees in your workforce:

1. Many of the disengaged employees in many workplaces are actually valuable employees with skills, talents, knowledge, expertise and experience that your organization could actually benefit from. If only you knew how to re-engage and tap into this talent.

2. Many, but not all, of the disengaged employees in many workplaces are people who

care. They care about what they want out of a job and what a job should offer them.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

They care about doing a good job. They care about their own career and what it means. Somewhere along the line they lost something and could provide your organization with a very valuable insight into what caused their current situation.

So, if we consider these two points in our engagement efforts, what do we need to do in order to re-engage these valuable resources that our organizations spent a lot of money to recruit, train and embed in our workforces? It will certainly cost a lot to either remain with the status quo or replace them when the time comes. Allowing a disengaging working environment to evolve and take root is also bad news for your employees. It is bad news for their mental and physical health as it creates stress. Disengagement is clearly linked to increased workplace accidents, sickness absence, and quality issues. Somewhere along the way, many of your disengaged employees learned a set of expectations that tells them that participation does not carry sufficient reward and therefore contributions are withheld. The Solution The most cost effective solution is to engage and re-engage employees and drive high performance through connecting with each employee on an individual level and tapping into his/her passions, emotions and aspirations. Empower the individual employee to create a new set of positive experiences in your organization and learn a new set of expectations - a set of expectations that tells him/her that it is worth participating and contributing. By reconnecting with individual employees your organization will learn what was driving disengagement in the first place. The feedback you will gather in this process will be much richer than the usual employee engagement survey. This journey will teach your organization valuable lessons about your people and what drives performance in your teams, not just in the organization. Employee engagement is about digging down deeper than the survey and beyond organizational benchmarking figures. But how can you achieve this? In the following pages, I have highlighted 7 Key Steps to an Engaged Workforce. These steps will drive engagement and performance in your organization.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

1. Organizational culture vs team culture A lot of focus is placed on the culture of organizations with a frequent emphasis on living the values of the organization. In our view, this is too vague and distant for many individual employees. The organizational values poster in the foyer doesn’t generate the desired interest, motivation and engagement. Why not? The organization and its culture is made up from all the team cultures that exist below it. The culture in each team is created and influenced by the individuals within that team – how they communicate, work together and with the various skills, abilities and attitudes they bring to their work. The individual employee is not totally fired by the organizational values because s/he can only recognize a snippet of relevance – i.e. the contribution of his/her team values reflected in the organizational values and culture. The individual, therefore, does not readily identify with what isn’t recognizable and relevant – organizational culture and values are too distant. Technology, such as etimes2, has enabled us to dig deeper than organizational values and culture. We can now define the culture within teams and the values that are important within that team. 2. Start engaging from the bottom up I have already commented on the bottom-up approach taken by etimes2 in the introduction, so I will keep this short and sweet. By defining team culture and values, we are increasing the opportunities for individual employees to recognise and readily identify with these. People like to know what is expected and what it takes to be considered as successful, or even just as good at your job. So, the first step is to clarify culture, values and success criteria within the team environment, rather than the larger organization. More than that, etimes2 provides individual employees with feedback on their contribution to the team culture and empowers them to contribute to an engaged team culture. We can then build engagement upwards through the organization from this point.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

3. 360° data and information The more high quality information you have in any aspect of life, the better you will be for it. We always do better and make the right decisions when we are well and reliably informed. Haven’t we always coaxed learners to gather the facts and data when delivering decision making and problem solving training sessions? The same applies to employee engagement

where we need to understand the complete picture that is driving engagement and disengagement in our organizations. However, it is not enough simply to identify the drivers of engagement or disengagement and design a corporate engagement strategy for the year ahead. We must gather data at all levels of the organization and develop an in-depth understanding of engagement in your workplace. By focusing on a bottom-up engagement strategy, etimes2 actually gathers more relevant data for our clients than other engagement software providers. Etimes2 goes much deeper and further than the traditional survey, providing you with real time data and information through our live dashboards. We don’t stop at how engaged your employees are. We build engagement. Real Time Feedback at 4 Levels Etimes2 provides in-depth insights to engagement drivers and feedback at organizational, manager, team and individual levels. As an engagement building platform, etimes2 encourages individual employees to create action plans to tackle their own personal disengagers as well as providing opportunities for involvement in decision making and problem solving. You will have real time feedback on how your employees are contributing as well as how many opportunities are provided for contribution. Etimes2 provides this data immediately. There is no waiting for reports and no waiting for further discussions and focus group feedback. Etimes2 digs deep into what really matters and what is actually happening and tells you immediately. 4. Feed data into your HR processes The data provided by etimes2 is of huge value to client organizations and can be used throughout the HR function. First, individuals are encouraged to hold more conversations with their direct line managers through the prompted action plans to tackle their disengagers. This will lead to more informed performance management and appraisal conversations as line managers get to understand their team members better. In fact, such conversations will encourage

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

employees to share their engagement drivers with their line managers and devise plans to increase engagement, contribution and performance. More importantly, though, client organisations are more informed on each team and department within the organization and can tailor HR activities, such as recruitment, onboarding etc., to suit. For example, by understanding how different the culture, values and success criteria are within different teams, HR can focus recruitment processes to select employees that fit into that environment. This information can be communicated throughout the recruitment process to attract the candidates you want to apply. The data gathered will also inform your learning and development programmes, particularly within management and leadership development. The real-time dashboards will immediately demonstrate where there are disengaged ‘hot spots’ in your organization so you can devise an appropriate intervention. Etimes2 will help you attract employees in the same way as you attract customers. They will see an organization clear on its culture and values but also recognizing how these vary within specific team environments. They will see an organization recognizing and valuing the different talents, skills and approaches that work best in different team cultures and empowering high performance through recognition and nurturing of team cultures. 5. Employee first Many organizations believe the best way to provide excellent customer service is to forcefully repeat the mantra ‘our customer is king’ and ‘the customer is always right’ at the expense of looking after their employees. This is a mistaken and unsustainable approach. It is all good and well to have excellent customer service objectives and strategies. I can’t imagine many organizations doing too well if they didn’t look after the welfare and interests of their customers. It is just plain good business sense to look after our customers.

If you really value your customers, however, then you will put your employees first. You will focus on training, developing and valuing your employees and basically treat them as you want them to treat your customers. You want your customers to be dealt with by highly informed, motivated and engaged employees who are advocating your products and services. They are

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

saying to your customers ‘this is where you get the best product and service. This is where you will return next time because you will remember how we treated you’. We all know the places where we have had the best customer service. They have been in organizations where the employees are well trained, valued and engaged. These employees know and care about your customer experience because they know and care about their products and their employer’s reputation. They are bought in. They are powerful advocates for your business and are your biggest brand advocate. Etimes2 provides you with the immediate ability to put all your employees first, no matter how many you employ, by increasing connectivity and communication throughout your organization. Etimes2 helps your employees understand and overcome their disengagers and creates opportunities for each employee to contribute to the success of both their team and organization. We start this off by enabling each individual to define and sense their own success and then contributing to team success. 6. Create genuine opportunities In the last section, I talked about creating opportunities for each employee to increase his/ her contribution to team and organizational success. Etimes2 provides the process by which senior management can connect directly with all employees and enable employees to get involved in serious decision making and problem solving through our “Boardroom” feature.

We also give you the ability to involve everyone in local decision making and problem solving within teams, where all members have an equal voice. It is objective, democratic and inclusive where the loudest voice doesn’t always win the day. We need all our team members to be pulling in the same direction, even if some members approach things a little differently. A variety

of approaches, styles and thinking brings creativity if managed right. It is also beneficial to allow all the experience within the team to be leveraged. The opportunities for increased contribution have to be both real and carry some value for employees and team members. We always approach each situation, whether we want to admit it or not, with the one question in mind – “What is in this for me?” This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Does the opportunity provide possible participants a chance to

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

progress their careers, or learn new skills, reconnect with some colleagues from other parts of the organisation, or simply to be seen as a valuable employee? I go back to my earlier assertion, many employees like to feel as if they are seen as being good at their job and are a valuable asset to the organization. Etimes2 provides our clients with the process by which they can start to open valuable and genuine opportunities for all employees to contribute more. 7. Develop engaging leaders It goes without saying that it is absolutely vital that organizations take some measures to develop engaging leaders and managers at all levels. All the best planned employee engagement initiatives, both bottom-up and top-down, can be scuppered and turned into a highly disengaging experience, just because of weak leadership or management. Many of us have experienced this type of leader. In the same way as client organizations can leverage the data generated by etimes2 to attract and recruit the best candidates, they can also target leadership development. The team heat map clearly indicates where disengagement is trending in your organization and a closer look at the team data can clearly illustrate what is driving the disengagement. This enables client organizations to target their leadership budget where it is most needed. The data can also be used when appointing team leaders and managers to specific teams or departments. The real-time dashboards will provide a clear picture of the challenge facing the new manager and the engagement drivers s/he will have to rectify. The dashboard also clarifies the team culture. So, all of this information can be communicated throughout the recruitment process and you can attract the types of leaders you need and who will drive performance through team and individual engagement.

Conclusion If you want sustainably engaged employees who enjoy spending their working time in an engaging workplace, then you need to fully understand the full picture in your organisation. Etimes2 can provide you with the insights you need at individual employee, team, manager and organizational level. We give you the real time feedback that makes a real and valuable difference to performance and productivity in your organization. Etimes2 helps you attract new hires, target specific leadership development exactly where it is needed and plan your engagement strategy with impressive accuracy. Quick and easy to deploy, you can have etimes2 working for you as soon as you decide it is the engagement building software for you.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

What is your next step to drive team and individual performance through increasing employee engagement? Nigel McPolin is the creator and founder of Etimes2, an Engagement Building Platform that drives sustained behaviour, engagement and performance throughout the organisation. Visit www.etimes2.com for more information and a free trial.