ESSAY Edelman Change & Employee Engagement

he Holy Grail for global business executives today is employee engagement. And well it should be. Recent studies indicate that close to 85% of engaged employees (some studies as high as 88%) believe they can positively impact quality of their organization’s products and services. The sad truth though is that those same

studies indicate less than 1/3 of employees globally are actively engaged in their jobs.

Engagement is about individual behavior. People who have both an emotional and intellectual bond to the organization. Disen-gaged employees not only exhibit less than satisfactory behavior as it relates to perfor-

in a meaningful wayneither engage nor informWhy Engagement Surveys

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mance, they actually produce less revenue for the business.

It is for these reasons that leaders and communicators alike are spending signifi-cant resources to uncover the elements of engagement.

This is apropos to any discus-sion on engagement surveys because, in too many organiza-tions, they’re a colossal waste of time, either knowingly or unknowingly designed to tempo-rarily deflect attention from more meaningful dialogue.

How so? Rather than do what they’re supposed to do – serve as a means for employees to advise leadership on the effectiveness of its management or operating model – they instead get used by HR and communications departments to gauge morale and awareness.

The workforce, sensing this, generally responds in one of two ways: by telling manage-ment what it wants to hear, or by truthfully professing any ignorance or confusion about the company’s strategic direc-tion. The first approach accom-plishes nothing positive beyond a back-slapping opportunity for

management, and the second approach is more often than not used as the impetus to establish meaningless “morale commit-tees” or “culture task forces.”

An Outcome Not a Goal The reason for such misdirec-tion is that often organizations define “engagement” as a goal or even a strategy when in fact, it’s an outcome.

Real engagement happens as a result of a number of inter-related actions including but not limited to: management behaviors; open and transparent culture; participatory decision-making; clear and consistent communications; team-oriented project management; rewards and recognition efforts; and compensation policies.

Once engagement is defined as an outcome, organizations can stop chasing their tail, so to speak, and move their focus from symptoms to the cause.

Check out the employee engage-ment survey practices of some of the leading management consult-ing and research firms, and you’ll see that these surveys usually aren’t really conceived to engage at all; they’re conceived to gener-

The reason for such misdirection is that often organizations define “engage-ment” as a goal or even a strategy when in fact, it’s an outcome.

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Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way

. . . before even embarking on an engagement survey, commit to doing so for the right reason. . .

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ate statistically laden checklists and metrics to provide manage-ments with insight into the short-comings of their workforce. They presume senior management “knows all” and put the onus for improvement and performance on the general workforce.

This isn’t a clarion call for the abolition of engagement surveys. Quite the contrary: approached properly – as a referendum on leadership – and they can be highly valuable. The key, of course, is to approach them the right way.

Some enlightened organizations do that already. Consider the following input gleaned from a variety of top-tier companies. We’ve left the identity of these senior managers anonymous to encourage their openness about internal subject matter.

Transparency “We’re proud of what we do: we view our engagement surveys as a core strategic, competitive edge,” says a senior communi-cator at a large manufacturing company. “We believe the more highly engaged our associates are, the more productive they are. We implement a new survey every one or two years. We

don’t sugarcoat our results (for senior management). Our execu-tives talk about the results often and build engagement into our enterprise targets.” The manager adds that the company doesn’t worry about measuring scores but rather, “participation in the survey and progress made…across the enterprise … If we incented the score, associates might fill it out more positively than they really believe.”

Actions Not Words An industrial company senior manager notes that conducted properly, engagement surveys “can help you set your strategic approach by giving you a sense of what people are really doing not just saying.” Another senior communicator from a manufac-turing company concurs, observ-ing that engagement surveys can offer “a true sense of how committed people are” and how effectively management is leading – particularly related to the toughest issues facing the organization.

This manager notes that engagement surveys can also uncover cases of senior manage-ment being tone deaf. After a downsizing, for example, many employees used the survey to

Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way

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voice displeasure that former colleagues’ offices were left untouched – down to empty coffee cups still sitting on the desks. “It was bizarre,” he notes, and employees weren’t happy about it. The survey offered a safe haven for employees to raise the subject – not a communica-tions issue, per se, but one that absolutely impacted engagement.

Respond vs. React A senior communicator at a healthcare company remarks that his large organization approaches near 100% participa-tion in its engagement surveys because it “explains why they’re important” so employees will take the time to complete them. In a very telling comment, he says that, “you’ve got to be prepared not to be surprised or shocked: You’re not in the trenches every day.” Further, “You’ve got to be prepared to do something” with the infor-mation these surveys generate.

Bingo! That’s the crucial point: before even embarking on an engagement survey, commit to doing so for the right reason: to gather useful, previously unknown and under-considered informa-tion that senior management will absorb and respond to! Not

through “morale committees” that put the impetus for change on employees, but through new approaches to engaging employees’ minds and hearts.

“It’s not about hearts and flowers,” says a senior commu-nications officer at an industrial company. “It’s about shoring up gaps. Employees need to know that the feedback they provide results in real action.”

A New Approach Before identifying what to do to improve engagement at your organization, here are three things to avoid when developing research:

1: Ill-designed - Check your questions and determine if the answers actually provide any insight into how people behave. Many engagement surveys only address what people say about involvement or communications or knowl-edge sharing or collaboration. For example, engagement surveys typically ask “what is the best way to receive infor-mation about the company’s strategy or direction”, and more often than not, the typical response from employ-ees is ‘though my manager/

It’s not about hearts and flowers .. . It’s about shoring up gaps.

– senior communications officer

Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way

supervisor.” However, in today’s matrix-structured organizations, interaction with managers is often limited or muted due to reporting lines and organizational design. Without a major overhaul in such things, this is not helpful. Rather, have the survey ask about the interactions with managers/supervisors taking place today and how they might be improved. This will provide insight on thing that can be changed.

2: Action Dis-Oriented - Again, the survey or research must be conducted to enact a new set of actions within the organi-zation led by management to improve the overall relation-ship between the company and its workforce. Reassess your research instrument to see if it’s action oriented.

3: Myopic - So much engage-ment research places the respondents - employees - in a proverbial box in terms of their ability to answer holis-tically. For example, this question tends to pop up a lot on surveys, “what types of content would you like on our portal that would lead to your increased involvement in the

Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way

organization?” The responses to this question often cite “more information on our vision, strategy, priorities, etc.” However, employees may or may not even be going to the portal with any regularity as to know what’s already there.

Six ways for your Engagement Surveys to Mean Something:

• Above all, instead of just tracking and reporting on engagement across a spectrum of areas such as “management interaction” or “adherence to values” compile an overall statement reflecting the situa-tion pointing to the organiza-tion’s management model. Doing so mitigates the knee jerk reaction to apply actions against each of the areas vs. developing an overall strategy.

• Recognize the real audience. It’s not employees! The real audience is leadership! Engagement is an outcome of the company’s current management model. At a minimum, the model needs to be recalibrated to deliver a more engaged workforce. If you believe employees are the audience, then all the effort is communicating results of the survey back to them instead of

Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way

fixing the areas they identified.

• Make Engagement a senior leadership priority! Once the results are in, have senior leaders brief the organization on the findings and the solutions.

• Be consistent: implement these surveys at least once a year. Once every other year is OK as long as you have mechanisms in place to gather feedback in the intervening years. One communicator interviewed above says his organization implements “mini surveys” in the years between more extensive surveying.

• Be objective: for many compa-nies, it makes sense to engage a third party to provide an additional perspective analyzing engagement surveys, to avoid bias and make employees more confident that their anonymity will be preserved.

• Finally… be level-headed: Almost as bad as ignoring feedback is responding too aggressively, too quickly. Take the time to truly assess the feedback and what it says about leadership’s effectiveness.

The Real Value Establishing and maintaining engagement internally is all about integration and alignment. IN the end, research is meant to identify the areas in which engagement is being thwarted or advanced by the organization’s management model or how it operates the enterprise. .

The results of any research must be dissected and shared among all key functions so that a proper solution can be devised and enacted. Having individual groups or teams run around implementing tactics without any cohesion is a waste of time and resources leaving employees confused and cynical and the business itself less than optimal.

Edelman Change and Employee Engagement is the global organizational (internal) change communications consulting group of Edelman, the largest independent public relations firm in the world and the third largest overall. The mission of Edelman Change and Employee Engagement is to advise and assist organizations on strengthening the ability to implement corporate strategy and initiatives through management and employee engagement and effective communications in order to build brands and achieve business goals.

The group provides distinctive expertise in organizational effectiveness, culture transformation, strategy implementation and accessibility, CEO transition and positioning, internal branding, post-merger integration, labor-management relations, internal communications programming and research/measurement.

For more information, please visit: www.change.edelman.com

Why Engagemnet Surveys neither “engage” nor “inform” in a Meaningful Way