Essential techniques for employee engagement
"Quite simply, if communications aren’t engaging, employees won’t give them the time of day," says Graeme Ginsberg (pictured), former managing editor of research and reports for Melcrum.
In this interview, originally published on David Zinger's website, Employee Engagement: Results That Matter, Graeme discusses the results and conclusions of Melcrum's 2008 employee engagement survey and the subsequent practitioner's guide, Essential techniques for employee engagement.
Download your free summary of the survey results, and if you're a Hub member, you can claim your 25% discount on the full report.
More information about the report can also be found on the Hub's news section.
Are you surprised that employee engagement is not on the agenda of 19% of organizations and just a general philosophy in the people practices of 54% of other organizations?
For the 19%, I'm surprised, absolutely. I think to myself, “How can any organization these days afford not to put motivating employees, helping them understand the strategic direction of the organization and their part in delivering it, and encouraging them to go the extra mile, at the top of their agenda?”
The market is increasingly fluid and changeable, and organizations need to stay sharp and up their game if they’re going to compete, or in some cases even survive. My guess, though, is that for many of these 19%, it isn’t a lack of understanding about how important having a motivated, engaged workforce is.
I think it’s more a case of the leaders and managers having to juggle lots of time-consuming, stressful projects and responsibilities and feeling they just don’t have the time to conduct research, develop engagement strategies and tactics, change team structures and find new ways of working.
To them, an engaged workforce would be a "nice-to-have luxury" rather than a "must have". They’re too busy "firefighting" to recognize that it’s probably the other way round – engagement is actually a must have.
It may be argued that incorporating engagement generally into people practices is better for the organization than a formal engagement program.
With an engaged workforce, the organization would be more secure and perform better, and they wouldn’t have to do so much firefighting! Meanwhile, with the 54% of organizations that are incorporating engagement as “just a general philosophy”, I think how surprising these results are will depend on how much you stress the word “just” – too much stress and it implies that this approach is an inferior one.
It may be argued that incorporating engagement more generally into people practices is better for the organization than having a formal engagement program. After all, shouldn’t we be looking to engage employees as much as possible – through all our leadership and manager communications, change communications, business strategy communications, and so on – and not just within the context of an engagement program.
Perhaps organizations have the potential to achieve higher, more sustained levels of engagement by letting the "spirit" of engagement flow through all their initiatives – even those areas that might be considered “necessary but by their nature not intuitively natural platforms for engagement” (for example, health and safety messages) or “difficult enough just to get the information across” (for example, financial results).
Tim Haynes, director of executive development at GlaxoSmithKline, makes this point really strongly in the Guide in the context of Appreciative Inquiry and employee surveys. I would think that there isn’t ultimately any one correct approach for all, though – it’ll depend on the nature of the organization, the strategic direction, the structures in place, the culture and so on.
The acceleration of focus on employee engagement since 2005
Aside from the changing business environment, are there any other factors that you think have encouraged such an acceleration of focus on employee engagement since 2005?
I think that socioeconomic trends have had a colossal impact. Organizations have been understanding and adapting to the changing business environment, but they’ve also been understanding and adapting to the changes in employee attitudes, values and behaviors.
Ten years ago, the internet was beginning to give people more tools to question what they were being told. They could quickly and easily go online, get back all sorts of data and viewpoints, and develop their own, informed opinions. Since then, this has really mushroomed – not only access to more information, but also the ability to express themselves, to discuss and share views extensively through interactive social media – blogs, online video like YouTube, podcasting, wikis and social networks like Facebook and Second Life.
I think that socioeconomic trends have had a colossal impact on employee engagement.
People use these technologies in their personal lives and they expect to use them at work. They aren’t going to accept traditional, "static" communications and channels anymore. Even e-mail has become old-fashioned and frustrating for them – their inboxes are totally overloaded with endless e-mails containing lines and lines of dry text.
Organizations have really had to re-examine how they phrase, present and deliver their communications to employees. Quite simply, if communications aren’t engaging, employees won’t give them the time of day.
We did a social media survey in June 2007 for our report How to Use Social Media to Engage Employees and I think this really illustrates just how seriously organizations have been taking engagement and changes in employee behaviors and needs when it comes to technology. For example, half the respondents (communication and HR professionals) said their organizations were already using online video to engage employees and another 27% said they would be introducing it by June 2008.
Meanwhile, a quarter of respondents said their organizations were already using online social networks, and another quarter were set to introduce them by June 2008. Organizations are definitely taking note of what people are doing in their personal lives. But, there again, it’s not totally surprising. A lot of the time we’re talking about “organizations listening to their audiences”, but it’s not “us and them” – a lot of these respondents have been using these technologies in their personal lives themselves.
The guide’s 4 techniques of employee engagement
What conclusions do you have about the key drivers of employee engagement?
Senior leadership and direct supervisors are still by far the most important drivers – nothing has really changed there since our engagement survey in 2005. Around 25% of respondents in organizations that conduct a driver analysis said senior leadership is the most important driver and around 25% said direct supervisors.
If leaders and managers are giving the 'wrong' messages, employees feel insecure, confused, cynical, demotivated – in short, disengaged.
This probably isn’t too much of a surprise since these are the people that employees look to for understanding what the organization’s values are and where it’s heading, and these are the people who shape the environment the employees work in and their day-to-day work. If leaders and managers are giving the "wrong" messages, employees feel insecure, confused, cynical, demotivated – in short, disengaged.
The next most highly rated drivers in our survey were “compensation and benefits”, “opportunities for career advancement” and “people-centric culture” – each rated as most important by around 9% of respondents. I mention this to people and they say, “Well the first 2 are hardly surprising, everyone wants more money in the bank and a bigger desk to work on”, but I don’t think it’s only about that at all. There are really emotional elements underpinning these – salary, skills and job title have a major impact on self-esteem, confidence, security, trust and so on.
If organizations are keen to engage their employees, they need to look more deeply at the drivers – not just which drivers are important, but also why they’re important. The Guide focuses on 4 key techniques:
- action teams;
- appreciative inquiry;
- message maps; and
- storytelling.
Very broadly speaking: Employee action teams are created to work with leaders to identify engagement goals and develop strategies to achieve them.
Appreciative inquiry brings employees at all levels together in a collaborative process to discover what are the factors that have made the organization or an initiative succeed, then envision ideals built on these factors and design how these ideals can be turned into a reality.
Message maps are a way of capturing the core messages simply and efficiently. The focus in the messaging process is on achieving the deepest understanding of the topic, who the key audience are and what that audience’s needs are.
Storytelling is the gathering, distilling and communicating of essential information about the organization through a narrative or narrative elements. This brings a "human" quality to the facts and data so employees can really relate to it.
Message maps and the rationale for the 4 techniques of employee engagement
I think the technique that many readers may be unfamiliar with is message maps. I believe a message map is a visual communication tool to help individuals tell their organization’s story more effectively. Is that correct? Can you tell us a little more about this.
Message maps help managers capture the core messages of a topic. The topic might be something quite broad and abstract in nature – like where the organization, an initiative or an individual is heading. Or it might be something tangible – for example, an announcement about a product launch or annual conference.
Message maps act like blueprints that guide all subsequent communication on the topic.
Message maps act like blueprints that guide all subsequent communication on the topic – ensuring consistency, whether it’s a CEO speech, an employee newsletter, website copy, a press release, marketing collateral, or whatever.
When it comes to creating the message map after the messaging session, less is definitely more – it’s presenting core and supporting messages so they’re really transparent and accessible. But the message map doesn’t necessarily need to be "visual" in the sense of having arrows and boxes.
It’ll depend really on the organizational culture and the topic – the message map could equally be a more traditional page of bulleted text. The Guide gives an example of each type of message map.
Can you tell us why you focused on these particular techniques? What was the background to this guide?
It was becoming clear to us from our conversations with communication and HR professionals that the discussion around engagement had moved on considerably. Organizations weren’t so much debating what employee engagement means and whether it can drive business performance – they were now telling us that they wanted to know how they could actually achieve it.
We had already produced our Employee Engagement report in 2005 – a very comprehensive research report covering the strategic issues around engagement – and we realized that one of our Practitioner’s Guides would be the best way to provide the hard-hitting “how to” information that they needed for implementation.
Action teams, Appreciative Inquiry, message maps and storytelling quickly emerged as the techniques most widely used by organizations.
We talked to practitioners at our annual employee engagement conferences in the UK, US, Australia and Europe and they told us that they really wanted to understand the techniques for engaging employees, rather than simply getting more information about particular channels. Action teams, Appreciative Inquiry, message maps and storytelling quickly emerged as the techniques most widely used by organizations – and also the ones that people wanted to know most about – so we focused on them.
Readers will gain a thorough understanding of what the techniques are, why organizations need them and how to apply them. Each chapter is written by a leading engagement expert, who walks readers through the steps of the process, providing templates, meeting agendas, sample questions and other tools so the readers can get up and running straight away.
There are also case studies to illustrate how the processes have been applied in major organizations, including McDonald’s, Rolls-Royce, Royal Mail, DRS Technologies and O2. The chapter authors are:
- Action teams – Linda Dulye, President and Founder, L.M. Dulye and Co.
- Appreciative Inquiry – Caryn Vanstone, Business Director, Ashridge Consulting.
- Message Maps – David Grossman, President and Principal, dg&a.
- Tony Quinlan – Principal, Narrate.
(N.B. Hub members. As part of the Hub's editorial board Linda and David are both available to answer questions from Hub members. Pose your questions to them anytime.)
Are there any other statistics in your latest survey research of 1,625 professionals in HR and communications that stood out for you?
I’m certainly surprised by how many organizations aren’t measuring employee engagement. Around a quarter of organizations with engagement on the agenda use a dedicated survey and 44% use a standard opinion survey, but a quarter still aren’t measuring it at all.
Those organizations with a formal program are much more likely to use a dedicated survey than those that have engagement as part of a general philosophy, but even 7% of those with a formal program don’t measure.
Also, a really important and interesting area is regional variation. We’ve recently published some very extensive research, How to Communicate with a Global Workforce, and national culture is a very major factor when it comes to engagement.
Global organizations have to be very careful when they’re looking at engaging employees in different countries and not just take a 'one-size-fits-all' approach.
For example, if you look at those key engagement drivers mentioned earlier – senior leadership and direct supervisors – the perception of what "good" leadership or management is may be very different from country to country. For example, employees in North America and Western European countries tend to like their leaders to involve them in decision-making, while those in Russia and Eastern countries expect their leaders and managers to be authoritative
Actually, it’s even more complex than this. Even sweeping terms for territories like “the West” are misleading – there can be quite major differences within any particular territory also. For example, in our employee engagement survey data, if you look at "large" organizations (i.e., more than 10,000 employees), 17% of respondents from large organizations in North America (US and Canada) said their organization doesn’t have employee engagement on the agenda, compared with 3% from UK large organizations.
And, when it comes to techniques being used by large organizations, employee action teams are significantly more prevalent in North American organizations compared with those in the UK, while storytelling is significantly more prevalent in UK organizations compared with those in the US.
So, global organizations have to be very careful when they’re looking at engaging employees in different countries and not just take a "one-size-fits-all" approach. They can’t just adopt engagement strategies or techniques and apply them in the same way across all their different offices.
Hub member discounts
Don't forget, you can download a free summary of the key findings from the employee engagement survey, and Hub members receive a 25% discount on the Practitioner's Guide to essential techniques for employee engagement.
Network with your peers
In addition to the networking opportunities to be had via your membership to the Hub – including the forthcoming free event in Chicago – and also the Communicators' Network, David Zinger also runs a social networking site centered around engagement which you might like to check out.
Published by Melcrum in 2008.
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What is Appreciative Inquiry?