Why it's no longer enough to just know whether or not employees are engaged. You need to know what aspect of their work is engaging them.
The topic of employee engagement is getting more attention today as leaders look toward 2010 and start to think about how to grow their businesses while motivating and retaining high performing employees. The popularity and ease of using survey tools has led many firms to go down the route of starting with data to jump start engagement.
This brings communication front and center of many employee engagement initiatives because employee engagement is a communication intervention. Here, the case is made that traditional employee engagement approaches may not be what you need. That is because, for some subsets of your employee population, increasing employee engagement survey scores may backfire and lower performance.
What causes employee engagement survey scores to lower performance?
In the fragile economy in which we're all working today, backfiring is not a good strategy. Lowering performance is particularly problematic. Thus, understanding how the engagement research has evolved to get under what we call the "conditions under which" employee performance may increase or decrease is key for success.
Valour Pulse™ is the name given to a diagnostic process developed from the 20 years of work on the drivers of firm performance. The survey questions that make up valour provide a diagnostic tool to help improve individual and firm performance.
Engaged in what is the question to ask
The valour survey work focuses on not just the question of how many employees are engaged, but engaged in what. This is critical because what employees are engaged in doing at work is more important than simply if they are or are not engaged.
- The valour survey questions uncover the conditions under which some employees will benefit from improvements in traditional employee engagement survey scores. They also show the conditions under which the performance of a subgroup of employees will decrease by improving these traditional employee engagement scores. This is because making engagement scores higher is not necessarily good for everyone.
- Valour is an acronym that stands for the four key constructs:
- VAL stands for value, we ask questions that assess the degree to which employees feel valued by their managers and peers.
- O - represents the word "ownership", and it covers questions that assess the degree to which employees feel a sense of ownership in their job and their company.
- U - is for sense of urgency, or the culture or atmosphere for moving forward, driving in a fast-paced environment.
- R - reflects rewards, that employees feel paid for performance, that rewards are fair.
Figure 1: Valour 2 x 2
In the research, we found an interaction effect between the components that make up val-o-r (traditional engagement survey items) and urgency (new concept for engagement).
Interpreting the valour pulse
Figure 1 is the legend used for the valour reports. It's provided to companies who use the valour survey. The upper right quadrant represents a state where employees score high on val-o-r (engagement basics) and high on urgency. These individuals have the internal motivation or energy to keep moving forward as the company goes through change, and they're achieving optimal results because they feel valued, have a sense of ownership in their work and company, and perceive adequate rewards for their efforts.
The people in the high opportunity quadrant have a high sense of urgency, and they usually only need a small intervention to improve value, ownership, or rewards to move them up to the engaged or high-performance state. The people in the disengaged quadrant, who are low on both criteria, are found to be those who are more likely to leave the organization. This bucket assesses your risk of turnover or employee withdrawal. This group may be in balance but in a negative way.
The last group, in the upper left quadrant, is the group that most organizations using traditional employee engagement approaches have no ability to diagnose. This is the group of people who are feeling very valued, rewarded, and positive about their job but who are doing less than your organization needs – or who have a low sense of urgency to move forward.
The missing factor in many traditional approaches to employee engagement
Thus, this line of research shows that urgency is the missing factor in many traditional approaches to employee engagement; these survey or diagnostic tools assume one size fits all.
Figure 2: Example of valour reports for four departments
When organizations use the valour questions, they receive the 2 x 2 valour reports for all views of their data (by department, location, manager, and any other demographic included in the work). As you can see from the sample 2 x 2 valour reports above, the percentage of people in each quadrant differs from manager to manager. Thus, the coaching and the intervention work needed for each manager is different.
In Figure 3 you find an example of the way the intervention process works with the valour diagnostic tool
Figure 3: Intervention strategy
Figure 3 shows the direction of the intervention with the black arrow. For those in the entitled group, you first have to lower their value, ownership and rewards. By doing this, you instill a sense of urgency for change. Our experience to date with clients shows that urgency is more difficult to manage and change than val-o-r.
Data and Dialogue Driven Leadership™
We also learned a critical lesson in our 20+ years of research on valour and energy. The data and dialogue process that grew from the measurement work gave employees voice in a way that was welcome and that led to immediate changes in the organization. The use of data and dialogue affected the sense of urgency and value and led to improved performance.
The key to performance was not the magic questions we developed, even though we have science and validation studies to support their use. The real magic is the dialogue. When managers used the data to have conversations with employees, the interventions that grew out of the dialogue were ones that led to short-term tactical performance wins and to long-term strategic growth.
Other recommendations:
OPINION: Take the journey to find the magic pill to engagement
How Everest improved engagement in tough trading conditions
Following the strategy map for engagement