‘Employee engagement’ has long been used as an umbrella term to describe the connection between a company’s employees and its vision, goals and objectives. The problem with it, and the reason that nearly 70% of change programmes fail, is that it’s passive and promotes a top down, prescriptive approach to communication.
We have evangelised for many years that the best way of creating widespread involvement is through powerful and effective live experiences and events. That’s certainly the message we were conveying at last month’s Melcrum Live conference anyway.
However over the last few years the way we communicate and involve has changed. Twitter, Facebook and the increasingly integrated nature of the mobile web are allowing us to connect in ways we’d never previously considered. In our personal lives, the way we interact, share and communicate is evolving at an exciting rate.
So, why are most companies still using the same internal communications channels as they did 5 years ago?
By the end of this year Deloitte has predicted that 90% of Fortune 500 companies will have at least partially implemented some form of company wide ESN.
An ESN is basically a social network for business. It’s secure, sociable and designed to open up channels of communication within your organisation to increase crowdsourcing, collaboration and co-creation.
At the moment it seems like a new one pops up every week, but for now we think these are the most effective ESNs out there.
Tibbr is probably the most interactive of all the major ESNs. In many ways, it behaves almost exactly like Facebook. Though there are other networks that might present a slightly more ‘professional’ hub for your employees, the visual nature of Tibbr makes it a great option for encouraging participation and involvement.
Yammer has been around for a while now and it’s still one of the most popular ESNs out there. Its major selling points are its security systems and it’s advanced integration with many other online applications and networks.
From our point of view Jive is probably the most exciting ESN out there at the moment. As well as performing all the basic functionality of Yammer and Tibbr, Jive also adds some exciting new ideas into the mix. From what we’ve seen it has huge potential to increase collaboration and productivity (Jive actually claim an average figure of 15%), but it’s social functionality is also very insightful. Just like LinkedIn, Jive will recommend people within your company who, it thinks, you should get to know. These recommendations are based on your interests and professional profile and have proven to increase interactions within companies across the world.
ESNs are just one way that the digital world is reshaping engagement and internal communications. Want to know more about how you could put these tools to work for your organisation?
Please feel free to get in touch, we’ll be more than happy to help.
Last week we read an article that likened the measurement of employee engagement with the measurement of love.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but bear with us…
Love has no unit of measurement. We have no benchmark for the lowest or highest level that can be achieved. We also have no tools or technology capable of mapping or measuring it. It simply can’t be measured.
Employee engagement is the same. There are no units, benchmarks or models to work from. Like love, the best we can hope for when attempting to gauge employee engagement is a rough indication based on more measurable indicators.
Unfortunately, involvement is no more measurable than engagement – or love for that matter. However, because the implications of an involved workforce are far more noticeable than a workforce that’s simply ‘engaged’, measuring the indicators of involvement is much easier.
One of the easiest ways to build an accurate picture of the levels of involvement within your organisation is to ask questions. In his article, Kevin Kruse calls these proxy questions. Though they don’t offer a concrete metric for gauging involvement, they will give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
So, what sort of questions should you be asking to determine the levels of involvement within your organization?
First you need to know what you are aiming for. Do you know what a fully involved workforce would look like?
Once you know what your aiming for, you can then work backwards to put together questions that will determine how close you are to achieving this standard.
You might start with questions like:
– Does [team member A] work extra hours without being asked?
– Do they take ownership of initiatives without being asked?
– Do they regularly come to you with new ideas?
These are clearly just a start – but you get the idea. By answering these questions, both for individual team members and for your organization as a whole, you’ll be left with a clear indication of whether you are heading in the right direction.
Unfortunately, a technological solution that allows us to accurately measure team involvement at the touch of a button is probably a long way off. That said, estimating the level of involvement within your organization, and measuring the effectiveness of your change programmes, is a crucial part of improving your team’s productivity. Just because it’s not perfect, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.
If you’d like more information about gauging involvement within your organization, or if you’d like to know more about why our change programmes are so effective, don’t hesitate to give us a call
Rather than trying to directly measure involvement we usually see companies measure less abstract concepts that give an indication of involvement. Employee satisfaction is one of the more popular ones.
Companies have been trying to measure employee sentiment for years. In most cases this meant ‘confidential’ surveys and appraisals. Needless to say, they weren’t always reliable.
In recent years the tools and methods that companies are using to measure employee satisfaction have moved on a bit…
One of the most interesting developments has come from the surge in digital social media. Over the past year the tools and algorithms that companies are using to scan the social web for happy customers, complaints and PR opportunities have developed at an alarming rate. Companies can now tell whether the Twitter community are saying positive or negative things about a recently launched product or even compare the different ways that men and women have reacted to something online. It’s proving to be an incredibly powerful tool for mapping customer sentiment on a large scale.
So, why’s this relevant to employee satisfaction?
Well, you know how last week we were talking about ESNs (Enterprise Social Networks)? Well, companies are now starting to apply the same technologies that have proven useful whilst monitoring Twitter and Facebook to these internal communications channels.
Microsoft use Yammer to facilitate organisation wide communication and collaboration. It works really well for them. Recently however, they took things one step further. They’ve now developed an app that constantly scans the network to give real time indications of employee sentiment and emotions. The app is called Crane and is now available to anyone using Yammer.
Imagine if you could get a real-time visual indication of the overall happiness of your entire workforce at the touch of a button!
What do you think? Is the measurement of digital sentiment going to become more important for managers? Will it ever replace the employee survey? Let us know in the comments below.
Recognition is a basic human desire.
No one wants to feel like their efforts are going un-noticed, do they?
To be honest, it’s pretty rare to find a working environment that doesn’t operate some form of recognition. Maybe it’s just a pat on the back at the end of the month, or perhaps some muttered words of appreciation when a big project is finally completed.
It’s something, at least.
Unfortunately, this common, erratic approach to recognizing your team’s efforts will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction and gradual, widespread disengagement.
If it’s done well, implementing a culture of recognition within your organisation can improve individual performance, team engagement and help align your team with your organisation’s wider goals and strategies.
In short: recognition creates involvement!
What makes this technique even more appealing to managers is that you could start to see visible improvements very quickly.
Recognition shouldn’t be seen as a way to boost team morale. It shouldn’t be used as a way to get your team through a tough patch or inspire them to ‘grind through’ the current workload. Recognition should be used as a tool to help keep each member of your team working in-line with your organisational goals.
Keeping your team engaged is all about cultivating a culture of involvement. If they feel that what they are doing is helping the organization, and that they are making a positive difference, they will be more engaged, productive and fulfilled.
To create a culture of ‘productive recognition’ you should look to recognise whenever a member of your team does something that clearly furthers your organisation’s cause. This will motivate that particular individual to continue working well whilst also showing the rest of your team the type of work that’s valued within your organisation. You’ll give everyone direction.
If you implement this strategy in the right way, you will quickly see it catching on. It’s common to see whole organisations adopt this strategy within just a couple of weeks. It’s fast, effective and contagious.
Implementing a culture of productive recognition within an organization is one of the most reliable and practical ways to drastically improve involvement.
Try it. Lead by example. The results might surprise you.
If you’d like more information about how to implement an organisation wide recognition strategy, or if you would like more information about how you can use recognition to start creating a fully involved workforce, please feel free to get in touch.
Did you know;
– The average UK worker has 10 days of ‘unscheduled absences’ each year
– The average cost per worker for employers is £673 (CIPD Report)
Now consider this:
– The average ‘engaged’ employee takes 2/3 ‘unscheduled absences each year
I’ll let you do the maths.
Put simply; these figures suggest that companies who are able to create an involved workforce stand to save a considerable amount of money and lost productivity based on attendance figures alone!
It’s no secret that absenteeism is a major drain on company resources across the country. Every day that one of your team is ‘off sick’, you are losing money and wasting valuable time. Unfortunately, although many companies recognise that they need to tackle this problem, most approach it in completely the wrong way.
There are two possible approaches to tackling absenteeism. The most common approach is to enforce attendance.
Although this can be very effective in curing the symptom and delivering short-term results, unfortunately this approach is only likely to drive the employee in question to further disengage with their job and colleagues.
The second approach is to increase the autonomy and responsibility of your workforce. Though it may seem counter intuitive, team members who have more control over how and where they work are far more likely to take responsibility and get involved with what they are doing.
Clearly, this second option will work better with some team members than others. To ensure that you aren’t left with an empty office and a whole team ‘working from home’, you will need to build in some ‘outer limits’. If you feel that an employee is taking advantage of the flexibility and control you’ve given them, you need to have effective, productive systems in place to correct the problem.
As a manager, you should never approach absenteeism as a distinct problem. If someone is sick, they should be able to stay at home. However, if they are taking additional ‘sick’ days to avoid coming into work, there are clearly much deeper problems that need to be addressed in the most productive way possible.
The answer? Increase involvement!
Are you struggling with high absenteeism in your organisation? Looking for a solution? Why not get in touch and find out how we can help?
When we design a change programme we focus on a single objective. This objective might be to design the visual identity of the company, or maybe define the company’s core vision and values. We then use this objective to showcase the value and methodology of true involvement.
The purpose of these change programmes isn’t to fulfil this particular objective – though this is an important component – rather, we hope that through this exercise we are able to lay the foundations for a culture of continuous improvement.
In order to ensure continuous improvement within your organisation, you need to tick a number of boxes.
First, you need to know where you are going and be able to communicate this to your entire team. If you are a leader within your organisation, the clarity of your vision and direction is the most influential factor in determining whether your workforce will be able to innovate and improve.
Once you are clear about your collective vision, you then need to determine your reason for getting there? No, making more money doesn’t cut it here. You need a reason that’s going to motivate and drive your team forward over a period of years, not weeks.
Next, you need a practical and clear method for achieving your vision. Don’t panic, you don’t have to come up with all the answers yourself, this is the whole point of having an involved team!
This brings us on to the final, crucial point. Each of the previous objectives could be achieved by a good leader with a moderately engaged workforce. The trouble is, by leaving it there you will inevitably have your work cut out keeping your team motivated and striving for improvement. It will feel like an uphill struggle.
Perhaps the most important factor is cultivating your team’s desire to improve. It’s this desire that defines the difference between simple engagement and true involvement. When your team wants to solve problems, come up with new ideas and achieve your common goal, that’s when you’ve achieved something of real value.
When your team shares your desire to reach your goal, when it becomes their goal, your job as a leader and manager gets much simpler. You won’t have to keep motivating your staff. You won’t have to keep them on track. You wont have to force innovations and brainstorming. It’ll all just happen!
These four key components for continuous development are all also core characteristics of the involved team member. Put very simply, the only way to achieve this state of continuous improvement within your organisation is to cultivate an involved workforce.
Would you like to see continuous improvement just happen in your company? Why not give us a call to see how we can help you make it a reality.
Ownership is the key to involvement.
When we teach involvement we do so through trying to get team members to take ownership of initiatives. Through this, we hope that team members start taking ownership of the company aims, objectives and vision.
So, your aims and expectations as a leader are that each member of your team will take ownership of company initiatives and own the same vision and drive as you.
Sounds like a lot to ask of an employee, right?
To achieve this level of involvement from each member of your team, your management style needs to reflect the value each of them hold for your organisation. You can’t expect an employee who has low responsibility and limited autonomy to get fully involved with their work.
Delegation is usually seen as a way of freeing up your time to focus on more important things. Instead, how about thinking of it from the other side? Delegation gives you an opportunity to develop your team. If you delegate tasks based on ‘what would benefit ‘team member A’ most?’ rather than, ‘what don’t I have time to do?’ you’ll start to increase productivity, ownership and involvement across the board.
Thoughtful delegation is the only way to encourage and cultivate ownership within a team. If you are trying to cultivate this ownership, you need to start treating each of your team members as possible future owners of your organisation. With this mind set, you will start delegating tasks that will cultivate responsibility, accountability and ownership. Even if that team member leaves two years later, the process itself will have ensured that, for those two years, they were fully involved with their work.
How many possible future owners have you got in your team? Do you delegate with this in mind?
Well, maybe you should start….
During our session at the recent Melcrum Live event, we asked teams to tweet their description of the role of IC, as an analogy.
In no order of preference, here’s an unedited list of what they came up with:
Send us a tweet if you can build on these @involve_uk.
In a recent article on The Guardian website, Stefan Stern debates the apparent ‘labour market paradox’ that we’re currently seeing in the UK. Despite the recent years of economic instability, we’re seeing relatively high levels of employment but only marginal economic growth.
Whether there’s a link between the economic growth rate and the performance of workers across the UK is almost irrelevant. The main interest of the article was in Stern’s discussion of the merits of introducing unlimited leave.
He argues that:
“Part of the answer must lie in so-called “presenteeism”: the low productivity of people who are physically present at work but who, for a variety of reasons, are not contributing all that they could. For many people today, work really isn’t working.”
Well, we won’t argue with that.
Though it is true that a large percentage of workers in the UK are completely disengaged; is the introduction of ‘unlimited holidays’ really the answer?
Stern points to Netflix and Evernote as working examples of how this can benefit both the company and workforce. They both operate an ‘unlimited holiday’ policy and have seen some great results. But does that mean it would work for all organisations?
Clearly not!
Evernote and Netflix are both innovative companies who’s staff already show clear signs of involvement. They probably didn’t ever suffer from ‘presenteeism’ in the first place.
Though a company’s holiday policy is a crucial part of the way it encourages autonomy, responsibility and ownership amongst its workforce, it certainly shouldn’t be used as a magic solution for companies who are trying to build involvement. For those companies, the approach needs to be far more considered.
‘Presenteeism’ is the opposite of involvement. If you have team members who simply turn up to work to be there, you need to start taking action. However, rather than focusing on giving them more autonomy to choose when they are at work, your focus should be on what they do when they are at work.
Unless your workforce share the company vision, take ownership of initiatives and feel valued, they will inevitably disengage. Your job as a manager is to find ways to empower them so that they want to come to work, want to get involved and want the company to succeed. If you can reach that point, your holiday policy won’t even matter.
Are you struggling with ‘presenteeism’? Want to find out what your options are? Why not give us a call?