Employee Engagement is more than just a warm feeling.

invigor8’s Peter Gannon explains more

New market entrants, cost pressures, innovations in products and technology, emerging brands, globalisation, changing consumer patterns and service expectations, shareholder value and City expectations. These are the challenges facing every business and most will be on your senior team’s agenda in some form or other.

Many organisations struggle with both the sheer range of challenges and the pace of change. The degree of difficulty they face is then frequently made worse by the vast number of projects set up that result in often disjointed and conflicting initiatives that confuse employees and deliver little real improvement.

A particular invigor8 focus – and one our clients especially value - is employee engagement. That is, engaging everyone from the top to the front-line to deliver the brand promise and realise the full potential of any investment.

Here are the essential ingredients for an engaged workforce capable of delivering sustained differentiation and competitive advantage:

1. A Common Cause is crucial. Your business needs an agreed and aligned strategy around a clear purpose that all can sign up to. ‘This is common sense’, you say, but so many companies fall at this first hurdle, in fact the vast majority of organisations fail here and, significantly, this usually starts with senior teams not being rigorous enough in their strategic planning and then failing to link up the various strands and, in many cases, individuals actively working to not engage and co-operate with one an other.
   
   
2. Naturally high performing people are attracted to strong brands. So ensure you research your market and customers thoroughly and develop branded products and services that really do differentiate. Ensure your brand values translate in to strong experiences and emotions for customers that can be delivered by outstandingly passionate employees. More about achieving this passion shortly.
   
   
3. You need to develop one strong explicit culture within the organisation (not lots of sub cultures):
   1. A clear, memorable vision about where you are headed is a vital component here.
   2. Next, an agreed set of internal values – expressed in every day terms that are developed by and owned by the whole business. This is a point often missed; too often values are developed by top teams on away days and then imposed on the rest of the organisation as if they came from Jupiter. Indeed, they might as well have come from there – top teams rarely speak in the language of the front line!
   3. So involve your colleagues and research thoroughly.
   4. Make sure the values are translated into behaviours and test them out. Do they engender enthusiasm within the work force? Do they align with your brand promise? Will they deliver a real difference for your customers – because they impact positively on all the key ‘touch points’ - and for you?
      
      
4. Communication & Engagement of all of this – and effectively - comes next. Significantly, many companies stall here, too. Effective communication is not just fancy, pretty posters – but this is just what many organisations do. Then they lose energy and momentum and, a year on, those posters serve merely as embarrassing reminders of what you don’t live up to!
   
   So, a robust plan of cascading the clear, consistent messages throughout the organisation is required.
   
   Ideally deliver it through the line, equipping your leaders to not just tell it, but to involve employees in discussing the issues:
   1. What’s the vision, the strategy, and what are your brand and internal values. Where have they come from and why do they matter?
   2. What do you expect of your people – as brand ambassadors – and why.
   3. How will the leadership team drive, support and live this too.
   4. How will we all explore – in teams and as individuals – how to make a difference and deliver the brand promise: Regular team based sessions designed to engage people in developing real action plans around what people can do to make a positive difference today, tomorrow, next week etc.
      
      

Ensure this approach becomes a way of life. Stick with it. Insist leaders drive it and encourage people to work together in a positive way. Support and coach your leaders and help equip them to deal with difficult situations.

Importantly, these are not new and unique skills required for this curious thing called engagement – they are core leadership skills. You shouldn’t need a whole new stream of leadership training (and the budget to go with it!). This is about focusing the training and development you already do. Too often, we encounter examples where training and development activity is one of the major sources of the mixed messages that get in the way of a clearly communicated strategy and priorities.

Always, keep up the communication – tell the organisation what progress is being made: Tell them how they are making a difference, celebrate the heroes and heroines who impress your customers.

5. Measure it! Develop the key measures that matter to your business. Ensure these measures align with the vision, the brand strategy and values. This should mean that you will have critical measures around customer loyalty, employee engagement and innovation / processes as well as the usual financials! Then let people know about the figures and ensure leadership behaviours don’t result in inadvertently delegating all the non-financial measures because if they do, you won’t get the results you want. Too often senior executives unconsciously sabotage the whole approach by travelling round their ‘estate’ and simply asking about the financials and ignoring the other questions that relate to employee commitment, new ideas, customer feedback and the like. As we all know, people watch and pay attention to what you actually do day in day out, not what you merely say on the set piece occasions.
   
   
6. Finally, motivate! Ensure your reward and recognition systems align with your key measures – the results you want. Bonuses might be realised through achieving targets across the spectrum, not purely on the financials. Celebrate people and teams doing great things day in day out. Celebrate the little things too, by letting people know when they have done something well.
   
   Promote people who get the job done well but who also achieve it in a way that reflects your cultural values.

And stick with it, through bad times as well as good! Too many organisations, put ‘culture and employee engagement’ on the ‘back burner’ because, ‘we’re experiencing difficult trading conditions right now’. The best organisations realised long ago that it’s precisely the strong culture and their passionate people that made the difference when times were tough and it was this persistence that helped them win through.

Sustainable success is every organisation’s goal. There are many factors at work but if you’re serious about being around for the long term; you have to get serious about engagement.

About invigor8

invigor8 specialises in developing Business, Marketing and People Strategies to help clients achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

We promote powerful links between HR and Marketing to impact on results, internally and externally: Culture Change, Leadership, Brand Development & Loyalty, Service Excellence & Employee Engagement & Development.

For further information about Employee Engagement and invigor8’s approach, please contact Peter Gannon:

+44 (0) 1943 850058
peter@invigor8.eu