Engagement Means Everyone

By Carol Patton

Employee engagement is not just HR’s responsibility.

That’s the basic premise of Engagement Intelligence, a program recently developed by global professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). One of the program’s goals is to help organizations understand that while HR is responsible for the process of measuring and driving engagement, improving it is actually everyone’s responsibility, explains Nik Shah, a principal at both PwC in Washington, D.C., and the firm’s Saratoga Group, which performs workforce and benchmarking analytics.

“This is not about [employee] satisfaction or how happy or unhappy your workforce is,” he says. “Although it’s an important measure, this is more about how you drive engagement and reduce the barriers to productivity to drive that business outcome, that business performance. That’s a thrust every leader should have…how do we get our people to be more engaged so we win as a team?”

Throughout this process, Training departments can play a pivotal role. Their job is to enhance curriculum or the overall learning environment, enabling people to develop their careers and eliminate barriers to professional growth, Shah says. That often leads to higher productivity and retention rates, which, in turn, improves their company’s financial and operational performance.

But HR often needs to kick-start the process, Shah says. Key steps include:

• Defining your business objective. Clarify what you’re trying to achieve by having a more engaged workforce. You’ll develop a better understanding of the key business drivers in your company and how enhanced engagement can drive performance.
• Conducting an employee engagement survey. This presents HR with an opportunity to work with other departments, positions, or functions, such as Training, Marketing, and Finance, and with line managers to design a survey that is relevant to the overall business. Make sure responses can be measured between business cycles or years. For example, when employee engagement increases, what financial and operational outcomes are affected? Does employee turnover decline? Does the number of worker grievances decrease? Does attendance or productivity rise? “We believe it’s imperative to engage line managers in the design process [and] collaborate with them because that’s where the real change is going to happen,” Shah explains.
• Showing survey results as actionable business data. “It’s not good enough just to present what employees said,” Shah notes, adding that a linkage analysis also needs to be performed. “Present the data in a way that the business can act on [it]. It’s the broader analysis of employee data married to customer data, married to financial data….”
• Identifying jobs, not people, that are most critical to your organization’s success. Ask various managers which jobs are more correlated with wealth creation or wealth preservation than other jobs. People in those jobs should be disproportionately more engaged than employees in other positions, says Shah, explaining that this step provides an opportunity to differentiate—not discriminate—between members of your workforce. “If you increase engagement or take away productivity barriers of people in those jobs, does that result in a material uplift in financial and operational performance?” he asks. “Time and time again, we find that when you improve employee engagement, you see greater levels of financial and operational results.”
• Designing a heat map. Dig into the business nuances at local levels. Break information down, not by traditional metrics such as gender, tenure, or location, but by how your company is organized and impacts on its bottom line. This presents Training departments with an opportunity to identify areas offering the largest return on investment, and then place additional resources in those areas.
• Avoiding the need to swing at every pitch. Employees have the ability to work through periods of dissatisfaction but not be disengaged. Still, HR usually tries to fix complaints or items on employee surveys that received the lowest scores, which may not be the best use of the company’s limited resources. Instead, work with other departments and functions to conduct an advanced analysis to find out where the noise is within your organization. What are people concerned about? What items actually drive employee behavior versus sentiment? “That’s where you need more advanced analysis, which comes through the lens of connecting with Marketing, line management, and Finance,” says Shah, adding that investments need to be made in areas with the greatest opportunity for improvement and impact.
• Offering support. Line managers and others throughout your organization need to implement the findings of your analysis. Develop HR support mechanisms that help them take action, interpret the data, drive performance, and hold the business accountable for performance improvement.

Roughly 80 percent of organizations conduct employee engagement surveys, says Shah. However, more linkage with departments such as Marketing and Finance needs to be conducted to drive the right kind of action planning. “The broader business needs to be engaged,” Shah says. “Data needs to be presented in such a way that there’s a clear line of sight that if you improve employee engagement, you will see a better financial or operational outcome. If you don’t, then perhaps engagement is not something you need to invest in.”

Survey Tips

Employee engagement goes beyond employee satisfaction, involvement, or buy-in. It’s the “extent to which employees have a desire to act and apply discretionary effort to drive business outcomes,” according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Determining the level of employee engagement at your company starts with asking the right questions. In your next employee engagement survey, consider including these statements designed by PwC to address the six attributes of engaged employees:

1. Advocacy: I would recommend ABC Company to friends and family as a great place to work.
2. Commitment: I intend to stay with ABC Company for another 12 months.
3. Discretionary Effort: My colleagues are willing to go beyond what is expected for the success of ABC Company.
4. Pride: I am proud to work for ABC Company.
5. Achievement: My colleagues are passionate about providing exceptional customer service.
6. Alignment: I understand how my job contributes to the success of ABC Company.