CONNECTIONS An Edelman perspective on making meaningful employee connections that deepen engagement, build trust and accelerate business performance
AUGUST 2015
THE 2015 STATE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT By Dr. Andy Brown, Executive Director, London, and Christopher Hannegan, Executive Vice President, Chicago It’s hard to deny that engaged employees are a key competitive differentiator. Creating deeper connections with employees, across organizations and with the wider world are important for business success. We recently conducted two studies to explore what Internal Communications and Human Resources teams are actually doing to measure engagement and convert it into competitive advantage. What’s working and what isn’t? And how can we improve? Here are five key findings:
1) ENGAGEMENT IS STILL JUST TOO “HR”
We think there are a couple factors in play here:
We asked what organizations defined as engagement and what were they measuring as a result. The data shows one simple thing: the vast majority of employee engagement surveys rely on an out-dated, oldfashioned, pure-play “HR version” of engagement.
Engagement survey models are too generic. Most surveys put forth a definition of engagement that suits the survey provider and helps them build their own benchmarking database; few are tailored for each company. Often, these off-the-shelf surveys ask questions that are too easy to answer positively. The solution? Demand a bespoke definition of engagement and a survey to reflect that.
Almost 50% of all organizations fail to measure employees’ engagement with the customer or the brand. This highlights a fundamental question: what do you want to engage your people with? If it’s just with you as an employer, the “great place to work” approach is fine. But if you want your workforce to engage with your customers and your brand, today’s common approaches fall very short. Our view? Engagement is really about three things. Are your people engaged with… …you as an employer? …serving your customers and delivering your brand? …delivering your business strategy?
2) ENGAGEMENT IS HUGELY OVER-REPORTED Half of our respondents indicated their “engagement score” was above 70% in recent surveys. Based on all we hear about the current engagement deficit, this raises a very uncomfortable question: are the bulk of these surveys painting an inaccurate picture?
The measures are too easy. We’ve all seen it: the standard five-point scale with survey reports focused on the “percentage positive” (agrees and strongly agrees). But all of our own engagement research shows that it’s the “top box” people who act differently – to each other as colleagues and, more importantly, toward customers. Organizations need to stop resting on the easy laurels of “percent positive” and instead track top-box scores, thus focusing on those who are truly engaged. One solution? Make your engagement metrics tougher and more discerning. One such measure is called full engagement. This isn’t a nice, cozy average of your five main engagement questions that provides a pleasing (but misleading) 70% engaged score. It takes a much tougher and meaningful approach. Full engagement looks at how many of your people (in an organization, a division or a team) score in the top box on ALL of your engagement model questions.
© 2015 Edelman
Full engagement is more meaningful because it measures how many people are “firing on all cylinders” and engaged in all the aspects you want them to be. It’s much harder to score highly, as you’re asking people to “clear more hurdles” to count as fully engaged. But it’s also a far more powerful predictor of hard business outcomes, such as talent retention, customer satisfaction and profitable growth.
There are also some interesting regional variations: Leadership is particularly the focus within Asia Pacific and EMEA while the Americas are looking to communications to improve employee engagement.
3) EMPLOYEES DON’T TRUST THAT SURVEYS LEAD TO ACTION
However, for leadership, the most common are: •
TRUST: Are leaders doing what they say they will?
While seven in 10 respondents told us their employees trust that the research process is confidential, little more than half say employees believe senior leaders will listen to their opinions. Even fewer (42%) believe positive change will happen as a result.
•
VISIBILITY: Do employees have contact with leaders or are they always behind closed doors?
•
LIVING THE VALUES: Is there consistency between the values the frontline is asked to demonstrate and how leaders behave?
Why is this? We find three common reasons:
And for communication:
•
•
•
Many senior leaders fail to take action despite naming engagement as a top priority. Huge volumes of evidence show that engagement drives hard business outcomes. Leaders need to act on that and take engagement data seriously. Managers often get drowned in data. Most surveys pump out numerous descriptive bar charts but do not help managers hone in on the few key drivers that will improve engagement on their own team. Smarter analytical techniques can help managers focus on the few data points that matter, form action plans around those alone and not get distracted by a mass of irrelevant data. There’s often little support for turning data into action. Firms need to put more commitment into engagement toolkits, planning sessions and employee “labs” to get people involved in acting on the data they have generated and forming solutions to engagement challenges.
4) IT’S ALL ABOUT HOW YOU LEAD AND COMMUNICATE
So what really matters? Our research suggests the detailed drivers of engagement within leadership and communication vary hugely by company, culture and state of the business.
• • •
BROADCAST: Do employees get the information they need to perform their roles effectively? DIALOGUE: Do employees’ opinions count, and are they genuinely listened to and acted upon? COLLABORATION: How effectively do different parts of the organization speak to each other?
5) THERE IS A DISTINCT LACK OF STRATEGY Staggeringly, only just over half of organizations surveyed (55%) have an explicit employee engagement strategy. Even among those that do, while 86% of senior leaders are familiar with the strategy, only 65% of people managers and 38% of employees are. Furthermore, one-third of executives surveyed were not confident their employees could accurately communicate the company’s business strategy to others, a statistic that drops further as the size of the organization increases. Yet 57 percent of employees reported they would perform more effectively if they better understood the company’s direction.
Endless tomes have been written about the drivers of engagement. But our data shows that the vast majority of organizations are focusing their efforts on two main areas to unlock engagement: leadership (74%) and communication (70%).
© 2015 Edelman. For more information, contact us at employee.engagement@edelman.com.
It’s hardly any wonder then that engagement is treated as a tactical, internal communications (IC) or HR project in so many companies rather than being seen as a strategic business challenge at the board level. To a great degree, IC and HR have the most pivotal role to play here. Engagement should be a core part of any people and communications strategy. But it needs a strategy in itself, which you can develop by asking: •
What business objectives will engagement help deliver upon?
•
Where do we need to focus to improve engagement (and what will we not be doing)?
•
What levers can we best pull to help deliver engagement?
•
How will we do this with different employee segments?
•
How will we measure our success?
FIVE ACTIONS TO TAKE Employee engagement remains a pivotal driver of business success. But a couple simple actions can help organizations approach engagement in a much more effective way: 1.
Make engagement just as much about your customers, your brand and your business as it is about “HR issues.”
2.
Get tough about measuring engagement. Don’t fool yourself with easy-to-get high scores that offer little actionable insight; instead, focus on employees who are fully engaged.
3.
Be specific. Identify the factors that impact engagement the most and equip managers to take focused actions in those areas.
4.
Don’t get distracted away from tackling leadership behaviors and communications effectiveness. Those will solve the greater part of your engagement puzzle.
5.
Build trust by getting employees actively involved in planning engagement for the future.
NOTES ON THE RESEARCH The inaugural Edelman ENGAGE “State of Engagement” study was conducted online in September - October 2014 with 566 respondents: 124 from Asia Pacific, 135 from the Americas and 307 from EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Respondents worked in senior roles in HR, internal communications, employee engagement and corporate communications at the director (28%), senior manager (30%), manager (26%) and other (16%) levels. The Zeno (a Daniel J. Edelman company) “Barriers to Employee Engagement” Study was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll in September – October 2014 with 305 executives at organizations with revenues of at least $1 billion. Zeno conducted a subsequent online survey of 1,000 Americans, representative of the general population in early 2015.
ABOUT US Edelman Employee Engagement helps organizations accelerate business performance, delivered by highly engaged and trusted employees. For more information, visit us at ee.edelman.com or follow us on Twitter at @EdelmanEE.
© 2015 Edelman. For more information, contact us at employee.engagement@edelman.com.