We all know that communication in the workplace is one of the more difficult organisational practices to get right. At Employee Feedback, we have found that where there is a low score on communication items it often follows that there is a low engagement score too. We are also aware that communicating with employees is not enough on its own. Factors such as the medium used, the quality and quantity of communication and ensuing there is enough opportunity for two-way communication also needs to be taken into consideration. In a recent article on the Personnel Today website, the issue of two way communication was discussed. The piece looked at communication in a corporate giant such as Tesco. They employ around 250,000 people across many sites so communication is certainly difficult to get right. In order to get ‘listening’ and to promote two way communication, Tesco set up a ‘Listen and Fix’ programme whereby they asked two key questions "What do we need to fix?" and "What gets in the way of you doing a great job for our customers and supporting each other?". Employees were encouraged to respond by email or text and leaders responded via texts, voicemails, internet, blogs and via in-store communications. They received more than 40,000 responses and thereby had a rich set of data to use to inform where to plough their follow-up efforts. What Tesco did particularly well was engaging the branches in the process. As results were anonymous (just store code was requested), each store could then receive feedback specific to their issues. The Store Managers were given this feedback and were encouraged to develop local level action, as opposed to being ‘told’ by head office. Around a quarter of the issues raised were fixed this way. The remainder of the issues were dealt with via ‘Helicopter View’ where they were viewed centrally. On review of the data, they found 125 issues which they could rank in terms of the number of responses. This provided a really powerful action plan! To embark on a process like this takes a huge investment in resources, in terms not only of time but also in terms of people and monetary investment. Tesco were able to invest heavily into this process with the prevailing view that listening to their staff and responding would encourage engagement with the company as a whole: "Listen and Fix is now a flexible brand with great recognition. We have not set in stone how we will use it in the future but we do know that we have a powerful tool for employee engagement and that everyone who works here is better off as a result." (Judith Nelson, International HR Director, Tesco). This example from Tesco puts into practice a number of best practice behaviours that Employee Feedback suggest to our clients on a regular basis. Listen to what the employees have to say, create easy ways for them to respond, provide timely feedback on the results, empower those at local level to take some responsibility to focus on their issues and discuss how you plan to action some of the more global issues. All of these things will really help to connect with the workforce and, in the long term if the approach is consistent, improve employee engagement levels.  

In the HR business, we tend to focus on engagement, how it's created and maintained. Why wouldn't we? Well, perhaps we should think more about dis-engagement. Why - because we know that engagement lies at one end of a road which leads back to alienation and burnout. This was demonstrated some years ago by Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter http://bit.ly/y79T9v.  And, to complicate matters, there's constant two way traffic along the route to engagement, because engagement is not a fixed, isolated point in which individuals exist permanently. Even the most energetic, dedicated and determined of us have bad days; days when feel less committed and may think about giving up and walking away from the pressures and frustrations of our job.  But many such people - like Stephen Hester at RBS for example http://bbc.in/wYF09G - will pause, reflect and then return their shoulders on the wheel. And for Hester and his peers, the prospect of re-engaging must look much rosier when it comes with the lure of a giant pay packet, benefits to match and the prospect of personal honours and accolades. So what must it be like for those at the other end of the road: the disengaged, disaffected or those suffering from burnout? For them, work provides few incentives, little reward and a lot of daily discomfort: "Work isn't exhilarating, it's exhausting. Rather than feeling enthusiasm, employees ... have to drag themselves into work every day. The people around them ask 'what's wrong?' 'are you feeling OK?'  They feel increasingly detached from work as something that's meaningful. They may even feel that they no longer are competent at what they do. These feelings and subsequent disengagement emerge over time."  (See http://bit.ly/z2gIfI pp 146). For these individuals, unlike Stephen Hester, re-engaging is not an attractive prospect. This isn't just a theoretical issue. For just as engagement brings all the benefits we know about, disaffected employees can severely damage a business by failing to perform, adding cost and driving customers away. And without tangible incentives, those lower in the hierarchy are more more likely to remain alienated and negative.  So who are the disengaged, how do we find them and how do we help them to reconnect? To answer these questions we need to understand that disengagement can manifest itself in very different ways. For example, some employees are disengaged because their jobs fail - in whatever ways - to meet their own needs and expectations. They may feel bored, pressurised, underpaid and undervalued by peers or managers. Skilled managers can often work with employees in this kind of situation to resolve some or all of these issues and return them to being fully functioning members of the work group. There's another, more difficult scenario: although predisposed to be positive and to throw themselves into their work, some employees may find they're just not able to match their colleagues' sustained high levels of enthusiasm and commitment. As a result, they can feel they fall short of others' norms and standards of behaviour and this may, for them, be just as stressful as being overwhelmed by volume of work, or lacking training or resources. Peter Warr coined the term the 'vitamin effect' - i.e. too much of a good thing can be bad for you - to describe this this syndrome (http://bit.ly/xYOuKx). In such cases, despite their best efforts, some employees may not be able to  keep up the pace and fall by the wayside. As a response to negative feelings about their own competence, they may detach themselves from work and colleagues. They can even develop serious medical conditions  hypertension and cardiovascular disease, for example.  Spotting disengaged employees from a corporate perspective should be a basic part of the employee survey process - but it's not always straightforward. First, when looking at the data, we tend to look mainly at the results for the most positive groups of employees. We also see that the scores for certain locations or departments tend to be lower. We'll usually explain the latter (often correctly) by reference to a certain line manager, or poor working conditions, or a threat of redundancy. The scores for related items will provide the necessary evidence. These are the (relatively) easy cases. It's too easy to gloss over the feedback from isolated individuals who work in highly engaged teams yet, for some reason, aren't on side. The signs will often there in the data - the few individuals who score very, very differently from the positive majority. These may be the burnout cases - How can we tell?  One test will be to look specifically at the scores for survey items that measure personal work engagement. Such questions may not be included in many employee surveys, but As consultants with an occupational psychology background we believe them to be an essential component of any engagement survey. See, for example, the well validated Utrecht Work Engagement Scale http://bit.ly/zhJ48B which measure three dimensions of personal work engagement i.e. vigour, absorption and dedication.    The responses to these questions will provide useful pointers to which employees are least engaged at the time the survey was conducted. But how do we tell whether the data refer to those who are affected in the long term or simply those making a brief (hourly or daily) detour from the road to engagement?  Traditional survey methods can't really help here.  To be sure that employees are at the burnout end of the road, it's necessary to measure their engagement on a number of occasions in real-time, and to respond accordingly. That's where our new, unique product - EngageMe - comes in.  EngageMe measures feelings of work engagement (on the three Utrecht scales) twice daily over a two or three week period. Simultaneously, data are also collected on what tasks or activities respondents were doing as they answered the questions. At the same time managers - as well as the respondents themselves - have constant and real-time access to the data. The output is a detailed map of engagement for an individual, a group or an entire organisation - at any given moment.  It's then up to the participants - leaders, managers or employees - to act. Trials are underway at the moment. We'll be reporting the findings in the coming weeks and months, as EngageMe is launched and goes viral. Find out more at http://bit.ly/yh7hI6          

  It's not much talked about by HR professionals, but 'Job Crafting' represents a practical way to increase employee engagement. In a very recent article, http://bit.ly/zcYQuy, Tims, Bakker and Derks describe their own research that confirms that Job Crafting "... correlate(s) positively with … work engagement, employability, and performance." So what is Job Crafting? Wrzesniewski & Dutton who first introduced the term back on 2001  (http://bit.ly/yvvC1X) define it as  "the self-initiated (my italics) change behaviours that employees engage in with the aim to align their jobs with their own preferences, motives, and passions." In other words, job crafting is what employees choose to do when they have the opportunity to exercise control over what they do (at work) and how they do it. Critically, job crafting is something which is done at the initiative of the employee. For people in many job roles however, especially those lower in the organisational hierarchy, job crafting is probably not seen as an option, something only those with high levels of autonomy can do. Tims et al argue, however, that any job can be ‘crafted’, suggesting that there are three possible strategies for restoring the balance between the job demands and resources i.e.   ·         Increasing job resources: proactively finding ways to help the employee to meet the requirements of the job. For example seeking additional training to develop greater skills. ·         Increasing the level of challenging demands: jobs that are boring can (and almost certainly do) lead to absenteeism, dissatisfaction and thence high turnover. Most employees in such roles could, if asked, suggest ways to increase the level of interest or challenge in what they do.   ·         Decreasing the number of demands that hinder performance: if the demands made on individuals become overwhelming, employees will not be able to perform. They may begin to suffer stress or burnout; they will be more likely to leave. In such cases, employees would invariably be able to see ways to relieve the pressures on them. They cite the example of nurses (not generally seen as especially autonomous) who became swamped with the pressures of dealing with large numbers of patients. One way they found to increase resources (and thereby limiting the demands that hinder performance) was to enlist the help of family members in the caring process. Another case was that of hairdressers who felt they were on an unstoppable production line: here the individuals concerned decided to become more open with selected clients and to seek more information about  their clients’ personal lives. At Employee Feedback we’re very excited by this research because it confirms the validity and potential usefulness of a new product we’re developing. The product, called EngageMe, provides real-time data on the relationship (ie the balance) between individual employees’  engagement, job demands and resources. This information, presented via a smartphone or PC based dashboard, can be used by employees and their managers to craft changes to jobs. This can be done at any level within the organisation and the results can be measured – again in real-time. EngageMe is not a subsitute for 'traditional' engagement surveys. It is a completely new tool for monitoring and facilitating real changes in engagement in any organisational setting. For more information email me at chris.mcgivern@employee-feedback.co.uk or on our website at http://bit.ly/yePpq3  

You may have read about a large scale study of employee engagement conducted by the Corporate Leadership Council back in 2004 http://bit.ly/wFU8LM  The project involved a survey using 47 questions that measured the strength of rational and emotional commitment to day-to-day work, direct manager, team, and organization, along with the level of discretionary effort and intent to stay.  More than 50,000 employees from 59 organizations, 30 countries, and 14 industries participated in the 2004 survey. The data were strongly skewed in favour of the US, but that aside, the demographic profile of respondents was pretty wide.  The respondent population, it emerged, were distributed into three broad groups:   11% were 'True Believers' who show strong emotional and rational commitment to their work, team, manager and organisation  13% were 'Disaffected' and strongly uncommitted to work, managers, teams and the organisation 20% leant towards non-commitment 27% were stronlgly commtted to one focus - ie job, team, manager or organisation The remaining 29% were truly ambivalent   So no real surprises there - these figures are pretty representative of the overall picture we tend to see in our own engagement surveys. An analysis of different demographics (age, gender, grade, marital status etc) showed little variation among individual employees - which also fits with our data, except, perhaps, that we tend to find that more senior grades tend to manifest greater levels of engagement. Of more interest, however, (though again, probably unsurprisingly) were the very wide differences between organisations. In the highest scoring companies, almost 24% of respondents were strongly engaged with work, team, manager and organisation, while in the lowest scoring businesses, fewer than 3% appeared to be fully engaged. In other words, in some businesses, eight times as many employees were strongly engaged as in others. Obviously, there were some simple and fairly obvious differences which heped to explain this variation - personality types, job differences for example - but the data suggested a very wide variety of factors affected engagement within and between these busineses. Which made it difficult for the Report to make any general prescriptions. So once again practitioners were advised that the best way to build and maintain engagement "... all depended"  on the prevailing circumstances within the specific organisation. Not very helpful. And that's often the situation today, when one looks for some kind of practical advice and support. Add to this the radical conclusion of Schaufeli, Bakker et al  (http://bit.ly/zlbHbR)  that engagement levels are constantly changing, daily, even hourly, and the challenge remains more daunting than ever. General prescriptions are of only general use to the manager, consultant or HR practitioner seeking a practical way to manage engagement in the real world of organisations today. That's why we at Employee Feedback have taken a different approach: EngageMe is a completely new tool designed to provide down to earth assistance with the engagement of specific groups of employee within a given organsiation - in real time. http://bit.ly/wwZLHm. Building on current research findings, EngageMe provides an immediate overview of what individuals and teams are feeling - and why. This information can be used by team leaders and managers - and employees themselves - to react and respond appropriately to what's going on in the business - NOW. Successful strategies can be identified and learned from. Issues and problems affecting engagement can be spotted and dealt with quickly. EngageMe isn't a panacea, or a replacement for the detailed overview that a 'traditional' engagement survey provides. But it is, we believe,the first practical tool that practitioners can use on a day to day basis to monitor and manage engagement. Which is what many of those who have long experience of employee surveys have been seeking for some time. The product is currently being tested and we'll write again to describe the results in practice. We'll also publish regular updates on our website.        

As a fan of Harvard Business Review, I recently read an article regarding talent management; it was entitled, ‘How to hang on to your high potentials: Emerging best practices in managing your company’s future leaders’ (HBR, Oct 2011). The article started by stating that only 15% of businesses based in Asia and North America feel that they have enough ‘qualified successors for key positions’. This increases to 30% in Europe, but still that isn’t a high percentage, is it?! Given that the CIPD definition of ‘talent management’ is the “systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their ‘high potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling business/operation-critical roles” then the situation may be a little concerning when thinking about the future successes of businesses. Talent management is not something that is easy to do. As per the CIPD definition, it encompasses a number of, often thought of as, HR related issues: recruitment, development, engagement, training, reward and recognition etc. One of these issues is often enough to tackle at one time but for talent management it seems an all encompassing program is required, but beforehand one needs to begin by identifying those of ‘high potential’, again something that isn’t a clear cut process. Thankfully, Egon Zehnder International have developed a model for assessing executive potential which can provide a great starting point. They have a model which consists of 5 concentric circles. At the core of the model is ‘motives – the desire to have a positive impact on others’. This is something that is considered hard to change. Next circle is ‘leadership assets – demonstrates insight, engages others, demonstrates resolve, seeks understanding’. At the next level there is ‘senior executive identity – accepting the costs of the executive position, seeing yourself as a senior executive’. Wrapped around these elements are ‘skills – what the executive can do’ and ‘knowledge – what the executive knows’, which as they are furthest out from the core are considered the easiest to change. This model makes intuitive sense. As is noted in the article, all elements have a major impact on whether a manager will be capable in a certain situation. It is clear that ‘high levels of competence alone can propel some people to some success and some promotions but won’t be enough to sustain them in large leadership roles’ (p81). At Employee Feedback this closely mirrors our employee engagement thinking, one needs a combination of capability and motivation to become fully engaged in the workplace. I wonder whether the most appropriate starting place for talent management to kick off then would be by focusing on employee engagement first, identify those who are willing to go the extra miles, arguably those who already have the hardest to change ‘motives’ layer of the model, and then assess whether they have the capability to become someone of ‘high potential’. It seems to me from reading much of the work around talent management that capability is the thing that is assessed first as much of the focus is around the skills and the knowledge of an individual, but perhaps this should be turned on its head and motivation and engagement assessed at the outset...any views on this? Reference: Fernandez-Araoz, C. Groysberg, B. Nohria, N. (2011). How to hang on to your high potentials. Harvard Business Review, October 2011.