Why Research?

I got asked recently why I enjoy research. A good question, to which I probably gave a garbled answer. So I’m going to have another go.

First of all, it’s something inside me. I was a curious child (as many people have remarked). I went on to study Maths and Physics. I spend an unhealthy amount of time listening to Radio 4 and bumbling around Wikipedia. I like to know stuff. And everything thing that I learn just opens up another dozen lines of inquiry. It’s ongoing, and I love it.

It’s the right commercial thing to do too. A base of knowledge brings me closer to my clients, to understand their problems, to be able to represent them as they really are, and to show them things that they are too close to see. For me, the best client partnerships are built on this depth of knowledge; it builds genuine, mutual trust and credibility.

And the value of research cuts both ways. Clearly there’s a margin to be made in research. But when the eventual outputs are brands, communications, leadership and engagement activity – there’s hundreds of possible solutions, and what might take best effect can be trial and error. A depth of research gets you to the right solution in a far shorter time, cutting through the multiple proposals, moodboards, pilots.

There’s a reason consumer marketing invests in perpetual research - the investment is paid back straight away, and continues to be paid back every time you and your client work together. And having got your client a great solution, why wouldn’t you work together again?

And, for me, it’s the right emotional thing to do. I work in employee engagement, organisational culture, employer brand. They’re all about getting the right people doing the right things for all the right reasons. They’re about making the working day more interesting, exciting and worthwhile. And if I can make someone else’s working day better, that’s the best working day for me.

Engage For Success

Yesterday, I went to an Engage for Success event, and I was impressed. More than most, it seems to me that they’re approaching engagement from the right angles – making it real-world and practical.

It’s primarily about business performance and there’s an impressive body of evidence for it here. But it’s also about people working in the way they want, and getting meaning from work. It’s not about screwing more out of people for less, and the trade union support they have is compelling.

They’ve come up with four “enablers of engagement” that must be present in an organisation to allow engagement:

• Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.
• Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch their people.
• There is employee voice throughout the organisations, for reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.
• There is organisational integrity – the values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap.

You can quibble about detail, but I think they're sound. Other definitions are criticised for being just about good line-management. That’s here, but so is strong leadership, employee involvement, effective communication, understood culture and sense of purpose.

And they urge that it’s not just about engagement surveys, it’s not even just about the actions after a survey. It should be an everyday part of everyone’s job, and not just HR or Comms. Each business must understand its own reality, have profound conversations with its workforce and constantly foster the right environment for engagement.

Music to my ears, naturally – there’s a need to research engagement, how it changes over time, and to help those conversations happen in a safe, anonymous, fun way. But I think there’s an opportunity for this thinking and language to really take hold. If there’s an event near you, go!

8) So, what has all of this got to do with Employer Brand?

Research can define both your EVP and your HR action plan. I’d go further, they should define it. And they are both vital to your employer brand.

 

As I alluded to last time, I think that too often an organisation’s EVP (what you get for working here) and its employer brand (how it feels to work here) are treated as the same. Your EVP is a snapshot of the great things about working in your organisation right now. Take it fresh out of the box, and use it today.

On the other hand, your employer brand is a couple of things:

1)     Hypothesis #11: It’s a constant process of building your reputation. And there’s a strong parallel with consumer branding. It’s about understanding, even anticipating, what your audience wants, and creating the product to match that need. It’s not claiming that you make the best widgets; it’s making the best widgets.

2)     Hypothesis #12: It’s a permanent process of cementing your reputation. And there’s another strong parallel with consumer branding, it’s about understanding what your audience already associates with you, values about you and what they wish you to represent in the future. It’s continually building a body of evidence for why yours are the best widgets.

Your employer brand should be actions and communications, always about what drives employees or future employees, building in the purpose, told in a culturally appropriate way – experienced and evidenced consistently in and out of the organisation. And the more you do inside, on defining culture, on building engagement through communications, managers and leaders – the easier to attract from outside.

You’ll get benefits from using it as a communication tool. But to get the real benefits, it must be long-term, it must involve culture, management, engagement – and it’ll take commitment from outside of HR. Then it all leads back to greater performance, and should be one of your key tools to improve your organisation.

Here ends the lecture.

There’s a few topics that I’ve skimmed over in the last 8 posts. I’ll return to them soon.

7) Promises

In my last post, I finally got round to the topic of research. Finally? Well, it’s what I do in my day job. I-would-say-this-wouldn’t-I, but I believe that good research, a depth of understanding, a real dialogue with employees – is the secret to engagement, to enhance your culture, to creating a great employer brand. And with all of that in place, performance should take good care of itself.

So, as I’ve described in posts passim, the things in need of attention in research are: understanding of purpose and culture, experience of communication, management and other drivers of engagement.

With a clear picture of this – and a picture over and above an engagement survey - you can uncover two things, which lead me to two more of my hypotheses:

1.     What it’s important for the organisation to do, and which it delivers on well now.

Which is a decent definition of the EVP – and Hypothesis #8 Most attention by HR depts and their employer marketing agency is spent here. That’s understandable, if there’s a recruitment need, the platform is probably already well ablaze. But it’s the short term solution.

2.    What it’s important for the organisation to do, and which it isn’t seen to deliver well on now.

Which is a decent definition for an HR strategic plan – and Hypothesis #9 Often HR is doing lots of things it doesn’t get full credit for. The communication, line management, cultural alignment just doesn’t allow it to be fully seen or understood

But more than this I think it’s vital for: Hypothesis #10 Concentrate on celebrating what is good now, but it’s just as important to making more things great in the future. So a bit of 1), and plenty of 2). After all, giving the customers (in this case employees and potential employees) what they want, how they want it, is how you build a great brand. And I’ll return to an employer brand next time out.

6) What Do I Get?

Employer Brand, Engagement and Culture: the story so far…

To get great business performance, employees need to know purpose and culture – what we do and why we do it – so that they can make the right decisions. To make the right decisions for the business they need to have a constant reminder of purpose and culture, and they need regular effective communications, especially from their manager.

So far, so good. But it’s all a bit sticky. It needs to be a bit more carroty. All stick, and people will do the job they’re paid to do. There will always be some stars that go above and beyond. You may even well inspire a few others to do more too.

But to regularly get people making the right decisions for your business, they need to understand why it’s the right decision for them too. They need to know what they get back. That makes it a bit less about “unlocking discretionary effort” - which I think is a useful concept to talk about, but it always sounds like there’s a how-can-drive-more-out-of-these-mugs-without-giving-them-any-more agenda about it. It makes it a bit more about a simple, logical, transaction. I like simplicity and logic.

There’s loads of lists of the drivers of engagement. I’ve linked to some before. I like this one.I’m a bit less convinced by this one. I’ve got it down to 8. Hypothesis #7 all that drives you in job, outside of the financial – and the managerial, communication, purpose/culture elements that I’ve described before – is in here.

1) The people you work with
2) Job content
3) Working environment and tools
4) Chances to advance
5) Chances to become an expert
6) Autonomy and creativity
7) Recognition
8) The pride you have in your business

You're free to - I'd like you to - pull that to pieces.
But the question is – so what? Well, again, along with the managerial, communication, purpose/culture elements, you’ve got a framework for investigation. Someone – perhaps someone like me – can go into a business and find out how all of these are experienced in that business. And what you then do with that, I’ll talk about next time…

5) So what are the right decisions?

The last couple of times around I’ve been beating my engagement-is-about-making-the-right decisions drum. I’ve talked about creating understanding of culture and purpose. But how do you bring them into people’s every day work?

Well firstly, I think it’s about communication. For the sake of transparency, I work most often alongside communication agencies, so I would say that wouldn’t I? But when I’m wearing my objective researcher hat, then I’ve become pretty convinced of Hypothesis # 6: Most organisations would benefit from better communication. In qualitative exercises communication always scores low, in open discussion it almost always crops up. Here’s a blog of engagement tips that gets one thing in particular spot on: communication is first on the list. And second. And third. And quite a few places down the list too.

Secondly, I think it’s about managers. Now, for the sake of transparency, I also work alongside leadership development specialists, so I would say that wouldn’t I? But look, there’s a reasons these organisations exist, and there’s a reason that people turn to them for their engagement issues. Again, when I’m the gimlet-eyed, detached researcher it’s often hard to get people off the topic of their manager. To the point where I believe Hypothesis # 7 Most managers aren’t very good managers. Which isn’t to say that it’s their fault. They’re nice people and they’re probably awesome at some other part of their job. That’s why they got promoted, But now they have been, they maybe don’t have time, haven’t been trained, or even fully understand what it means to be a manager. This is a great article about the contribution managers make to engagement, when they understand the role and know how to both push and pull their team.

Thirdly, these two points belong together because it’s managers through whom most of the most pertinent communication should come – but if they’re not fed it, and don’t know how to deliver it, then it’s not going to happen. Engagement becomes an uphill struggle, culture is variable, and performance suffers.

And as well as the communications about what benefits the company, managers are also the conduit for the information that benefits the employee. Managers help you access the drivers, the what-you-get-in-returns, which is what I’ll talk about next time.

4) Making the right decisions for your employer

Previously, on Employer Brand, Engagement and Culture…I’ve talked about the purpose and culture of the organisation being delivered by engagement. I’ll now embark on the circular argument that engagement is, in part, about understanding the purpose and culture.

Last time out, I hypothesised that engagement is about making the right decisions. A part of that has to be about making the right decisions for your employer. People want meaning from work, they want to know that what they do contributes to something. It satisfies a basic human desire to improve. Here’s a good blog about it, showing that this applies to even (seemingly) menial jobs. And here’s a nice graph (yes, hair-splitters, it’s about job satisfaction, but the point stands. And anyway, I always like to bring Herzberg into it).

You need to know what’s important to your employer to make the right decisions; those that will allow you and your employer to improve. So you need to know the purpose – permanent goals and the goals for today – and understand the culture. But, Hypothesis #5: Understanding of purpose and culture isn’t kept current in lots of organisations.

That makes it hard for people to engage fully, that makes it hard for them to make the right decisions, and that affects performance. But in addition, I also believe that a lot of organisations think they do a better job of maintaining understanding than they actually do. It’s done naturally in businesses where employees have a direct stake in success (a great idea in so many regards, and the stake doesn’t have to be financial).

Elsewhere, it may not be so good. As an example, I think that engagement surveys are seducing employers with a figure of 70-odd% engagement. They’re not viewing that result as 70-odd% people that are somewhat-positive-or-neutral-ish, and 20-odd% people who are, at best, cheesed off. They’re not seeing it as a rallying call to reach out and communicate better with their employees to give them a purpose, and a reason for their work.

Those of you paying attention will know by now that once I’m about 300 words in, I’m usually setting up the next blog topic – which will be on that vital communications.

3) An Environment of Engagement

There’s lots of definitions of engagement. You’ll be delighted that I don’t propose a new one here. You’ll find lots of reports, articles and blogs about what engagement is all about – and you’ll find one that works for you. Here’s three that have influenced me recently: This does what it offers on the tin - practical advice. I like this cynical look at engagement stats. And this, from my former employers work, is a robustly healthy mix of both the cynical and the practical.

In my past two blogs I’ve talked about performance being the driver for all activity and that for performance you need alignment between customer and employee expectations and for that you need engagement.

And one thing that I think engagement is about which isn’t well covered in what I read is this: Hypothesis #4: Engagement is about making the right decisions.

It’s not about robotically making the right decisions for the business. If that’s your bag, head here. And I’m not talking about “If I stay until midnight to get this done, I’ll get nominated for employee of the month” (although if you have, you should (and if you don’t have an employee of the month, you should)). I’m talking about creating the greatest possible overlap between what the business wants, and what employees want to professionally achieve.

It should be a two way-street. One where employees have an inherent understanding of what’s good for the business, and know what they’ll get in return, when they do the right thing, the right way. And maybe (and here I could be straying beyond hypothesis into pure speculation) if you’ve made those kind of decisions all the way down the project, then you possibly haven’t ended up having a midnight crisis. After all, is that crisis a show of your engagement, or a last-resort that will seriously damage your engagement?

So, how do you help people make the right decisions? As I touched on last time, I think it’s about the creation of an atmosphere where three interlinked things happen:

1)    Purpose and culture are known and talked about

2)    There’s effective communication, and that lives or dies with line-managers

3)    The drivers – the what-you-get-in-returns – that people most value are understood, tailored to the workforce, and measured

 

And it won’t surprise you greatly that those are the topics of my next three blogs.

2) How Important is Culture?

What impact will your organisational culture have on your bottom line? How crucial is it that your people’s behaviour is harmonised, that they hold the same values and instincts?

In my first post, I made the case for performance being the only real measure of success for any action on brand, culture or engagement. And I hypothesised that without customer and employee expectations being aligned, you can’t improve performance. Sticking to my principle of keeping it simple, I think bringing those expectations together is about two things:

1.     Purpose - what we do

2.     Culture - how we do it

It’s self-evident that if the customer gets what they want, how they want it, success should follow. And if right along the chain of delivering the product/service, everyone knows what they’re aiming for too, that must grease the gears.

So assuming that Purpose is known inside and outside the company; how well understood is culture? What are the values and behaviours of the business? If they’re “got” by customers, do employees get them? Do they still get them when the pressure’s on? Are they coached on what they mean? Are they measured against how well they deliver them? Here’s my hypothesis number two: most organisations don’t do nearly enough to ensure cultural understanding.

Which isn’t to say that some cultures aren’t organically strong. And it isn’t to say that all action is limited to an “Our Values” page tucked away on the corporate website. But there’s more to be done –and the importance of doing so is nicely illustrated here, in words and numbers. Two key points: “a healthy, high-performance culture impacts financial performance and increases employee engagement” and “companies with a strong culture perform better, are more resilient and last longer.” One of my self-imposed rules (Rule 7, to be precise, the Trendy Vicar Tenet) prohibits me from drawing parallels with current events, but we can all see some businesses that might be in better shape with better cultures.

So once your culture has spread through the company – a topic I’ll return to – why should anyone choose to act or behave in the prescribed way? It’s unlikely you want them to always do things the easiest way. This is where engagement holds the key. Now, ideally, you’ve selected the people that will naturally respond within your culture, but hypothesis three says: you can’t just recruit an engaged workforce. There’s not enough of ‘em, other people like to hang onto ‘em, and besides, you don’t get engagement right in one go. And in fact, “you” don’t get engagement right, it’s in the hands of your employees. You can only create the right environment.

And in the following posts, I’ll expand on the importance of an environment for engagement, and what it might look like.

1) It's all got to come back to performance

How Employer Brand, Culture and Engagement all fit together is complex. One affects and reinforces, or damages, the other.

For instance, the better that culture is understood in the workforce, the more likely that workforce is to be engaged - and page 7 of this study gives good evidence for that. But engagement isn’t just cultural understanding. And the level of engagement will influence the current and continuing strength of the culture. There are overlaps, crossovers and inter-relationships. That complexity fuels books, studies, models, articles, new definitions; and sometimes that can leave all of us with a bit more knowledge, but maybe a bit less understanding.

There’s an important place for all of that. It advises my thinking, along with my experiences and other articles, discussions and blogs. But in the mud and oomska of working life – and most of all when as HR, agency, consultant, you’re pitching your big idea - simplicity is all. To my mind, simplicity sells, and that’s what I’m aiming for in these blogs.

So here's the simplest principle of all: whatever you do, it always has to come back to business performance. If your big idea isn’t going to affect productivity, costs, time to market, quality of service, consistency, or whatever, then it’s academic, or worse – and I hope these words make your blood run as cold as mine - just an HR initiative.

There’s some powerful statistics about the effect on performance that great people strategies can have. Where to start? Well, here’s the first in a series of hypotheses: You can’t get good performance without customer and employee expectations being aligned. So an Apple employee knows that user-experience is all. A McDonald’s employee understands that uniformity of product is a customer priority. On the other hand, you’re not going to feel like anything other than a route to a profit at the bank, and you’re not going to get a speedy response from the council, until their employees understand that’s what you expect. Without that alignment, you cannot sustainably succeed, and you certainly won’t improve performance. You may get “better”, but only in a way that isn’t relevant to your customer.

So lining up those expectations feels like a simple place to start. That is then about a shared understanding of purpose, culture and look-I-get-all-of-this-but-actually-what’s-in-it-for-me? And that’s what I’ll expand on next time…