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…