A report from the global management consulting firm, the Hay Group earlier this year revealed that businesses are being stunted by ‘depressed’ employee engagement.
The study highlighted that a third of employees said they were performing optimally, claiming that barriers put in place by their company are preventing them from excelling at work.
Commitment levels have also fallen to a five-year low with two-fifths (44 per cent) of workers stating they intend to leave their employer within five years, with more than one in five employees (21 percent) intending to leave in less than two years.
That translates into 21% of your workforce are inclined to leave your Organisation given the chance. That’s a shocking number!
The extensive employee engagement study also found that the employees most committed to their organisations put forth 57 % more effort, and are 87 % less likely to leave their company than employees who consider themselves disengaged
It should be no surprise then that employee engagement, or lack thereof, is a critical factor in an organisation’s overall financial success.
Many companies use standard or bespoke surveys to try to measure and anticipate employee engagement, however they often struggle to derive meaningful results, and the outcome is “just another HR survey”.
Leading companies are now moving beyond just understanding the levels of their employees’ engagement, and are using change management techniques to understand the drivers behind it.
Companies that use an employee engagement survey, then go on the properly utilise change management engagement tools can reduce voluntary staff turnover exponentially and also improve individuals discretionary effort in the workplace which leads to greater productivity and ultimately profit.
Moving beyond the survey
Moving beyond the survey requires a safe environment for both Managers and staff alike, and the creation of cultural drivers such as FAIRNESS can also provide a massive support for the increase in staff discretionary effort.
The following factors are critical in moving HR led programmes such as Employee Engagement Surveys into the mainstream of Change, Planning and Development.
Bring together the executive management team and make it their responsibility for employee engagement.
Gain the outspoken sponsorship of the CEO and the Board. Nothing will happen without their sanction and support.
Engage the staff in a data collection exercise around a Strategic statement released by the CEO. Make the feedback anonymous and therefore safe for the staff to “tell it how it is”. This negates the filtering that occurs from staff to the Boardroom.
Use this data to conduct a “change session” led by the Managers themselves. They can form strategic change projects which account for all the data fed back. It’s a quick win.
Publish the results – remember that fairness culture? Well this action promotes it.
Then when everyone is aligned around the common identified themes, DO THE WORK!
Most change programmes fail to complete and render the exercise worse than useless. Once the work is done, measure the improvement in discretionary effort across your entire Organisation.
Employee engagement will play a critical role for organisations actively looking to gain competitive advantage in both short- and long-term.
Moving HR into mainstream Business Planning and Development, using employee engagement as the key driver, will provide a robust planning platform for future success.
For more information, please contact Philip Webb at philip@tamplc.com