Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Time: 1:00pm Eastern / 10:00 am Pacific
Presenters: Christian Nielson, Chief Strategy Officer, Decisionwise; David Long, Chief Operating Officer, DecisionWise
Cost: Free
Every organization has ways they can elevate the experience they are providing their employees, and much of this is tied to improving employee engagement. Join us as Christian Nielson, Chief Strategy Officer, and Dave Long, Chief Operating Officer, discuss how to improve employee engagement within your organization.
Register and reserve your spot today!
This Webinar qualifies for SHRM and HRCI credit.
Transcript
Hey, Dave.
Thank you. Good to be with you.
Let’s jump in. We’re gonna try to keep keep this conversation. I also mention just at the beginning, Dave, do you mind watching those admits there?
Yeah.
Um We’ll keep it a little bit more conversational in some of our, our past webinars. Um Also just start by saying you, those of you who might be familiar with some of our content may already notice more green in our branding than usual. So this is a kind of a sneak peek at some updated branding that we’re going to be unveiling here, decision wise. So you’ll, you’ll see more and more of this as you um work with us.
Our session today is about improving employee engagement. Let’s walk through where we’re headed our agenda and we’ll keep this fluid as we need to get to chat.
We ad we’ll try to pause, look at that and that hopefully not too much room uh at the end of this for uh some more questions to answer, but where we’re headed where our plan is uh headed. We’ll, we’ll start by speaking about culture, employee experience and employee engagement. I shouldn’t say ex and ee um but we’re gonna be talking about the difference between those things. We’re gonna walk through some of the frameworks that we’ve developed that found to be very helpful in improving employee engagement.
We’ll speak to looks like we got some, some echo. Let me turn on some voice section on my side here.
Uh I’ve got no portion of the eye.
Yeah, maybe going.
We, we go back and forth on this.
OK.
Thank you. We’re, we’re a feedback company and we’re getting some real time, real time feedback as we go through this. So, thank you.
Um Maybe Ping has to let us know if the echo is any better there.
No, it is better. Much better. Thank you, Gina. Thank you, Laura. OK.
We’ll uh we’ll get going.
So then we’ll um we’ll speak through some helpful frameworks, as I mentioned and some tools that are useful in improving employee engagement. Then we’re gonna talk through what it looks like to, to have a reactive and uh and responsive approach to employee engagement results, which is why most of us are here, the techniques we’re mostly familiar with, but we want to go beyond that and talk about a more proactive approach to improving employee engagement, summarize key takeaways and then we’ll move into Q and A so to get us rolling here.
Um And now with the echo, we may not have as much back and forth as, as we had planned, but we’ll, we’ll figure it out as we go, I, I’ll just kick us off with some definitions.
We hear a lot about culture, employee experience and the, and employee engagement. And it’s helpful to talk a little bit about the difference in these terms.
So let’s, let’s understand the landscape a bit.
We see a lot of folks, especially outside of hr use the term culture very broadly. In fact, sometimes they’ll, they’ll come to us for an employee engagement survey and say call it a culture survey. And there’s nuances in these different in these terms and important to remember. So we’ve got culture and we’ve got kind of an academic or a more descriptive definition there. The shorthand version of that of culture is the way we do things around here. It’s the underlying dies and norms, the guiding beliefs and all that.
But if we’re shortening that it’s the way we do things around here, everything about your organization adds up to the culture. Uh the, the personalities of the founders, the, the geographies you’re located in the local cultures that surround it.
Um The, the, the flavors that current leaders bring in and with their personalities, everything adds up to that, that current culture or the way we do things around here, policies, procedures, um size of the organization and, and the, the, the amount of time it’s been in existence uh kind of helps also establish how rigid that culture may be.
Um Let’s talk employee experience, ex the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the organization in which they work. So it’s the experience that employees have at the organization or how we experience the culture. So the culture is the way we do things, the experience, the employee experience is how your employees experience that culture, how they interact with it, the effect it has on them.
And then this last term engagement, uh an emotional state where we feel passionate, energetic and committed to our work. Um That is our reaction to the employee experience.
Um The way we um you know, we, we go to work, we, we, we are encounter the, the, the culture, we experience that and based on that experience, we get to choose how much we engage with that organization, engage with our work. And so really the employee experience, we like to describe that as we’re building an invitation for people to engage.
And so to summarize all of this improving engagement will usually require improving, improving the employee experience, which will likely require adjustments to the organizational culture. Dave I don’t know if you have anything to add or, or clarify on that.
Um Yeah, I, I think with the, with, with um II, I think it’s a really good way to, to look at it in terms of when, when we’re looking at culture, we’re looking at the way we do things around here. One thing I would add around management is, it is the response to the employee experience, but it is their positive response to the employee experiences. We can have many responses to the employee experience. But uh but with engagement, it would have to be a positive response to it.
Yeah. Good, good point. So one response would be attrition. You know, if I don’t like the employee experience, I might leave it. That’s, that’s a really great point. We’re looking at a positive response to uh to engagement.
Let’s go a bit further and, and then I’ll, I’ll turn some of these slides over to you, Dave. But we want to jump into some frameworks that we’ve developed. You know, Dave and I have both worked with hundreds of organizations around their employee engagement efforts. A lot of survey work, consulting work.
And we’ve um with the decision wise team, we’ve worked on some, some tools to help understand and explain and improve engagement. So we won’t go through all of them, of course, but we’ve got a couple that we think are, are very helpful.
Well, the first one we call the engagement ecosystem, there might be a better name for it, but it’s kind of just a framework for understanding how we can improve that employee experience. So let’s take a look at, let’s take a look at this. So knowing that the experience is basically the invitation we create at the organization, inviting people to engage that through the experience we’re creating, it’s helpful to, to simplify how we can align our organization to create that experience and three categories we’ve um identified in, in shaping this uh will, will outline here under this organizational alignment. The first would be senior leadership.
The executive team shapes the mission, vision and goals. They do a lot to shape what’s happening at the organization, not just strategy and direction, but even the culture and tone the decisions, they make their behaviors. People observe what the leaders are doing in the organization that shapes culture real time and uh uh their attitudes and and the decisions they make shape what the employees see as important in the organization.
And so senior leadership is a very important category. We’ll speak about that and how we, we um suggest leveraging that group or informing that group to help them shape and build positive employee experience and engagement.
The next would be something that is near and dear to engage or to hr professionals, people systems.
How are the systems in our organization aligned to create the right experience for our people? So in, in a minute, we’ll get into some specific examples, how we will use this model to, to action plan. But as you filter through employee engagement data, uh thinking through how people systems are aligned to get current results or to get better results is a really great um thing to be considering.
Then the last is uh what’s happening at a manager and team level. And that is a really important category. And you’ll notice just in our model here, our framework, this is the group that’s closest to the employee experience.
This is the group that’s creating the everyday weather that employees feel as they go to work. Um And they interact with their team and managers. We all know that that concept of people leave managers, they also stay for managers. And so there’s a lot of weight placed on what experience is being created at that manager and team level.
So we’ll get into greater detail, how we use this model. Uh And, and go through some kind of simple examples here in a bit.
Um But this ecosystem is a tool that we found to be very helpful and we’ll, we’ll uh speak a little bit more about it.
Dave, you wanna take us through the next one here.
Yeah. Um Let’s talk about uh organizational maturity and, and when we talk about this, um we, we have this understanding when we first start working with a client or with an organization on improving employee engagement, there’s different levels of what we would call readiness uh for that organization and what they can take on. So, if you have never measured employee engagement before, uh you’re in the state called passive engagement, that’s the bottom of the screen here. Passive engagement essentially means you e engagement is happening or it’s not happening in your organization, but it hasn’t been um we, we haven’t taken any deliberate steps. We haven’t done anything deliberately in our culture in order to try to create engagement necessarily. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t have good managers or good leaders or, or an hr team that isn’t concerned about the employee experience all is we just have not measured it yet.
And so when we go from the step of, we’ve got passive engagement into now we’re going to start measuring the level of engagement. We have left passive engagement and we are in this mode that we call measurement.
And that is what most organizations, any organization pretty much is ready for right now. So if you’ve never measured engagement before, you would start with this measurement step. Now, what does that mean?
Does that mean we’re only measuring and not doing anything with it? No, it doesn’t.
When we in the measurement step, we still want to respond to the survey, we still want to take action, but we may not be ready for some of those higher level things that we all want to get to when it comes to engagement early on in your time, managing engagement.
Um And especially those folks on, on the call here who are uh who are uh hr professionals, you’re going to feel a lot like hr owns engagement and the more you can expand that ownership first, usually to the executive team or some executive sponsors who really care about it and are really behind it, we want to expand it to them. And then ultimately, we want to expand and we, that’s what we call the commitment phase. Beyond the commitment phase, we want to expand ownership to all leaders in the organization. In other words, we are driving engagement through the leadership structure and we call that leader driven experience. So as we, as we build what we’re ready for initially is maybe just take a measurement and take some organizational action, communicate the results.
Then we’re starting to build commitment. We do a little bit in the way of education.
Uh We start setting expectations, we start getting buy in from the top leaders in the organization and other leaders from throughout the organization.
And then when we’re actually this third step leader driven experience, we actually start to, to um uh go beyond just setting the expectations. We’re actually holding leaders accountable to the uh to the level of engagement of their teams integration and mastery beyond that are, are really great to have. We’ve certainly seen some organizations get all the way to the mastery level, but most organizations are trying to get to the point where they can be, be driving engagement through the leadership structure, which is really what we call leader driven experience. And then we can integrate alliance systems, expand listening campaigns, we can do all kinds of things once we’re driving engagement through the leadership structure.
Um And uh anyway, that’s, that’s really the the, the goal that most organizations we work with have is really just to get to the point where they’re at leader driven experience. So that what we, what you’re ready for right now and, and the, the honest truth is most organizations that have been doing engagement surveys, they’ll come to us and they’ll say, you know, we’ve been doing the same thing over and over again and we’re not sure what to do next or we’re not sure how to move, move on from here.
And honestly, a lot of the time the answer is, well, it’s time to expand ownership. We are probably ready for a little bit more and so we’ll talk more about that as we go on.
Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, this is, this is a model that we, we use every day and we love it. And I see some folks there, Pam asking for the slides, we’ll, we’ll see what we can do to make them available. Laura’s got to work around that seems to be working as well. Uh But yeah, happy that this resonates. This is a really useful, a very useful tool and, and just so just to kind of recap and um you know, to improve engagement, we’re really and improve the experience that invites people to engage. We’ve got this ecosystem model to help us understand these components that drive the experience and this readiness model that kind of helps us understand what are we ready to do as an organization and what’s, what’s possible.
Uh Another concept that we wanted to talk about is less of a framework and more of maybe a missed opportunity for a lot of organizations as you’re thinking about improving employee engagement.
You know, a lot of times it’s like, ok, what do we need to add, what do we need to insert into our organization or, uh, you know, it add to our current procedures or practices.
A lot of times we’re missing out on things that just need to be removed. Um And, and it’s, it’s usually staring right at us. So as you think about improving engagement, consider this idea of what, what, what are the cultural toxins that just need to be removed from our employee experience every day?
Yeah. And that’s something that, that early on when you’re working through engagement and, and with our maturity model, you’re kind of at the measurement stage. It’s really tough to get beyond the measurement stage unless we have moved removed some of the obvious cultural toxins that are in the organization.
I love that. And, and this, this is a quote that’s not taken necessarily from the, the the people experience framework. This is, but this comes from the world of Charlie Munger, who’s Warren Buffett’s right hand man and uh obviously a very successful investor, but we love this concept and he said it is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten uh, by trying to be consistently not stupid and trying, instead of trying to be very intelligent. And the reason we put this quote here is, I mean, Charlie and, and Warren are billionaires.
Um, they’ve been very successful and they’re not trying to re invent the wheel, they’re not trying, they’re trying to be very consistently, not stupid. And I think that’s something for, for all of us we can learn from that. There’s, there’s some things that we can remove things that we shouldn’t be doing that are, are hurting engagement.
Um And that, that’s the, maybe the more readily available opportunity for us. So some examples and Dave and I have some great client things where we’ve learned from our clients that have, have done this uh but elements that might harm employee experience and there’s a long uh a much longer list, but anything that suggests distrust long ago, um Dave and I worked on a client together and uh they had, they had uh as part of their operations, they had delivery drivers or the service trucks rather that were out and they had put GPS um into the trucks and then uh they had people monitoring the trucks. And if they took, made a left hand turn, when uh they thought they should have made a right hand turn, they’d get called on the, on the CB, on the walkie talkie and say, hey, why, where are you going?
And, and that really minimized their experience that didn’t invite engagement. That was an experience that suggested to them. We don’t trust you.
Um, surveillance is important for safety and it has a place. And so we’re not saying that that’s not a case, but really be careful with that because surveillance or anything that’s construed as, as, as artifacts or symbols of distrust employees pick up on and that, that uh lessons that experience for them or can, can drive them to um you know, uh want to lead the organization or, or disengage bureaucracy, that is not a positive correlate of engagement. Bureaucracy is not something that people necessarily enjoy or thrive. So look for elements where we can simplify or streamline the organization. So we’re not having to jump through unnecessary hoops, outdated policy and procedure and also toxic managers. We’re going to spend a lot more time talking about the roles leaders at every level play in shaping engagement, but a toxic manager.
Um you know, sometimes we just look the other way on that or we just get used to them and that, that really can, can harm engagement
and toxic managers aren’t always the managers that you think they are. That’s the interesting thing about it. What we found is um even some of the managers that, that people really like to work with and work for are, are some of your toxic managers and, and it can be just a matter of, hey, I wanna be your friend more than I wanna be.
Mm.
Toxic managers. So, there’s obviously the ones that we all think about that are kind of turn and burn type managers. But, uh, but it can be even the ones that, that are best buddies with all their team and they’re just in protection mode. They’re, they wrap their arms around their team and, and they’re protecting them from the rest of the organization. So, so we want to expand the definition of toxic managers a little bit there.
Yeah, that’s a really great point that, you know, if I’m a manager, that’s, it’s just promoting, hey, I want you to like me, I want you to, you know, connect with me, but it’s us against them. Uh That’s, that’s not gonna drive engagement. We’ve got a lot of research that supports that.
Let’s uh let’s go a little bit further here and, uh you know, with two of us here, we can watch that chat, feel free to put questions or thoughts as we, as we go through here, happy to, to respond to it. Also. Uh um uh we’ll, we’ll uh look at op options to get the, the slides out if that’s a possibility. Um Let’s go further. Dave, do you wanna walk us through kind of this reacting and responding approach to employee engagement?
Sure. Um This is kind of uh if we’re talking about the maturity model, the base level of the maturity model, um of what we call we call uh the measure react approach to, to engagement.
So, um uh if we go to the next slide, Christian, um so essentially how the organizations that come to us originally will say this is how we’re solving for engagement.
Um We’re gonna run a survey, we’re gonna do an action plan. We might have everybody, every manager in the company do an action plan and that’s going to bring us engagement.
Now, uh that’s the, that is the routine that most organizations will begin with. And when we talk about where we are on the maturity model with that, we’re really um you know, base level of the maturity model survey action plan.
Hopefully our results go up the next time.
Next slide, Christian.
So we’re gonna survey to determine the level of engagement, understand general areas of concern. We might even communicate those areas of concern to people. We’re going to address uh concerns, uh act to address concerns. And then we’re gonna measure again to see if the concerns were reduced. Now, this is a method that we’ve seen play out. And if, if your organization is trying to kind of continue down this path, you can do this two maybe three times before you start burning out a the, the leaders of the organization. And b we start burning out the people in the organization from taking the survey.
Eventually, it feels like you’re squeezing the balloon a little bit where uh you squeeze the balloon, the air all goes to one place and then you release it and then it comes back to that same place.
It starts to feel that way because we start chasing these themes from the survey. So for example, uh you know, one survey might say, well, we’re low on communication. So we’re gonna work on communication. The next survey, we improved communication, but, but, but now we’re low on growth. So we’re gonna do an action plan around helping employees grow. So, and we kind of go back and forth between these different uh these different themes and we keep working on them and we keep doing action plans. And I do think you still see some incremental improvement and I’m not telling you not to action plan, by the way on surveys. But I’m saying if this is the only effort that you have, it’s gonna eventually start to wear out uh your, your, your leaders and especially your senior leaders.
I’ve been uh I think we’ve probably all been as hr people but also as a consultant in the room with the executives where they say they say we’ve been doing this for three years or four years and it just feels like we’re doing the same thing over and over again.
And if they’re starting to feel like that and you start to hear that sort of thing, it’s a good indication that they might be ready to take on a little bit more.
So if you go to the next slide, um Let’s, let’s talk about an example.
So we have an example here. Um So we’ve got a low score in employee voice. Um And so we, what we decided to do is we’re gonna work on that as an organization.
So we’re gonna create an action plan as an organization and we’re gonna say, so looking at some of the things that, that Christian talked about, we might look at the senior lead leader level and say, uh OK, so uh leaders need to listen more. So we’re gonna create a plan around that, then we’re gonna create some structural things that we can do. Maybe, you know, this, this, this survey is an employee voice side. So we’re gonna make sure that we respond to that. But also maybe there’s some other ways that we can listen. Maybe we get a, a suggestion uh box at some at some point or something like that. And then at the team leader level, we’re gonna say, hey, make sure that you’re, you’re capturing those ideas and passing them along action, you know, we’re gonna take action on it and we’re gonna take organizational action.
Um And, and, and honestly, I’ve seen those sorts of actions act actually improve uh things like this employee voice and things like that.
What’s interesting though is we, we improve something like this and oftentimes when we’re working on something early on, it is just an effort of saying, well, we’re just removing some of these, these organizational cul cultural toxins that we talked about. We just have to get out, we just have to get out of our own way in some of these issues. And so we do that early on even we start to notice, ok, we’ve improved employee voice, but we’re not seeing engagement overall move in the direction that we want to go. We see individual items on the survey move forward and that’s good. And we’re happy about that, but we’re not seeing overall engagement improve. And again, that’s the same thing that with the senior leaders will come to us and say, what, what are we not doing yet? What do, what do we still have to do?
And, you know, and, and Dave to that 0.1 of the interesting thing we see is sometimes organizations paralyzed by what, what do we action plan on?
And we’ve got so many themes and we want to do 1010 things or, or, or sometimes they’ll, they’ll uh they’ll either try to do too many things or they won’t do anything because they, they can’t do it on the one thing. A lot of times as you, you know, it’s important to try to find the, the, the, the right thing to focus on, but it’s almost as important just to demonstrate to the organization we heard you and we’re doing something, the act of listening and responding, especially as you’re at those early stages of the maturity model are, are so important because we’re trying to build trust. We’re trying to say no one was retaliated against for providing feedback and the organization got better in some way because you, you were heard.
So as we mentioned before, um the Measure React approach is really just the base level of the this maturity model. If we’re trying to build engagement, we can do that two th two times, maybe three times before it starts wearing itself out um in our organization. And, and before we start, we have managers and um and really employees looking for more uh what are we gonna do? That’s, that’s less reactive and, and more proactive.
There are some strengths to this approach, next slide.
Uh There are some strengths to this approach for sure and we’ve talked about them a little bit already.
Um you know, you know, just solving uh we like a big survey, you know, a 50 question engagement survey. And the reason why we like that is because it does allow us to kind of cast a wide net and try to figure out what are here are all the things that impact employee experience and what are the things that we can improve from, from in, in that experience? We like that and of course, we wanna identify anything that might be um negatively impactful on people in the organization. And of course, we want to improve those things.
So that’s, that’s definitely a strength of this. The, the, the weakness of the Measure Act approach is that we are always in reaction mode and no matter what you’re doing, uh it never feels good to be constantly having to respond and, and, and just feel like you’re always just reacting to what’s going on currently.
And so we really uh prefer to espouse when we’re trying to improve employee engagement overall, we’re really wanting to espouse more of a, a proactive approach. And I, I say that and it sounds easy for me to say that it’s really, actually it was really easy for me to say it.
But um but it’s a lot harder to do and, and the reason why it’s hard to do is because most organizations that try to jump into a proactive approach just aren’t, they aren’t ready to be there.
Um There’s, there’s, there’s, there is ground work that needs to be laid in order to get there and we’ll talk more about that as we go on.
Yeah, a lot. Uh You mentioned earlier, Dave that idea of expanding ownership a lot of times, especially if an organization hasn’t ever done engagement or if it’s, or if they haven’t done it for a while, you’ve got to go on this journey where it’s always seen as an hr initiative initially. And then the next step is getting those leaders to buy in and, and those first few years um are, are critical at building that buy in with those senior leaders.
All right, let’s go a little bit further here. Um And again, feel free to put those questions in. We, we will have time at the end. We’re going at a pretty good clip, I think, uh, that diet Coke, Dave and I have both had this morning is, is speeding this up a little bit ahead of schedule.
Um Let’s talk, you know, we talked about the reacting and responding approach which is is critical uh but also has some time limits on that and on how many years you can rely on that approach.
Uh Let’s let’s discuss what a proactive approach to employee engagement might look like, uh what that might look like. Um And, and especially as we, you know, alluded to as you move up as you expand ownership, um uh you’re going to start leveraging more of your leadership structure to drive engagement.
You’re going to be very limited in what’s possible. If, if engagement is seen as an hr only uh priority or as hr owned, only initiative, you really need to expand the um expand that ownership. And that’s really what this maturity model is about. We’re moving from measurement as we go up, we see leadership buy in that starts with our senior leaders buying in and starting to prioritize this and align this to organizational objectives. We see us uh educating managers about their role in shaping engagement and really what we’re talking about where we’re heading with. Um This is what we call leader driven experience or LDX. You saw that, that, that third tier was leader driven experience. We’ve expanded ownership, we’ve built accountability uh for, for the employee experience at different levels of the organization and much more becomes possible when we’re, we’re functioning at that level.
Let’s let’s go through that same example actually and, and take it through more of an LDX approach, uh this leader driven experience approach. So let’s go back, let’s say our, our survey um uh It shows that we have a, a sense of a low sense of employee voice. Employees don’t feel like they’re heard or if they’re heard, they’re not responding to their opinions aren’t valued. Let’s go. Uh Now we’re as an organization, we’re at that leader driven experience level of the maturity model. Where do we go from here?
Um Maybe I’ll, I’ll start this off a bit and, and Dave uh feel free to chime in. We’ll try to be careful with our mic. So we don’t get that echo from earlier. But let’s tell this is where we would really start to lean into more of this ecosystem model where we’d say, OK, we’ve got an employee experience challenge around employee voice. We want to improve this part of the experience.
Um The le let’s look at what’s happening at senior leadership. How is senior leadership promoting uh listening throughout the organization? Are they listening to their direct reports? Are they promoting employee ideas when they do leverage employee feedback? Are they calling that out publicly? Do we have examples where uh employee feedback has driven has bubbled up throughout the organization and gotten to uh senior leaders and influence decisions.
If not, how do we make that happen? What’s happening at that senior leadership level? Do, are they making decisions that completely in a vacuum? How much access do they have to the front lines, those types of things at that senior leadership level, people systems, do we have the right tools, procedures, policy, technology in place to capture employee voice? What’s happening? Have we created a system uh uh organizational expectation around manager, one on ones have we built the tools to give managers um uh to, to be successful in listening to their employees and then at that manager and team level, what’s happening in the manager uh interactions? Are they having those one on ones? Are they effective?
Um How consistent, where is it working well with the manager and team level? You can learn a lot, lot from your highest scoring areas and also from your lowest scoring areas.
Um uh where you can say, OK, who’s who’s winning in employee voice? And what can we learn from that group? And how can we spread that to other parts of the organization who’s really struggling with this? And is that an opportunity for some focused attention, you know, in a bit, we’ll talk about coaching and, and three sixties as a follow up. Dave, you have something.
Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the interesting things when we, um, when I’m meeting with a leadership team and they say they’re, they’re confused and, and maybe a little bit, um I don’t want to use the word upset but, uh, but, but, but it may be agitated a little bit at, at a low score um, around employee voice. Why do people feel like they’re not listening?
And then inevitably, and they’re, and they’re correct, they th they say that they say to me, well, why do you think our managers aren’t listening to their people?
Um And I’ll say, and I’ll, the question I always ask is what expectation have you set for them in the way that they’re supposed to listen and respond to people when they, when they give uh when they give that and this is what we mean by proactive, right?
Um If we haven’t set an expectation for leaders in the organization uh of, of how you handle the experience of employee voice, then they’re not, they’re going to handle it their own way and some leaders are gonna be very inviting of it probably to a fault and some leaders are going to be um uh completely shut it down because they don’t want to hear it.
And there’s some leaders that are gonna handle it perfect perfectly really. Um And, but it’s just gonna depend on the leader that you have in the organization. So for driving uh engagement through the leadership structure, we really want to think about setting an expectation for, for how do we lead in this organization? And part of that is going to be, how do we capture, uh how do we listen to capture and respond to suggestions, ideas, innovations that are brought forward by employees in this organization?
Uh uh I think you bring up such a huge point that uh and I’m, I’m, I’m sure this will resonate with some of the folks uh attending that in most organizations, we see that people are promoted because they’re amazing individual contributors and, and they’re promoted and most of us assume, oh, you’re promoted, you’ll, you’ll get the hang of it. You know what it now means to be a manager. But no, they knew what it was to be a rockstar, individual contributor.
And we as organizations don’t do a great job of saying here are the new expectations of a manager uh around listening around accountability around all these different dimensions and an engagement survey is really great. In a minute. We’ll talk a little bit about where it’s great about highlighting some of this information. But there are other sources of feedback. I know we had a really good comment, a question about employee feedback.
Um There were other good sources of feedback uh to really address this manager uh level which we’ll get into in a, in a bit. But you can see kind of how that when we get further in the organizational maturity model where we can open up new avenues of action planning and new lenses, as we, as we think they’re OK, these different components of the leadership structure
and something I would say that that goes hand in hand, what we’re talking about, uh the senior leadership level uh needs to obviously be the, the group that exemplifies the behaviors that you’re looking for, that drive engagement. They need to be able to do that.
But they also need to be able to say let’s set a standard and this is part of where we get into where, where do, where do they work hand in hand with, with hr in order to build a more proactive environment for engagement to occur.
One of the things that hr can do is work hand in hand with senior leaders in determining what are the behaviors that we’re looking for and can we be specific about that and spell those things out?
And, and the reason why that’s important and sometimes we’ll call that uh uh you know, uh uh uh uh a uh a competency model, a leadership competency model or we might call them um uh success factors or, or things like that, that uh that you, we’re looking for these things that are behavioral nature that are behavioral markers that show us that we have leaders that are leading in a way that is going to lead to engagement.
If we don’t provide that framework for leaders of this, these are the behaviors that lead to engagement, they’re just going to kind of choose their own behaviors. And that’s fi that’s fine. We want some of that autonomy and leadership and it’s good to have differences between leaders. But to, to lay out some principles for success is a really important part of proactive engagement. We’re getting beyond the employee voice example and just saying, look in general, we need to, we need to lay out some of these things
and that, that’s also a really great way, Dave to, to, for leaders to buy into the process when you go to a leader and say, hey, we need to define the leadership expectations or these, these behavioral expectations for the organization, not just in terms of universally applicable good behaviors, but things aligned to our strategy. What do we need to, to embody as an organization to be successful, to accomplish your goals as a leadership team? And so it might be a greater focus on innovation. It might be a greater focus on some, some very specific behaviors uh to, to help execute on strategy.
And that can also build a lot of buying from leaders when they think, OK, this isn’t just, you know, you know, something that I can discount is not my job. This is, this is something that’s very important for organizational success. It’s tied to strategy, it’s tied to business outcomes, those types of things around that, that leadership model.
I, one of the things that I think is, is an important consideration here is, is you’re building now and we’ll call it a listening strategy and we’ll, we’ll get to another slide on this in just a second.
But uh if you’re building out a listening strategy in your organization to say, how are we going to capture the data that we need in order to uh proactively improve engagement, an engagement survey or at least the traditional engagement survey is by very nature, a very reactive instrument.
In other words, we are asking for feedback on a whole bunch of different kind of granular parts of the employee experience.
And uh and the expectation would be from, from employees if I’m giving you feedback here that you’re, that you’re gonna do something about it.
And so it is by nature a reactive instrument because of all the things that we’re asking on it.
We I think managers have a hard time managing to engagement when they only get that data one time in a year.
Um If they’re only getting it once a year, then it’s, it’s really easy to fall into the measure reactor approach or the reactive approach of engagement of saying, OK, I’m gonna take these three things and we’re gonna improve on these things. Nothing wrong with that. Of course, we want them to do that.
But also we want them thinking about if the, if the survey happens in January every year, we want them thinking in February and March and April, what am I doing? In order to foster an environment where people can be engaged.
And in order to do that, we need to adopt a philosophy of getting the right data to the right people at the right time. Meaning if the right data, meaning we don’t always need the full survey, but we do need some sort of marker and indicator to see where people are people high on engagement or are they low on engagement? What’s their experience like right now?
And we have a few different measures that we can use that. 11 measure that we love to use is a measure around belonging because we know how much that is critical to people’s engagement or a net promoter score type measure or, and an engagement index measure something like that. That that’s a very simple, uh very simple data that we can collect and we can do it more often because it’s a lot smaller survey, we can do it more often and we can get that feedback to managers. There are lots of ways that we can do it. Some organizations will adopt like a semi annual pulse or a quarterly pulse and some organizations will adopt other listening programs that we talk about here in a second.
So if I were looking at this in the traditional sense, um What we would probably be depending upon is an annual survey and it would be a reactive sort of thing. But if we were adding to this, we might add some p surveys in there. And however many of you want to.
And now as a manager, as a leader, um you’ve put, now you’ve put a piece of a piece of um, data in their hands. That is outcome data.
It’s, uh, it’s not, it’s not directly actionable.
It, you, the leader has to think to themselves as I approach engagement or as I, as I make decisions or as I do things in my area, how is it going to impact the KP I or the metric that I’m receiving on a quarterly basis or, uh, or more or less frequently than that, that, that tells me how engaged my people are. Now, I’m thinking about how do I make decisions in the interim between these large annual surveys that we do? The anchor surveys, that was what we call them that we do on an annual basis. Do I have a marker that tells me how I’m doing along the way?
And when you give a manager a metric like that, they begin uh managing toward that metric, they become more proactive about it because they’re thinking, OK, I’ve got to do, I’m gonna make a change in my organization. We’re going to implement a new software and ordinarily maybe your manager might think, well, let’s just get it done. But now they’re thinking, OK, so I’ve got this KP I coming, I’ve got this metric coming in two months.
That’s gonna tell me how my employees are feeling. So now I’m thinking about, OK, how do I, how do I implement this change in the best way possible? So that, so that not only do I maximize the adoption of the change, but also how do I maximize the experience that people are having through the change? So it’s a different way of thinking of things and it doesn’t happen unless we’ve set an expectation of the data that’s coming and also are willing to hold managers accountable against that data that’s coming to them.
Was it, you know, it, it’s a great point in terms of adding some more but not, not overwhelming with data, but getting the right level of detail to them with the right frequency so that they feel some sense of ownership and reinforcing that accountability is within an organization. There’s some other um surveys that or, or in listening instruments that we found to be very helpful in rounding out a listening campaign.
So for example, there might be ad hoc listening surveys, things that where we need to ask, you know, for, for example, during COVID, a lot of ad hoc surveys were run around. Hey, how are we doing with this move to remote work?
Do you know around employee safety? How do we feel, you know, there were a lot of those things that and it’s good to be able to open up those conversations when necessary.
Um on it, it’s also great for change management, um uh efforts as well on boarding and exit surveys, these life cycle moments, these critical moments. If you’ve heard our other webinars, you’ve heard us talk about critical moments on boarding an exit, understanding how people feel coming into the organization, understanding that the their thoughts as they leave the organization, that’s critical ex information that you can use to tune a culture to invite greater engagement anniversary surveys. That’s an interesting model that um we’re seeing more and more of our clients move to and, and we’re going to be um uh enhancing our technology in the very short term to, to uh accommodate this to a greater extent.
But it’s a survey that sent out at a natural time of reflection, which would be someone’s anniversary with some kudos around. Hey, great job. We, we appreciate having you with our team. Please give us some feedback and that’s a great moment to also ask for one of those those overlying metrics that or overarching metrics that Dave mentioned like AAA net promoter score or a net belonging score just and then some open text, you know, asking them about their, their experience with the organization and as well as just this concept of ex monitoring.
Uh Dave, do you want to talk, you know, we, we’ve geared around a lot around the, the lag metric, the, the the outcome measures. We’re seeing a lot of success with this next item 360 feedback. And it’s not something a lot of leaders think of as, as a component of engagement, but we found it fits very nicely and very strategically with employee engagement efforts. Do you want to help connect some of those dots?
Sure. And uh I just want to address a question. Somebody mentioned survey fatigue and I think it’s since we put about 1000 surveys on the screen at once, it’s, it’s we should mention that um uh the way that you wanna handle a listening campaign is to make sure that you’re not overtaxing people with, with, with AAA huge number of surveys that you have to take on an ongoing basis.
And so when you do a poll survey, you might do a uh a stratified sample of the organization.
Um And when you do anniversary surveys, then one, then you can get ongoing feedback throughout the year depending on when, when somebody hits their anniversary date. So, so it’s only one additional survey. That’s the reason why anniversary surveys are, are becoming more popular. It’s only one additional survey beyond the annual survey that they have to take during the year.
So you, you would want to get this to a point where you wouldn’t want any one employee taking more than maybe two or three surveys in a year about their experience and that may include onboarding.
Uh And that may include an anniversary survey and an annual survey, but they’re, they’re not taking any more than that. So it’s a really good question. So you, you really want to design your uh your listening program around that. Now, I do have organizations that do a quarterly pulse where they send out that pulse to everybody in the organization.
Uh One of the organizations I work with personally, it would be at the mastery level of the maturity model. Um And so they, the, the people in their organization realize how effective it is for them to fill out those surveys. And if, if they feel like things are being done with the data that they’re sending the, would they feel like their lives improve because they’re sending that data to the leadership team, then they are going to fill out as many surveys that it takes to get them there.
And so they, in that organization, I think they do four or five different different uh surveys during the year that people do. But, and,
and I just add, it’s a really great conversation and important. And um today’s point if they, if you’re responding and you’re using the data employees will keep providing it if you see participation dipping, especially if you’re trying to do quarterly pulses too soon in the maturity process.
If you see uh participation declining, that’s a sign that you’re it’s probably time to pull back on that. And there’s some other things around manager, one on ones and other ways to capture feedback that are very effective. But it, it, it is something that you’ve got to pay attention to and kind of tune and, and uh grow with your, your organization.
So, back to your original question about 360 degree feedback and, and the way that you framed it was, um we, we have all these, uh these surveys that kind of help us understand what are the outcomes, what, what, uh what are the things that, that, uh, or, or, or kind of lagging indicators of, of where we’ve been or what we’ve done.
Uh, what we found is that we’ve integrated over time and we’ve been doing decision wise, we’ve been doing three sixties. That’s actually how we started.
So we’ve been doing them since the 19 nineties back when we did them on 3.5 inch floppy disks. Um, and we’d send those to people and they’d mail them back and we’d assemble a 360 report. So we’ve been, we’ve been doing three sixties for a long time. It’s only been in the last four or five years that we’ve started to look at three sixties as a critical tool that we can use in order to improve, um improve employee experience and we can do it, we can use it as a more proactive method of doing that. So if we can look to the next slide Christian. Let’s just give you a quick example of the difference that you might see.
Um Well, OK, so this is essentially what I just said. Let’s go to the next slide after this.
Give you a quick example of what you might see in terms of the difference of the, of, of what you would see on an engagement survey. The engagement survey does a really good job of telling you what managers should be doing. So the engagement survey ma my manager section of our engagement survey, there’s a set, there’s a question on it that says my manager cares about me as a person.
If we get a high score on that or we get a low score on that on the annual survey, it is simply an outcome of everything that we’ve seen the manager do over the last year. If we’re looking at this differently and saying, what does it mean to care about employees? We might create behavioral statements that we could actually put into a 360 degree feedback instrument that we would not put into an engagement survey. So for example, um we would say, look, we’ve got a competency here that says caring.
Uh it’s a, the competence is carrying and the way we might define that getting a little more granular and this may not be a perfect way of defining it. But there’s other, you know, you can add to this, you can take away from it, do whatever you want, but whatever you need to do to define what does it mean for a manager to care for people in this organization? And we might say things like demonstrates a personal interest in the well being of others time for other people sympathizes with others.
Meeting personal or professional challenges provides help when others are overworked or stressed. And in that way, we’re getting that sort of the DNA of in our organization of what makes what makes a caring manager. Now, we could add some things to that we could take away from it. We could be more descriptive. We can build that according to your culture and your strategy and what you’re trying to accomplish there. We can tweak that in any way that we want, but it’s going beyond just saying, hey, we expect managers are going to care about people and we’re showing them exactly. Here are the behaviors that tell us that you’re caring about people. And this is what people will see when they, when they see this, they’ll say, hey, that’s a caring manager.
II, I love this, this model and yes, that is DNA. Not a candy. Uh Yeah, I guess it could be either. Um But this concept that we can get more descriptive and give more actionable data in, in a 360 when we’re working at that manager level. On top of that, it builds greater ownership because there’s a direct connection.
It’s a uh we, we’re smiling at the comments, we will do our best to, to figure out getting these slides to you. II I think it’s an option here. Um But also we, we’re happy to resonating that that’s the real win here.
Um But also the 360 besides having greater detail, it, it also invites greater ownership. It’s your data. It’s based on the experience specifically that you as a manager creating. In fact, that’s what we’re trying to answer with the 360. What experience am I creating? And is it the right experience? Am I happy with it? Is it going to lead to the outcomes that I am committed to and the organization is committed to? And a 360 does that in a way that is, is very different than an annual engagement survey and it has a really important place. So, you know, there’s all sorts of different strategies you can employ with 360 your lowest performing teams following an engagement survey, your highest performing teams, you know, invest in your high potentials with 360 feedback and lean into that with some coaching.
Uh but also use it to, to bring up the the floor in terms of um the the lowest the areas where the manager isn’t necessarily creating the right right experience. And so there are a lot of, a lot of wonderful places to consider 360 feedback in an employee engagement strategy.
We’ve covered a lot of ground quickly. I hope, I hope that we are able to stitch this together and also add to some of the great things that you’re doing on your side. Just to summarize, to improve engagement, we really need to focus on improving the experience. Just that statement, by the way, resonates with senior leaders. If you say you can’t build engagement, you can only invite it by creating a strong employee experience that opens up the mind to what are we really able to do here? What, where can we focus and really lean in?
Uh Sometimes I feel like engagement is this mysterious thing that they, they, they can’t influence directly. Um And, and connecting to the experience helps consider organizational alignment and readiness those models. We, we mentioned, I could also add, don’t forget to look for areas to remove those toxins that we talked about, start by addressing engagement at the org level that, that reactive approach and then build on that to where you can um expand ownership uh uh from outside hr uh to include senior leaders and, and ultimately managers at every level and ultimately everyone in the employee, every employee to have some sense that every day we core what it feels like to work here.
Um Right day, right. People, right time, that’s where we’re headed with our, our technology. That’s where we, we believe that we’re going to be able to do more by getting um getting the, the, the, you know, the 360 data and those, those overarching metrics um into the system where, where they need to go into your approach, where it needs to go leveraging that 360 feedback. So no further ado I we’ve got some, some time here.
What questions do you have? Oh, go ahead, Dave.
Oh, I’ll mute.
- So we’ve got a couple of questions. Uh Both come from Mary. Uh One of them was what are the best tools for employee feedback and surveys? The answer to that question is decision wise as tools for employee feedback and surveys. Um Honestly, what, what we, what we believe on that if you’re looking for a tool. Um We, we believe that that it’s really good to have go with an organization with a set methodology.
Um It’s really hard to use tools like all tricks because they don’t have templates, they don’t have benchmarks, they don’t have things like that.
Um And there’s a lot of tools or there’s a lot of tools similar to decision wise if you’re looking for it. But obviously we are biased to our tool. We, we build it because we think it’s the best. So um that’s, that’s the one that we would, that we would suggest. Um The second question was, what are the pros and cons of the suggestion box?
Uh Management? Con continue says no, no to this. Uh just come to them with, with issues and, and I think that’s true. A lot of leadership teams, uh don’t like suggestion boxes. Um, I would say a suggestion box, I’ve seen it be effective where it’s being responded to regularly.
Um, the function of a suggestion box, in my opinion is a collection of anonymous suggestions. If I don’t feel comfortable going to my manager with something, then I could put it into some sort of and it would always, it wouldn’t be, you know, a physical box anymore. It’s uh there’s lots of electric uh or, or uh you know, cloud based whatever uh suggestion box that you get into if you, if you wanted to do that, but it should be just for the anonymous feedback to get to leadership. And if you’re going to put it out there, then it needs to be responded to.
So, um you, you need to be able to, to, to be following that and responding to it. So those are the things around it. If you are looking for suggestions from people that would put their name on those suggestions, then there’s better ways to do that. And I do agree the best way to do that is to invite that feedback directly toward the leadership team. And that might mean that the leadership team is not just passively saying come to me with suggestions, it’s what they’re going to people and say what suggestions do you have. Uh So they’re actually trying to actively get those suggestions out there.
Yeah. Yeah. And, and uh there are electronic um, and, and digital solutions for this. Uh We don’t, we haven’t employed it. Uh, I, I think we will mi mid next year, we’ll have our version of that and it’s gonna be really geared around what Dave said, which is, they’re only effective if there’s uh active curation. So you’re gonna get a lot of people wanting a different coffee maker. Uh You’re gonna get a lot of those things. You, you, you, you might get some whistleblowing things that should be handled a different way.
Um We should go through more of a whistleblowing, um, you know, channel. Um And, and so you’ll need someone to check it very pure, uh very frequently and to curate it and, and to be able to escalate and, and, and kind of filter out the noise on, on some of those things. But um, there’s, they have their place, certainly any other questions.
So, um, so there was one that said, I wanna just call out Leah’s comment which says we use decision wise for our engagement surveys. 10 out of 10 would recommend thank you, Leah for that. Uh We will the checks in the mail. Appreciate that.
No, I appreciate that Leah. Uh we, we do work hard to, to build a, a very effective tool for measuring this.
Yeah, I hope, I hope, you know, that that’s come across in this is that we care a lot about what we do. Uh It’s not just, you know, we’re engaged in, in engagement. We, we believe in this and we try to practice these things on our own team and we’re not perfect there either. We, we, we’re, we’re human managers as well, but, uh, appreciate Leah recognizing that then. Uh, we, we certainly love that feedback.
Um, I, I also love the comments about around fatigue. Um, you know, the, the the other things maybe as we, we see if there’s any other questions that come in.
Uh Fatigue is something to watch for as you, as you create these listening programs, but also organizational response that maturity model, if you’re not getting leadership buy in, you don’t want to start overwhelming with surveys because you’re not gonna be able to push it to the, you’re not gonna be able to do it.
Um You kind of honor that feedback from the employees, the, the org is not gonna let you do that. So you recognizing kind of that tension there and, and if you’re able to move up a maturity model that’ll kind of dictate how far you’ll go.
Um That’s, that’s an important point there.
- We’ll take one last one. Last question is from Pam.
Um Are your engagement surveys built to the specific organization or the generic to be used across the board?
It’s a really good question and it’s one that you have to balance a little bit because you want to balance two things. You wanna balance, getting the right survey for your organization, which is important and you also want to balance having benchmark information. You want to be able to compare uh we know the score is low for us. But how does that compare to other organizations as well? So, um I I would say we often change the language within our questions without changing the meaning of our questions to fit the organization that we’re working with. And we also would say we, the way that decision wise operates is we have a benchmark database of like 200 questions that we can go to so that we can pick and choose a little bit and still have benchmark data that we can bring in in order to in order to kind of uh make it custom for the organization.
But also in order to make sure that it’s standard enough that we can, that we can apply our, our methodology and, and the information that we have
in general, I’d say it’s somewhere like 90% standard survey, 10% variability and, and that even changes year over year, the next year, you may say, hey, we want to add some questions about change management. If we have them in our benchmark, that’s what we go to. So we have that, that comparability. Sometimes we do work with you to create custom questions as well.
And I see we’re right at time, we want to thank everyone for attending and, and uh being part of this conversation, as was mentioned, we will uh send out the information for the HRCI and SHRM Credit and I will do my best to make a case for getting these slides out. I hope this is a helpful conversation for everyone. We, we certainly enjoyed it.
