We were recently joined by Sara Gomez, Chief People Officer at Lloyd’s of London, to discuss how she worked with ENGAGE to:

  • Redefine engagement to become a strategic, value-adding initiative by asking business leaders three key questions
  • Support the senior leadership team in role-modelling and driving engagement
  • Deliver improved business outcomes through more informed decision-making based on the power of predictive insights

This was during her time at Lloyd’s (the world’s leading insurance market), Direct Line Group (one of the country’s largest insurance firms) and Moss (one of the UK’s top menswear retailers) as well as at a fast-growth fintech. See the key takeaways from the discussion below:

Enhancing the strategic value of engagement

Emphasise the importance of deriving strategic value from employee engagement efforts. Engagement should be seen as a business initiative driven by leaders rather than a standalone HR task. This shift in perspective helps align engagement activities with overarching business goals and outcomes.  This strategic focus can be achieved by:

  • Improved contextual understanding: You should begin the engagement process by gaining a deep understanding of the organisation’s strategic objectives and challenges. This is through engaging in discussions with senior leaders, to explore what the business is aiming to achieve. This context allows for engagement that will directly support business priorities. Sara spoke about how ENGAGE’s interactions at an early stage with the CEO and ExCo of Lloyd’s helped to achieve this, for example.
  • Using a tailored approach: Recognise that each organisation has its own unique culture and challenges and will be at different points on the maturity or growth curve. Engagement strategies must be customised to reflect these differences. By understanding the specific needs of the organisation, leaders can develop engagement initiatives that resonate with employees and effectively address their concerns. Using this approach helped Sara to add value in organisations as diverse as an insurance firm (DLG), a retailer (Moss) a fast growth fintech and the world’s largest insurance market (at Lloyd’s).
  • Applying a tailored definition of engagement: Clearly define what engagement looks like for your business. This means asking three key questions:
    1. First, “engagement for what?” – what are the strategic objectives for the business and why are you trying to create engagement amongst your people, to what end? What KPIs are you trying to shift as a result?
    2. Second, “engagement with what?” – what do you actually want your people to be engaged with? With you as an employer for sure, but CEOs also want employees to be engaged with delivering a great customer or client experience and with the purpose and strategy of the business.
    3. Finally, “engagement through what?” – what parts of the employee experience (EX) will help us to engage our people in the way we have just stated? Is it about how we are leading people, managing them, communicating with them, developing them etc.?
      • Getting your senior leaders to answer these three questions will help your definition of engagement to be tailor made and anchored in your business objectives.
      • In addition, it helps gain leadership buy-in by involving executives in strategic conversations about employee engagement, changing it from being seen as a tactical or pure-HR initiative

Delivering value through smarter analytics and predictive insights

Engagement initiatives need smart design combined with smart analytics to drive change and performance.  But this can only be achieved through:

  • Using the “full engagement” concept: The notion of “full engagement” refers to the idea that employees must be positively engaged across various critical dimensions – such as their connection to the company’s purpose, understanding of its strategic goals, committed delivering a great customer or client experience and a real advocate of you as an employer. Achieving high scores in this multi-dimensional model is challenging, which ultimately makes it a more rigorous and meaningful metric. It captures the complexity of employee engagement and has also been found highly predictive of harder business outcomes.

 

  • Leveraging the predictive value of engagement metrics: There is a strong connection between “full engagement” measures and key business outcomes, such as talent retention, customer satisfaction (e.g., Net Promoter Scores), and financial metrics like profitability and growth. This predictive nature of engagement metrics indicates that by fostering a highly engaged workforce, organisations can anticipate better performance in these critical areas – but which really matter for you is the key question. For example, Sara spoke about how ENGAGE helped to connect engagement to customer satisfaction at DLG, to store-level growth at Moss and to talent attraction and retention metrics at Lloyd’s.
  • Using balanced benchmarking: While external benchmarking can provide useful context—showing how an organisation compares to others in the industry – it should not be the sole focus. Instead, organisations should concentrate on identifying their unique drivers of engagement and learning from their internal best practices. This perspective shifts the emphasis away from complacency, where organizations might feel satisfied simply matching average scores, and instead encourages a deeper exploration of what truly drives engagement within their specific context. As an example, Sara worked with ENGAGE to understand what the very best managers were doing within Moss stores to drive year-on-year growth through an engaged workforce.  At Lloyd’s meanwhile, we helped to identify the key drivers of engagement within topics such as leadership, communications and performance management. 
  • Not forgetting the human element in engagement work: Automated platforms can generate reports, but the nuanced interpretation of those reports requires “in the room” work that can engage stakeholders (such as senior leaders), help them interpret the findings, and facilitate discussions on what the data means for the business. This human touch ensures that the insights derived from the data are actionable and relevant, helping organisations move from mere data collection towards meaningful strategic action. Sara spoke about how ENGAGE has helped provide tech-enabled, not tech-led engagement solutions and how configurable tech has aided leaders and managers to get what they most want from their insights.
  • Differentiating impact from scores: Not all low-scoring questions correlate with significant improvements in engagement. This distinction is crucial; leaders need to understand which themes will move the needle on engagement. For example, while certain aspects of the EX might score low, they may not be the most impactful areas for enhancing overall engagement. This insight helps avoid misallocation of resources and frustration among employees who invest time into initiatives that don’t yield results. Focusing on the real key drivers helps you to deliver impact at speed. For example, Sara spoke about how:
    • Our strategic priority analysis at DLG helped the ExCo to understand what their key strength areas and critical improvement areas were for engagement
    • Our key driver analysis helped managers at Moss to focus their engagement improvement plans down to just a few critical issues
    • Our employee segmentation analysis at Lloyd’s helped their ExCo to understand where they could leverage their most engaged people and work to re-engage those who were lagging on their engagement levels.

 

If you would like to learn more about our approach, our work with other clients or would like to enquire, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected]