Moving from a tactical engagement survey to a strategic engagement programme.

Nearly every company of a certain size will host an annual engagement survey or conduct regular pulses to gain insights into what their employees are thinking and how they are feeling. Whilst this is all useful, it isn’t necessarily utilising the value that a strategic approach to engagement can have.

At ENGAGE, we believe that engagement should be one of the most valuable, strategic business tools available to leaders trying to drive sustainable growth or transformation. It should not be seen as an HR issue, it should be put front and centre as a business priority.

But in many organisations, this requires a reset: a realignment between strategic business priorities and strategic people priorities. It is about defining engagement in terms of the people behaviours that will deliver the business ambition. It is about shaping the employee experience in a way the drives these behaviours and supports people in playing their part.

How aligned is your engagement strategy with the business strategy? Can your ExCo see the link between the investment you make as an organisation in creating a highly engaged team of people and the business value this creates? Is engagement as “BAU” as market intelligence, customer experience or financial performance?

Here are a few ways you could start to challenge the way engagement is currently approached in your organisation and elevate it to the leadership priority it should be:

1. Go back to basics.

What does engagement mean in your organisation and how effectively does your employee experience drive this?

Think about the behaviours captured under that banner of engagement and challenge yourself to articulate the business outcomes these will actually drive.

To decipher what meaningful engagement is to our client organisations, ENGAGE always begin by asking three questions:

• Engagement FOR what? This is about understanding your strategic goals and therefore what engagement should be driving. What specific KPIs would you expect to shift if high levels of engagement are achieved?
• Engagement WITH what? This is about understanding the people behaviours that will determine whether your organisation achieves these goals. How do your most engaged people think and act?
• Engagement THROUGH what? This is about understanding what aspects of the employee experience will drive the right behaviours.

By asking these questions, you’re making the connection between business performance and how people’s behaviours can help to drive it. The tangible and quantifiable relationship between employee engagement and business success is one that every organisation should seek to optimise. Admittedly, this makes the development and implementation of your engagement strategy a little more complicated. Redefining engagement as a business priority rather than just an HR one, will inevitably make it more relevant to a wider stakeholder group and raise expectations. This is a good problem to have and a sign that engagement is starting to take its’ rightful position as something everyone in the organisation has in a stake in.

2. Focus on the drivers of engagement. Take learnings from across the entire employee experience.

Think of the employee experience as something that impacts people sequentially – the journey from pre-hire expectations, to exit reflections and alumni behaviours. Think of it also as something that is punctuated (often in different ways at different moments in time) by constants, for example: leadership behaviours, company direction and purpose, culture, development and progression, performance management, recognition and reward, ways of working and enablement.

Every aspect of the experience has the potential to shape the extent to which employees feel driven to, and enabled to, embrace those behaviours defined above as key enablers of business success – engagement redefined. There are insights to be gleaned at every stage of, and through every lens we take on, the employee experience and taking a more holistic approach allows us to understand the relationship between these and the impact the experience is having on business outcomes.

But taking a more holistic view isn’t just about gathering lots more data – be it behavioural, experiential, perceptive or preferential.

Taking a more holistic view is about taking a data-driven approach that enables you to assess the relationship between drivers and outcomes and empowers you as an organisation to leverage your employee experience as a key driver of business success. Taking a more holistic view means understanding the influences that shape each stage of the life-cycle and enables you to differentiate between the “moments” and the “moments that matter”.

A joined-up, integrated approach that takes into account what is special and unique about your organisation and creates opportunities for you to learn and improve. It supports an iterative approach. It is ongoing. Aligning everything to the business outcomes you are trying to drive – and being able to quantify the impact – creates focus and prioritisation. It empowers you with actionable insights rather than descriptive data.

3. Shift the emphasis away from data and more towards action.

Getting insights out to the business is important. Ensuring business leaders, people managers and employees all have access to data creates ownership and accountability. But only when it is delivered in an action-oriented way. Engagement is a contact sport. It is a conversation and a collaboration, not a dashboard.

How can you bring this to life?

1. Analyse your people insights in a way that gives your stakeholders the predictive power of, not just insight, but foresight. Avoid drowning people with descriptive data. Don’t make engagement about “scores”. There are a range of analytical techniques that can help you identify your employee experience priorities. This enables you to remove the burden of interpretation and guesswork. Undertake accountability mapping to ensure these priorities are owned at the right level or function. Engagement shouldn’t feel like an “activity” or something to add to the “to do” list for business leaders and people  managers. It should be an ongoing priority with a demonstrable impact on how effectively their teams deliver. Smarter analytics will help the business prioritise the areas that will create the greatest return.
2. Provide collaboration and innovation tools that allow everybody, at all levels, to contribute to creating a more engaging employee experience. Focus on building the capabilities needed to support this. Engagement shouldn’t feel like something that is done to people. The, perhaps overused, concept of “you said, we did” neglects the importance of creating a sense of ownership across the organisation in shaping and implementing changes that will enable people to better play their part. Applying the smart analytics outlined above to proactively and objectively identify and codify internal best practice embeds a culture of learning and innovation. Demonstrating a commitment to this strengthens perceptions of engagement as something the entire business values as something that drives individual performance as well business performance.