Our CEO and Co-Founder, Dr Andy Brown, was recently joined by Sara Gomez, Chief People Officer, to discuss how she worked with ENGAGE to enhance the strategic value of engagement and deliver value through smart analytics and predictive insights 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 fin-tech. Please see the Q&A portion of the discussion below.

Q: You have mentioned that some organisations are comfortable with scoring say 70 to 80% on their employee engagement. Do you have an example of when an organisation didn’t just rest on that and worked to move up to say 80, 90 plus? And then what were the business outcomes as a result of that?

Andy: I think the answer to that is, it almost doesn’t matter what your score is. There’s a bit of an obsession in engagement about what score are we at? Whether you might be scoring 80 on a particular measure or 50 on a particular measure. Our whole outlook is about how do you improve? I think there’s a couple of things we’ve done which have worked to get the improvement. So, at Direct Line, for example, we worked with Paul, the CEO, and Simon, the HRD, and then you (Sara) and the team. Their engagement scores went up by about 40% over several years, it was an almost linear improvement. The way they did that was, firstly, they focused on their big strategic priorities. So, we used their data to say, what do you need to work on in the big picture? We then drilled behind each of those big themes that needed work. And we said, at a key driver level on leadership or on culture, whatever it was, what are the very practical and tactical things you need to get working on? And then, we work with them to put action plans in place at a local level to get those working.

We’ve got a client from the States that we’ve worked with for about 11, 12 years now, who’s used the same process. And, you look at their engagement chart, it goes up considerably. In our model, if you’re at about 50% full engagement, that’s about average. Our high-performing firms are up in the kind of 70s to 80s. So that’s when you’ve probably worked on it for several years, you’ve done analysis as to the key drivers, you’ve really worked on them and you’re getting up at the 75/80% mark of full engagement. It still means you’ve got a fifth of your workforce not fully engaged and, I would also say there’s still work to do there.

Q: How did you make sure that the leadership teams you worked with were bought into engagement as a business tool?

Sara: I think it goes back to that conversation upfront with leaders about their business. I think it’s just taking it in on that level first of all, so it’s really clear, and it’s not an HR-led piece of work, it’s a business tool. And providing data, getting over the benchmark bit with integrity. I think whether we think that’s where we should focus on that, people always ask you, and so I think once business leaders could interrogate you a bit more, which companies are in there? Why would it be those? How would you sample size? The things that we focus on, which you (Andy) can handle with ease, you get that buy-in too. I think just the insights and the ease of that, so that you don’t have to have a four-hour trawling through presentation. You (ENGAGE) actually take us straight to the deck. When we present it, you don’t really take us through too much of the detail. It’s a high level of what we need to focus on. Which just works.

Andy: The very first conversations we have on any piece of work around engagement are with the CEO and ExCo. And it starts with, forgetting engagement, forgetting your people for a moment. What are you trying to achieve as a business? And you’re right, CEOs love talking about these ideas. And then it’s connecting where we’re trying to get to as a business with what engagement needs to look like to get there. We’ve just done this with one of the big retailers that we just started working with, and we’re just getting that first set of ideas. But the first conversation we had with the CEO and his ExCo, and they could easily tell us, We ask them a question: “Think about the most engaged person you’ve come across in the business recently – what are they like?” They’re always first to volunteer to help with change, they go the extra mile, they will be positive about the difference they could make to a customer and they can almost paint a portrait of what really engaged people look like. I think if you have those conversations early on with leaders, that’s how you get buy-in. Because they see the connection between engagement and the business outcomes.

Q: What was the biggest benefit to the business when you took the tailored approach in those different companies?

Sara: In Moss Bross stores, it was being able to engage with the store manager, on their level of here’s something you can do, in what’s a very challenging workforce. I had to learn in retail very quickly, to think of attrition at 80% as being the norm. It was really, from a practical perspective, saying to managers with your new starters, this is how you get them up to speed quickly and comfortably so that even if they’re with you for six weeks, or six months, or six years, that they feel comfortable. It’s being able to just distil out urgent things you should do. In Lloyd’s, we’ve got some wider strategic elements that we’re working on, but then at the same time are working with a manager dashboard and tailoring that to the function, and make sure that you’ve got action plans on both.

Andy: If you think about the real basics, like when somebody in the business first sees the questions you’re going to ask about, if they feel like they fit in this business, the questions, they’re much more likely to get on board with. If it feels like a bland, off-the-shelf approach, it’s going to feel a bit more tick box, because it’s just a “lowest common denominator” set of questions. We had a great anecdote from one client recently where their very tech-based provider had done a survey for engagement, and when the questions first went live, people opened the survey and, it said “How do you feel about working at, and then it had < insert company name here >”. And they had just not put the company name in. To us, that really summed up the horrible off-the-shelf sausage machine approach.

To view the entire discussion, please click the link below:

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]