In a world is moving forward at such a fast pace, changes happen rapidly. To be able to survive or even excel in the changing business landscape, organisations must be equipped with three critical differentiators: speed, information and engagement.
When your employees are working at full speed, empowered to take accountability, in a happy environment with enough insightful information to help correctly predict the future, your business performance can certainly exceed that of your competitors.
Most of us are now familiar with the concept of employee engagement. It defines whether your people feel committed to the success of the organisation and whether they can drive it forward. This vital human capital issue has become the top priority list for many companies in recent years. Many companies have been using engagement surveys ever since the US research group Gallup introduced them 15 years ago in the hope of finding the best approaches. Thus it is no surprise that almost every company I know is working toward improving employee engagement.
However, it seems that employee engagement remains one of the critical problems that many executive-level leaders are dealing with daily. What went wrong? Was the money and time we invested in the engagement survey just a waste?
Instead of pointing my finger at the tools, I’d suggest that we take a step back and rethink our understanding about building employee engagement.
In practice, most companies still perceive employee engagement as a stand-alone topic that has no connection to other human capital issues. Moreover, the engagement survey is often deemed a one-off activity done annually by the HR department. Consequently, the engagement survey has firms has become no more than a check-the-boxes exercise with a numeric score. Employees feel pressured to supply inflated answers and those who don’t rate their employers high enough are vilified.
Now, let’s pause for a moment and reconsider exactly what we intend to look for when we carry out an engagement survey. Isn’t it because we are trying to find data to show whether our employee feel engaged? Isn’t it because we believe that with those numbers we can tell if our people love their work and the environment we have created for them? We want to know this because we believe that if they feel engaged, they will treat customers better, innovate, and continuously improve the business.
With that in mind, it is essential to realise that the global definition and view of employee engagement must be modified. Engagement is not just about having loyalty toward the organisation anymore, but it is about having a commitment to drive business outcomes.
Engagament must become a continuous, holistic part of an entire business strategy that includes additional aspects such as driving customer satisfaction (internal and external), profit, revenue and shareholder returns in order to truly transform and accelerate your business performance.
In other words, to be able to adapt to the changing environment and genuinely benefit from the information and insights an engagement survey can provide, organisations and leaders need to move toward integrated workforce management instead of dealing with or solving one human-capital issue at a time. Integrated workforce solutions should include not only engagement but also other topics such as diversity management, performance management systems, employee retention and turnover, and so on.
In this sense, a good engagement survey needs to be up-to-date, real-time, holistic, detailed and informative so that the leaders and HR can make sense of the data. Still, it should be noted that numbers and ratings are one thing (or they could be just numbers), what’s behind them is another story. It is a story that needs to be designed and implemented for people to be engaged and committed to the organisation.
I am certain that companies that understand engagement well enough and make the most of the engagement survey would go as far as to redesign jobs, modify the work environment, alter or add new benefits, continuously develop managers, and most importantly, invest in people.
Having partnered with IBM Kennexa to offer the Smarter Workforce Solution, which is an integrated workforce management system, I strongly believe that the many employee insights we find from the engagement survey can help company a competitive drive engagement that could eventually lead to better business performance. Of course, such tools only work when companies really do take action based on the given information; otherwise, they will just go back to the vicious cycle of spending money doing surveys to hear what they already know.
Here is my final piece of advice: people aren’t engaged by programmes. They are engaged by people. Ultimately, employee engagement cannot be built by an engagement survey developed and executed by HR practitioners; instead, it must the leaders who drive and lead engagement to happen because of their actions.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, e-mail arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th. For daily updates, visit https://www.facebook.com/apmgroupthai