Creating and Sustaining Employee Engagement at All Levels
Related Fun Fact of the Week: Workplace engagement in the United States sits at a mere 33%. Globally? A dismal 13%!
Just imagine the productivity gains we could have if we all chose to engage. Not just waiting for organizations to engage us, but engaged as individuals. Oh and by the way, engagement has proven to have a direct correlation to job satisfaction and happiness. That is in our control.
To wrap up this series on elevating employee engagement, we have shown that moving the needle on employee engagement is much more than conducting a survey and putting together employee networking events. That is why employee engagement has not increased over 2-3 percentages points in nearly 20 years.
Creating and sustaining an organization of highly engaged employees becomes reality when:
An organization is committed to enabling and cultivating a culture and the prevailing performance environment where every employee is encouraged and trained to lead where they are, no matter their title or position in the organization. In addition, rapid teaming taps into, and combines, the unique talents of individuals to solve complex issues and to take advantage of future opportunities.
Leaders shift from managing people and their activities to supporting and enabling them. Where performance is pursued, not reviewed and they are truly coaching, not coaxing.
Where all employees take ownership and accountability for their engagement by:
Leading their personal and team performance.
Leading change, not managing it.
Leading with accountability, no matter what.
Establishing and cultivating relationships beyond just communicating with ‘bits and bytes’.
Elevating employee engagement is difficult and complex but the rewards in productivity, retention and bottom-line profits are immense. Employee-engaged, leader supported, organization enabled…the keys to elevating, and most importantly, sustaining top-tier employee engagement.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Want to Be More Engaged in Your Workplace?
Random Related Fun Fact of the Week: The average length of an engagement is 14.7 months.
Bonus Fun Fact #2: Approximately 2,000 couples get engaged every year at Disney World.
Bonus Fun Fact #3: 75% of brides change their Facebook status shortly after getting engaged.
Oh…wait…that’s not the type of engagement we talk about here! Ok, never mind, on to this week’s insights!
Let it start with you! Up your personal engagement by:
1. Stop any negative talk, actions or behaviors that impact you or those around you. Be a source of positive momentum.
2. Proactively pursue your performance, don’t wait to react to a performance review in 6 months or a year. Set a 20-minute performance connection with your manager every month that you lead.
3. Ask your manager if you can lead a ‘what’s working well, not working well’ session with your team. Take the feedback, and as a team continue to leverage the strengths and form small action teams to create options that will change what’s not.
If each of us would proactively do one, or all of these, you can’t help but have better employee engagement. Think about it, better engagement starts with each of us getting engaged!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Engage Your Employees Through a Team Environment
Random Related Fun Fact of the Week: The most effective teams don’t have formal leaders! Teams work best when members listen and talk in equal measure. If one member takes control and begins to dominate the discussions, it creates resentment. The team falters. Effective teams do need managers, though. Diverse teams are more creative and get more done but they require a team manager (not an individual contributor) whose full time job is to help team members communicate and work together, despite their diversity.
You might be part of an organization that has just completed or are in the middle of an employee engagement survey process with the results either complete or due back due very soon. What comes back is a lot of data highlighting strengths to leverage, opportunities for improvement and hundreds, if not thousands of written comments! (You will never believe some of the things people write when asked to comment in an anonymous survey!)
So now what? Organizations often hand the results to HR for follow-up. Other organizations delegate next steps to front line managers, or like many, unfortunately choose to do nothing.
Our recommendation?
If you want better employee engagement, you better engage the employees! This year try doing this, tap cross-functional, high potential employees with a charter to review the survey results, develop a core set of recommendations with an action plan. Present that plan to senior leadership, and then assist in turning those recommendations into enhanced employee engagement.
Our experienced has shown amazing results. From engagement teams creating a new hire “passport” program that addressed a gap in organizational onboarding for one client, to developing a series of cross functional “Performance Action Teams” (PAT’s) that form, perform and then re-form as performance issues are identified throughout this organization. These PAT’s intervene in the performance drift to quickly address both new and past performance gaps.
And this is just a small glimpse at some of the incredible results engagement teams like these have achieved. An additional benefit to engaging an employee-led team, when you add this question to next year’s engagement survey, “Has anything changed since the last engagement survey?”, it has been our experience that 90% or more of the employees will say yes!
So, don’t let this year’s survey results fall into the dreaded and powerful “blackhole of engagement surveys”. Put that data in the hands of those that can and will make a difference, the employees!
If you need help or examples on engagement team best practices, let us know, we exist to enable engagement success.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Disengagement: Stop Actions and Activities that are Known to Disengage
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
Over the last few weeks we have highlighted a sure way to enhance the percentage of engaged employees in your organization: Stop actions and activities that disengage employees to elevate your employee engagement!
To summarize:
1. Eliminate the blackhole employee engagement surveys.
Engagement Action:
This year conduct the engagement survey as normal, but then:
Provide the results within 30 days and communicate to all employees.
Turn the results into action within 60 days through the use of employee-led teams with the support of HR and functional managers, not led by HR or the managers.
Starting at 90 days, provide continual engagement team(s) status and progress updates to the entire organization, with the intent to connect everyone to the progress every 30 days.
2. Evolve the Annual Performance Review Process
Engagement Action:
Shift performance management and performance reviews into performance enablement and performance connections:
• Evolve the semi-annual/annual performance reviews into 20-minute, monthly performance connections led by the employee and supported by the manager.
• Each monthly, gain clarity and ensure alignment to goals and expectations. Make adjustments and plan for the next 30 days. No surprises at the end of the year.
3. Close the great divide that disengages – Culture vs. Performance Environment
Engagement Action:
Get real. Identify does your performance environment reflect the stated culture or is the culture more aspirational:
• Form 5-8 person cross-functional employee teams with the goal to gain true and honest feedback about the current state of the performance environment people are working under and whether it reflects the stated corporate culture statements or marketing materials.
• Create employee engagement teams with the charter to take the focus groups’ feedback and begin to align the current performance environment with the aspirational culture.
• Determine resources and enabling actions and activities that will ensure ongoing alignment.
Sometime moving forward means stopping what we are doing today. If you want better employee engagement, you better engagement your employees.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Disengagement: Culture Vs. Performance Environment
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
Culture vs. Performance Environment – The Great Disconnect that Disengages.
In every organization there is a culture and a performance environment that every employee comes to work and experiences each day. However, the organizational culture that is displayed on walls and websites is often aspirational and not the day to day performance environment. In fact, this gap can actually be a source of hallway banter and jokes if the disconnect is significant and the senior leadership fails to see or acknowledge that a divide exists.
It is this misalignment that can disengage an employee population. It is the “We say one thing but do another.” syndrome.
If our company branding states things like “We put our people first.”, “We are an innovative partner.”, “Best in class.”, “Customer focused”, and any number of other positive descriptors but employees walk into a performance environment of command and control management that accepts status quo and often looks to place blame when things don’t go as planned, it is easy to see why employee engagement can waiver.
It is time to align! Align your day to day performance environment to how your organizations marketing materials describe your organization. If your company struggles to get that alignment, we can help, let us show you how. A committed and engaged workforce is worth the effort.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Disengagement: The Annual Performance Review
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
The annual performance review – a known cause of employee disengagement.
It is time again for the dreaded annual performance review. A time where managers are under the gun for writing any number of reviews and their employees anxiously await what is contained in that review. The process is dreaded because it is often viewed as a necessary evil that is required by the organization to be submitted by a certain calendar date each year. Unfortunately, these annual performance reviews rarely produce meaningful performance enhancement and the ownership and accountability for the actual performance review can be misplaced if it falls to the manager to complete.
Fortunately for all of us, the annual performance review process is rapidly evolving. Rather than leader-led, employee-compliant discussions, the next generation “performance reviews” evolve to employee-led, leader supported, organizational enabled (ELO) 20-30-minute monthly performance connections.
Rather than the manager setting expectations at the beginning of the year and giving the employee their annual performance review at the end of the year, organizations are evolving to our ELO model for engaged performance. The future performance connection looks to the employee to set performance expectations with their manager that should align to the vision the manager has for their organization. Then the review of actual performance as measured against those expectations, is with short (20-30 minute), focused performance conversations held monthly and led by the employee.
The manager’s role in this model is to pursue future performance while the review of performance is where is should be, with the individual that is performing. Now, instead of anxiously awaiting the verdict on one’s performance and millions of hours spent by managers writing reviews up to the very last minute before HR’s deadline, the employee and manager are clear and aligned on expectations and on the performance in achieving those expectations each month, with no end of year surprises. The end of the year performance review now becomes next year’s performance vision and planning session.
It does take training, tools and reinforcement to make the performance switch, but it is well worth the investment. Turn the dreaded performance review into the coveted performance pursuit.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.