Filed under Employee Engagement …

Jan 14 2012
1 Comment
Business, Employee Engagement, Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Technology

Change & Communications Study Report: Implications For Asia Pacific

Towers Watson (my employer) recently released a report on The 2011/12 Change & Communication ROI Study report. It has great insights about what could organizations do to build Clarity, Confidence and Community in their organizations through effective communications and change management. While I leave you to enjoy the full report, I found some of the charts interesting as they showed geographical breakdowns including Asia-Pacific level data.

In terms of ensuring that employees are business literate and have a good view of organizational performance, there seems to be little variation across the geographical regions. Even so, Asia-Pacific sits at the bottom of the pack on these important issues related to providing clarity and building a sense of connection.

The second issue I spotted was related to Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Given the nature of the talent race in Asia, I think it’s quite a hot issues these days. And interestingly, a higher percentage of Asia-Pacific companies report that they have a clearly defined EVP. However, when it comes to having a segmented EVP approach (e.g. for high performers, high potentials etc.), these companies fare a bit badly. Also, the bigger question is how effectively is the EVP winning mind-share in the talent market.

And as social media powers the new world of communications, there is a fair distance that companies in Asia-Pacific have to go. Only about 30% of the organizations report that they have a documented social media policy in place, the corresponding number for the USA is 77%! Moreover, only a handful of Asia-Pacific companies report that they have the right tools to measure the effectiveness of social media. So, first there is an adoption issue and then, if measurement is not effective, then establishing a clear business case for social media will be a challenge for companies. As for me, I am more interested in finding out how Asia Pacific companies are leveraging these channels for building an open, transparent and collaborative workplace.

All graphs and data credits to Towers Watson
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Nov 23 2011
6 Comments
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

After Your Employee Survey…Bias For Action

I work with several companies on rolling-out the results of their employee surveys. I do executive presentations, employee town-halls, enterprise-level action planning, frontline action planning, KPI setting – the whole works! In my experience, the companies who come out successful from such initiatives are the ones with a strong “bias for action”. They have a sense of urgency for getting things done, for making the workplace better, for taking the organization forward. Often companies, leaders and HR professionals fall into the “excessive deliberation” trap. Deliberation is good, but an overdose of it can paralyze actions. It can be demotivating to people. Timelines can go for a toss. And employees are left in the lurch.

Tom Peters talked a lot about bias for action in his book “In Search of Excellence”. He also shared some slides on this on his website. I just loved the quote on the second slide:

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” ~ Herb Kelleher

 So, stop staring indefinitely at the employee survey results. Make things happen.

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Oct 22 2011
1 Comment
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

Building A Sustainable Employee Engagement Strategy

Here is a link to an article I published on Towers Watson’s website, titled “Building A Sustainable Engagement Strategy”. Through this article, I urge companies to take a hard look at their employee research constructs and make sure that the frameworks they are using are helping them focus on the right issues. We need to make sure that the Employee Engagement models we are using are evolving with the times.

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Sep 03 2011
7 Comments
Employee Engagement, Social Media, Technology

A Mobile Strategy for Employee Engagement

I remember clearly that a couple of years ago, a leading mobile handset manufacturer talked about a term called “micro-boredom”. Micro-boredom happens in very small slices of time in which we do not know how to fill the time. And mobile devices, with their applications, provide the escape route. Clearly, I felt that this is going to be an important trend which will mean that mobile devices with a large apps ecosystem would flourish. That’s what is happening today with iPhone and Android devices. But, importantly, micro-boredom is a trend and people do tend to look at mobile devices as a way to fill in the void. And you can possibly see this trend all around you – think about daily commutes, coffee breaks, waiting for someone – the list is endless. In effect, I think that there are multiple opportunities to have the attention of people.

On the other hand, there is some data (though limited to the USA) from a mobile analytics firm, Flurry, to suggest that mobile app usage is not only increasing over time, but is also actually ahead of the traditional web consumption. This reinforces the strength of the mobile medium.

Combining the two trends above, I feel that the most ubiquitous, available, connected and engaging screen is the screen of a smart-phone. It is always with the individual, it is always on and one can push content on it. While a number of companies are using this screen for engaging their customers, I have not come across companies with a mobile strategy for engaging their employees. The possibilities are endless. It could be an enterprise social networking app to keep up with other colleagues or the latest news about the company or to check out what is the next product being developed by the team on the 18th floor! It could be a video app where people could listen to senior leaders articulating the purpose of the company or the new strategy. It could be an app that provides e-learning. It could be an intelligent recommendation engine app that looks across all your enterprise web activities and recommends books for professional development. Or it could all come together in an integrated app. I could go on, but I am sure that we can conjure up even greater possibilities with this.

I think having a mobile strategy for engaging employees is very important already, though it may not be widely recognized as a need. I think this is a powerful medium to connect and engage with employees. If you have any ideas on how to bring a “mobile employee engagement strategy” to life, do write in!

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Aug 24 2011
3 Comments
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

How Can HR Use Engagement Surveys to Drive Business Performance?

Several companies invest thousands of dollars in running Employee Engagement surveys. Typically, they use the survey results to benchmark workplace experiences with other organizations,  determine enterprise-level priorities, drive key HR programs, set engagement-related KPIs, involve managers in the action planning process etc. But one of the key elements missing is how do we use these insights from the survey, fortify them and use them to really drive business performance. I often find that we miss connecting those critical dots. If HR has to ‘get a seat at the table’, then all it’s initiatives should link back to business performance, including employee engagement.

I could think of one potential approach, and it may be suitable to larger size organizations with a decent number of “units of analysis” i.e. bank branches, retail stores, production sites etc. If we have sufficient number of units to study, the first step would be to start linking the employee engagement survey data to business metrics. Think sales, profitability, productivity, employee attrition, customer survey scores, safety incidents, customer waiting time etc. Then you would need some analytical wizardry to examine how these metrics link to employee survey data. Do highly engaged bank branches have higher loan growth and higher net interest margin? Or do low engagement manufacturing plants showlow productivity as well? Or worse, the linkage is not meaningful or not strong enough (in which case you really need to go back to the drawing board to design a good survey). Such linkages help to establish the validity of your employee research frameworks and help create buy-in among the senior leadership team.

The next step is really to take it a notch further up. Based on the above linkage analysis, you would have identified your high / average / low performing units. Now, the way HR can really add value and improve business performance is by replicating the high performing units. How do you do that? Well, you try to examine what differentiates these high performing units from others. You could look at a range of variables for employees in these groups – age, tenure, experience, competencies, managerial practices – anything that can hypothetically differentiate performance. And yes, you could also connect it all back to the employee survey and see what issues are these “high engagement – high performance” units particularly satisfied on as compared to other units. Again, we are just looking for factors which can differentiate or even predict engagement and performance

Only when you have insights of this depth, then you could work out a plan for replicating such high-performance. Such insights can provide inputs into recruitment plans, talent management, rewards, training & development, career progression etc.  And all this will potentially have much more credibility since you have validated these against business outcomes.

What do you think? How are you using employee survey data to improve business performance? Drop in a line if you would like to discuss this in details.

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