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.
Mumblr
Mumbling on Management, Human Resources, Employee Engagement & The Ideal Enterprise
Tagged with Ideas …
Key Analytical Skills for HR Professionals
HR organisations in several companies seem to be getting better at collecting data from multiple sources – HRIS data, financial metrics, people metrics, performance metrics etc. However, still, top-notch data analysis remains under the domain of a few specialists. I just come across a few HR professionals who can readily grasp the technical details of a multiple regression or a utility analysis for measuring the impact of engagement on attrition. As HR functions vie to get that seat at the table and position themselves as true business partners, senior executives will be looking at HR for persuasive, data-driven analytics to support key decisions and initiatives. In other words, HR has to get its game right for preparing a “business case” for all its programs.
I would like to propose a some key analytical skills for the HR professionals of tomorrow:
- Research / Hypothesis Design: HR needs to understand how it can design experiments to validate hypotheses or come up with alternative explanations to organizational phenomena. At the same time, knowledge about effective sample design techniques can come in handy as well. It can help HR design research studies which can be administered to statistically representative samples, instead of the entire workforce. This could help generalize findings and help save on precious time & efforts.
- Correlations & Regressions: I cannot count how many times I have seen these two key techniques completely misinterpreted or used senselessly. Most importantly, we need to distinguish between the two. Correlation is, simply, two variables moving in the same direction. For instance, employee engagement and financial performance might be positively correlated implying that both generally, move in the same direction. However, we cannot say that one causes the other for sure. On the other hand, regressions help us to form models to explain causality i.e. variables moving in the same direction because one causes the other to happen. For instance, among an employee engagement survey of 50 questions, you can use this to analyze what factors have the largest influence on engagement levels.
- Financial Analysis Techniques: Now, this is a potentially long list, but there are a few key things that help in working out the business case for key initiatives / decisions. Firstly, there has to be a fine appreciation of costs – fixed costs, recurring costs, and variable costs. Secondly, skills around conducting cost-benefits or break-even analysis would be extremely helpful. And speaking of that, if HR professionals can master concepts around “the time value of money”, they can really start demonstrating the rigour of their analyses.
Of course, this is not comprehensive and I look forward to your views in the comments. What analytical skills would matter the most for high-caliber future HR professionals?
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!
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.
Gamification of the Enterprise
One of the blogs I love reading is The Future Of Work blog by Socialcast. It has great content about things I am passionate about – social media, organization development, employee engagement, collaboration tools etc. They also put up great infographics every now and then. I just couldn’t resist posting their infographic titled “Adding Play Into the Enterprise”. It does a crisp summary of employee engagement trends, the explosion of gaming and how they can be married together. My favorite bit is when they compare the ‘Gaming World’ with the ‘Job World’. So, your job title is the “level”, salary is “score”, promotions are “level up” and performance reviews are the “stat summary”. That’s a cool way to think about it!
Enjoy the infographic! And do share your best ideas on gamification.
