Employee engagement is a high priority for most HR professionals, but Jeremy Starling, managing director of INVOLVE, explains why engagement is no longer good enough and shares some tips on getting employees involved.

“Our people are our most valuable asset” is a sound bite uttered by many a corporate executive, but for businesses that aspire to be great this statement has never been more true.

Employees are often the only differentiator an organisation has. So, finding quicker and more powerful ways to help your people make a difference is central to having a winning business.

Engagement is not enough

It’s not enough to have employees who are passively engaged, in terms of being on your side, feeling reasonably positive and bought into the direction, but not inspired and without sufficient ownership to make them want to do anything differently.

What a winning business needs is active employee involvement – where employees get it, own it and get on with it. Think Google, which has a ’20 per cent time’ philosophy, where employees are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time on side-projects they’re really passionate about but which have nothing to do with their main job function. Many of these side projects eventually become actual Google products.

Involving employees in how a business is run has been happening since 1771, when William Denny introduced the business world’s first employee suggestion scheme in a Glasgow shipyard.

Most organisations have progressed beyond this basic level of involvement, but despite a mass of evidence proving the ROI of an involved workforce, many fall short and limit themselves to merely engaging their employees.

Involved business performs better

Employee involvement is not a soft issue. It’s about profit, share price and results.

Collins and Porras (Built to Last) reported that businesses which sought active involvement with their employees had a massive 16-to-1 long-term stock market differential compared to those organisations that didn’t.

Buckingham and Coffman at Gallup (First, break all the rules) surveyed over 1 million employees and 80,000 managers worldwide and found that positive employee involvement correlated directly with business profitability.

Involvement is about ‘What, why, and how?

How can you have involved employees who are active participants in the business, wanting to take positive actions, own initiatives and get stuck in?

Getting the right balance between ‘what, why and how’ is the key to having an involved workforce, where everyone is actively pulling in the right direction.

First, leaders need to explain precisely ‘what’ the business needs to achieve and ‘why’, and then give employees true ownership of the ‘how’. Everyone knows that people own what they help create, so ask them to come up with what needs to be done and not only will they will come up with great answers, they will also take ownership.

Active participation and emotion, not email, are essential techniques business leaders should use to communicate the reasoning to employees. If the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are not sold in clearly and effectively, the issue won’t be a lack of employee involvement, but a series of loose cannons – employees going off in different directions, having taken out slightly different meanings from when they had the ‘what and why’ explained to them.

Similarly, if you tell employees ‘how’, they won’t own the process and won’t, therefore, be personally driven to make change happen.

The GE ‘Work-Out’

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, frequently cited his employee action plan ‘Work-Out’ as a key catalyst in the turnaround that increased GE’s market value from $14 billion to over $410 billion in two decades.

Overnight, ‘Work-Out’ changed thousands of ailing processes – with solutions entirely proposed, scoped out and driven through by the 290,000 employees.

Liverpool Victoria’s change to LV=

After listening to members, customers and employees, the management of Liverpool Victoria decided the brand needed to evolve to make it more relevant.

Once the new look, brand name, LV=, and values had been agreed, it was crucial that all employees worked out what this meant for them as individuals and had real ownership for how (differently) they needed to behave to reflect the new values and bring them to life in their work.

Rather than merely engaging LV=’s 2,000 strong workforce in the new brand identity, values and behaviours, INVOLVE created four powerful, intensive and fun, active half-day experiences.

To sell the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, standard engagement techniques were employed.

The involvement really started when employees were split into groups and put through a series of active experiences that enabled teams to gain a deeper understanding of the behaviours, values and actions behind the new brand.

Visualisers, graffiti and story-board artists worked with each team to capture their top-level ideas for bringing the new brand to life in their daily work. Giant murals were created live at the events and then put on permanent display in prominent locations at LV=’s Bournemouth head office.

To maintain awareness and momentum following the events, the same teams got together to add a further layer of detail to the ‘how’ and the murals were updated accordingly. Leadership team coaching is also helping to keep employees involved by continuing to ‘evolve’ brand and customer focus.

The success of the employee involvement project is demonstrated by the soft and hard figures below:

• All LV= now have ownership of a very successful ‘external’ rebrand
  
• New business in Life and General Insurance, as well as General Insurance renewals, are all up year on year
  
• 2.0 per cent fall in employee turnover year on year
  
• 23 per cent improvement in employee understanding of organisational direction
  
• 31 per cent improvement in confidence and motivation by brand, values and behaviours
  
• 21 per cent improvement in commitment to living values and behaviours, and confidence in leadership of the business

To have an involved workforce, where employees are active participants, wanting to take positive actions, own initiatives and get stuck in, a business needs to build an involving culture that encourages and supports active participation. So:

• Make involvement a key part of the leadership agenda.
  
• Encourage employees to be involved in defining and delivering the ‘how’. Making it their right.
  
• Commit to the long-term – it takes time, effort and commitment to deliver a truly involved culture.

Originally formed in 1996 as The Eventworks, Involve is the UK’s leading employee involvement team. For more information, please visit: www.involveuk.com