The government-backed campaign to improve employee engagement in Britain’s businesses has stepped up a gear, an audience at the headquarters of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) heard at the Sustainable employee engagement conference.
Held to raise awareness of employee engagement on the recommendation of the government sponsored MacLeod Review, the ‘Sustainable employee engagement’ conference saw a host of experts provide case studies and advice for firms of all sizes.
And a progress report on the Review’s recommendations suggests that a number of new measures will soon be in play to ensure that business seeking to improve engagement will begin to receive extra support.
Opening the conference, hosted by DBIS and the International Association of Business Communicators, Lord Young of DBIS said: “The importance of employee engagement is that it doesn’t matter what the particular environment is in your company, you’re going to improve performance if you practice engagement. The correlation is clear – good engagement raises productivity, and reduces staff turnover and absenteeism.”
Elaborating on these benefits, chair of the MacLeod Review, David MacLeod added: “In the public sector the indications are that there is a correlation between capability reviews and the 330,000 civil servants who have just responded to the employee engagement survey. For local authorities there is a correlation between engagement scores and audit commission findings on the performance of the local authority. In the private sector , you can look at any number of studies, one of which looked at 40,000 business units to find that the more engaged had 12% higher profitability.
“There are other benefits too, that are intrinsic to how we are going to take advantage of any forthcoming upturn. We need new forms of competitive advantage and more engaged employees say it brings out there creative ideas.”
He added: “If we’re going to take advantage of the upturn, if we are going to have the public services that you and I want, or you want to deliver, we simply have to harness these levels of engagement.”
To help organisations improve employee engagement, the MacLeod Review recommended that – in addition to raising the profile of the issue through events such as the conference – government agencies and delivery parties need to collaborate to align their resources and provide support. Nita Clarke, co-author of the Review, was pleased to report that progress was being made.
“We took the view that it was absolutely vital that there was support for engagement, in other words that there were resources like Train2Gain with an understanding about engagement,” she said. “We recommended that particularly the government-based agencies got together and I’m delighted to say that that is happening, and spearheaded by the team from of this department [DBIS] this work is being pulled together so that engagement is part of government support. This really matters, particularly for the SME sector, which gets a lot of training and support from [the government] through the RDAs for example.”
Published last July, the Review also recommended that resources should be easily accessible, another area where there has been progress. “A web page that is freely available for the use of the SME sector is being developed at the moment with practitioner forums, people who are doing employee engagement, and also a specialist team,” added Clarke.
Toolkits will be launched on the Business Link website in March.
Best practice was also demonstrated at the conference, with MacLeod and Clarke highlighting four behaviours that characterised businesses that were successfully engaging their staff.
• The leadership provides a strong strategic narrative giving a line of sight between the job and the organisation’s vision – “In those orgs that did this well there appeared to be a pretty strong sense of where the org was going and why,” said MacLeod. “The really great organisations have a simple story that people can hold in their heads about what the organisation is trying to do and why and that they can relate their job to. People want to know how their job contributes to what the organisation is doing and because they have a sense of where the organisation is going, when [the leader is] not there they can make sensible decisions that are aligned with what you’re trying to do as an organisation
• They have engaging managers who inspire and challenge their people, coaching and supporting them to play the role expected of them and who treat team members as individuals – “They have managers with some basic skills on how to deal with the people for whom they are responsible,” added MacLeod. “They know how to focus the people on the task required and can organise the work as efficiently as possible and give people some scope to introduce more of themselves in that work.”
• There is an employee voice in the organisation, for reinforcing and challenging views, between function and externally – “Engagement is more likely to work when individuals are able not just to express their views but are encouraged to express their views. But ‘voice’ is not the same as ‘communication’, telling people is not listening,” said Clarke. “One of the things we found as a barrier to engagement is a fear of letting go. If you are going to listen to people you have to let go of the information and give them the information – it has to be an informed voice. It is also absolutely essential in our view to align your industrial relations and employee relations strategies with your engagement strategies. A good example of that is ‘don’t do that, all that happens is that the union tells people not to fill in the survey’. The organisations from the finance, retail and telecom sectors that do this well in many cases have very powerful partnerships arrangements with their trade unions. It is an enabling framework in which engagement can happen.”
• There is organisational integrity such that espoused values are reflected in behavioural norms – “Every organisation either has implicit or explicit culture and set of values,” added Clarke. “But it also has the reality on the ground in terms of behaviour. Whenever the two don’t coincide, that is the biggest recipe for disengagement in our opinion.”
“It doesn’t matter what the size of your organisation is,” emphasised Clarke. “We felt really strongly that you don’t have to have huge HR department and a huge communication department to do this.”
In other addresses, the audience of senior leaders from HR and communications also heard how Telefonica O2 UK had deployed social tools to drive engagement by opening up two-way conversations within the organisation.
“It is very easy to talk about top down communications not being the right thing to do and that it should be all about the conversation,” said Glenn Manoff, head of communications and reputation at Telefonica O2 UK. “But it can be a little more challenging because we all tend to work in controlled organisations with cascading messaging.”
Deploying an internal social network – a kind of internal Facebook it called ‘Mingle’ – O2 aimed to enable employees to form communities of interest, solve problems and work together in a conversational manner. However, its first effort was unsuccessful.
“Ultimately it didn’t catch fire,” explained Manoff. “We knew what the message of the company was and we were very clear that this was a very powerful medium. But the two didn’t quite meet. We just chucked the medium out there for people to get comfortable with. It felt a little bit like medium for medium sake.”
Its second attempt, however, is shaping up to be a big success. Called ‘Fanclub’, the project has more focus, specifically on recognition, enabling staff to leave messages of support – ‘applauses’ – on eachother’s profile pages.
“It is set up to reinforce the strategy, everything is tied to our values and it is a simple social networking tool that allows employees to build a profile of themselves,” added Manoff.” Half of our employees, over 6,000 people, have now built a profile in only four months.
“We had conversations about borrowing the notion of letting people form collaborative working groups to tackle issues. But we said let’s just do one simple thing, we’ll reinforce the strategy with a social network specifically designed for recognition and reinforcing the message and strategy.”
