Employee Engagement: Pivotal to Talent Management

When we work with clients we see that engagement plays as key a role in Talent Management as it does in Organisational Performance.

We all know the research and the resulting stats surrounding employee engagement: which show that a stronger engaged workforce will demonstrate an increase in productivity, a reduction absenteeism, a leap in creativity - but how often do we look at employee engagement as a critical component of our day-to-day talent management activities?

Without engagement in your appraisal and performance management processes, or your talent reviews or your succession planning programmes, any actions planned can become little more than tick-box, form filling exercises.

But how do you plan to increase this engagement - and indeed do you know from where you are starting?

Good questions - and ones we are help our clients to grapple with right now.

Someone please explain this madness to me!

A sample 360 report has come across my desk recently. It's not one generated by our Talent360 software and its source shall remain anonymous.

What's got me 'putting pen to paper' is this idea that in addition to asking raters in a 360 review to rate someone's behaviour against a particular indicator, it also asks them to rate how important it is to the role. So let's get this straight, a direct report rates their manager on a number of behaviours, such as communication style, team working, support etc, OK so far, and then gets to offer their opinion on how important it is to their manager's role? I'm all for getting feedback on what makes a good leader or manager but its not done in the context of a 360 on an individual that then appears in their feedback report.

Firstly, what qualifies the direct report to determine and trade-off which of these indicators are more important to performance in the other person's role? Secondly, the views expressed are not necessarily going to create a consistent picture of what is important - my direct reports might have a different view than yours when it comes to importance of a behaviour in a role. So where does that leave us?

Similarly, if a behavioural indicator is rated as important by one group of raters (such as peers) but not by the manager group, where does that leave the poor individual with these conflicting messages in their feedback report.

We think this is completely bonkers and a great example of what could be done not what should be done.

If an indicator is considered to be important to high performance in a role, then this should be validated by those who hire, promote or performance manage thse folks, not the poachers turned gamekeepers! (If input from staff is required to find out their views, then management culture and employee engagement surveys are the way to go.)

With Talent360, an indicator can be marked as 'key' and therefore the scores (whatever they might be) should be taken in the context of an important characteristic and acted on accordingly.

I'd be delighted to hear a rational case to support the 'rater determines how important' argument, but not in jest please as I'll end up tearing out what little hair I have left!

Employee engagement - a brief background

Employee engagement has risen in popularity over the past few years. Some enthusiastic pundits have made categorical statements that a more engaged employee leads to better business results and anecdotally there is evidence that this is so – intuitively this would of course make sense. However, there is also evidence that there is little or no correlation whatsoever with business performance – a recent study by Henley Management College concluded that in their research in the corporate world, no such relationship exists.

We have also seen commentary relating to engagement that focuses on the notion of how to get that ‘extra discretionary effort’, i.e. to create employees that are willing to put in more work for altruistic reasons. We think that this focus on singularly attempting to get more out of people is both cynical and short-termist. Having said all this, a more productive, motivated, happy and ‘easier to get on with colleague’ is better than one who isn’t and engagement studies have sought to attempt to analyse and decode what makes this ‘better’ employee. Consequently, employee engagement has developed into a complex and multi-dimensional concept that has gone much further than the simple notions of motivation, the psychological contract and employee satisfaction, yet it draws on elements of each of
these ideas. It also has much in common with the extensively researched concepts of commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). With these last two, there are some important differences – engagement is a two-way process: organisations engage people (intentionally or otherwise) through their systems and processes and they in turn choose the level of reciprocal engagement. Do read our article in our last newsletter ‘Are your Talent Management Processes Fair?

http://www.head-light.co.uk/Articles/Fair_Talent_Management.pdf

So what does an engaged employee ‘look like’? From an HR perspective, the typical behaviours demonstrated by the engaged employee are:
• A belief in the organisation and its purpose
• A desire to work to make things better
• An understanding of business context and the ‘bigger picture’
• Being respectful of, and helpful to, colleagues
• A willingness to ‘go the extra mile’ , and
• Keeping up to date with developments in their field.

Marketing and Internal Communications functions have pioneered the ‘employer brand’ idea, but this is just a part of the picture. As the concept of reciprocal and multi-dimensional engagement has developed, it has moved on from simple Employee Satisfaction or Employer Brand questionnaires and into the realms of personal alignment with organisational values and mission statements. This exploration of employee feelings, emotions and psychological associations requires a subtlety and deftness when asking for feedback in these areas - asking straight questions on the above list of areas directly would clearly not generate any useful results as they are too blunt and unsophisticated an instrument.

How do you find out if employees are engaged?

Engagement is typically measured via the use of a very specific employee survey, now predominantly delivered and scored electronically. To call it a questionnaire or survey would be technically correct, though greatly undervaluing what it could provide in terms of output and insight. An Engagement Diagnostic gathers relevant, structured feedback, both qualitative and quantitative in the areas that matter most (more on this in another blog), in language and terms that are unambiguous and universally understood. This is where Occupational Psychologists can add real value and develop (and validate) engagement oriented behavioural indicators, not dissimilar from those used in 360 reviews. Subtlety and deftness can be achieved with careful wording that ask the important questions in the right way and a combination of positive and negative statements together with some discretion as who to ask for feedback, makes for an insightful diagnostic.

Many organisations report success using the many well respected generic tools, though to our way of thinking, and supported by the findings from the Institute of Employment Studies, a tailored questionnaire reflects the behaviours in your own business context, profession and industry providing the essential organisational fit required to take purposeful action across the business as a result. There is a straight trade-off – is it more important to have an imperfect diagnostic, whose results that can be compared against similar and dissimilar organisations for benchmarking purposes? Or is it more important to have a sharp, insightful instrument whose results can be used to improve engagement levels and business performance in your own company?

We’ll let you decide.

Our next blog, will develop these ideas to help you identify the type of engagement diagnostic that will provide feedback you can act on.