Engagement party

Employee engagement has generated a mountain of research compiled by an army of academics over a number of decades; it's a topic that never goes away. Yet, ironically, many managers still struggle to get to grips with the concept, as delegates at our recent people and productivity roundtable meeting freely acknowledged. Neil Lewin is learning and development consultant at Festo, the consultancy that sponsored Works Management's People & Productivity Survey (see WM, July/August, page22). For him, employee engagement – a bone-deep commitment by the workforce to the goals and values of the employer – has serious and lasting business implications. "Measuring and monitoring employee engagement is the latest gauntlet to be thrown to employers because it can be linked directly to the bottom line," he said. "An organisation has to be able accurately to assess the current level of employee engagement before identifying areas that need to be addressed." However, there is also a flipside – how committed employers are to their employees. Lewin again: "In our experience, based on people we talk to, this is often missed. They see it very much as a one-way street. Acknowledging employer engagement is a crucial link between investment and the bottom line." Listening to the workforce is one indication of employers committing to their people. Lewin explained: "It is companies that make the effort to find out how their employees feel about them, and then act on the feedback, that enjoy the highest returns." One way for companies to discover what their employees think of them is to conduct surveys, but these aren't without their problems, warned Nick Lee, UK general manager at global energy business ConocoPhillips Petroleum Co: "[A survey] gives you a view as to which parts of the workforce are more engaged than others and it therefore gives you a point to focus on. "However, the challenge is coming up with meaningful actions around the feedback. I think one of the mistakes we've made in the past is that the questions tend to be like 'what can the company do for you?' We are not balancing that with questions like 'what can you do for the company?'" For Lee, the challenge for the senior management team is to identify what lies behind particular comments or scores: "I think perpetually we find difficulties in coming up with really strong, credible, deliverable actions around the feedback." A potential danger of employee surveys is that they can trigger a target-based approach. Festo's Lewin had this caution: "In the early days, we were very much drawn into seeing employee engagement as a target; as we had a result in the survey, that figure became fixed. "That was a negative response because people started to focus on what we do to affect the number rather than looking at comments coming back and asking how we address those individually." The comments from employee surveys can certainly offer clues to how committed the employees are, but should senior managers concentrate on the actively engaged, the mildly engaged, or the actively disengaged? WM's People & Productivity survey showed that 61% of managers spend half or more of their time on disengaged employees. Lewin summed up the dilemma: "Do you devote a lot of time to try to bring the disengaged up to speed at the risk of alienating and holding back the high-performers or do you focus your time on the better performers to drive forward hoping they'll be dragged along, but potentially leaving them just to do damage?" He added: "By pulling the big middle group [who are neither engaged nor disengaged] along with you, the disengaged have fewer and fewer people to influence until they stick out like a sore thumb, especially in a small company." However, Fujifilm Speciality Ink Systems' continuous improvement manager, Gary Burgess, made this important point: "Be careful. If you don't spend any time on your top [actively engaged] people, they will tend to drift away." Spending constructive time on your actively engaged people implies an ambition to motivate them. One way to achieve this is by by promoting them. However, shopfloor people who are elevated into management positions must be properly prepared, said ConocoPhillips Petroleum's Lee: "I think a lot of [newly promoted] supervisors still see themselves as shopfloor people who are just a little bit different and, therefore, can still be the 'barrack room lawyer'." He said shopfloor people raised to management positions had to be made aware that their role had changed and that it now involved representing the company. "That means you're not one of the boys or girls anymore, that you've got to behave differently. Very rarely do we actually have those conversations [at the time the person is promoted]. Sometimes we have them a bit later when we see a problem. "You can't train people to be great supervisors or managers as such, but you can give them the tools to be better and help them position themselves mentally for the new role." Ian Cosgrove, plant manager at MGB Plastics, added: "Traditionally, we have promoted journeymen. The best technician was doing a really good job so would make him manager. He probably hasn't got a management bone in his body so it is a double whammy. You've lost your best technician and created a rubbish manager." Cosgrove strongly advocated the promotion of "bright, intellectually capable" people into management positions. He explained: "It's easier to bolt people skills onto somebody with good soft skills than the other way around. Good technical guys are often very blinkered – 'by the time told him how to do it I could have done it myself': how many times have we heard that?" Engaging in conversation • Graeme Parkins, Dyer Engineering: "We spend most of our time thinking, talking and acting on the disengaged people and very little time on the big bit in the middle where the wins really are... We need to get our heads around how we get to the missing middle" • Nick Lee, ConocoPhillips Petroleum Co: "My company has a history of doing a lot of opinion surveys and engagement surveys of the workforce, but I think we are always challenged with what to do with the results " • Neil Lewin, Festo: "An engaged employee is someone who uses all his or her skills and ingenuity to help the company as opposed to a disengaged employee who invariably spends much of their time looking for another job" • Bob Tunks, BK Tooling: "I'm not into football, but we've just had the World Cup. There, we saw England going out in the early rounds and yet a team like USA went much further with a team of players that you've never heard of. I just ask 'why?' The reason is because they have a belief in team America – they feel that they are part of something bigger – whereas, with the England team, you feel like it's a bunch of Premiership players who are just there to make up the numbers" • Hanna Coonagh, Fleet Laboratories: "I think it is important that people understand where we are going as a business and where they fit in with that in their daily jobs. Working with production people, they don't always think about communicating the message of the journey that we're all on" • Ian Cosgrove, MGB Plastics: "Use your enthusiasm and energy to convert the hearts and minds of those who do want to move forward. There's always one or two who you are never going to change, so why try?" • Gary Burgess, Fujifilm Speciality Ink Systems: "Historically, we have had some poor managers who have come from the shopfloor because they haven't had the proper training" • Chris Moore, Seagate Technology: "Some of the results we see coming back [from employee surveys] are very much cultural... In Asia, they generally do whatever you ask them to do whereas in the US they appear to be much more engaged – they feel much better about their job even though it may be simpler"