What the Dalai Lama Can Teach Us about Employee Engagement

What the Dalai Lama Can Teach Us about Employee Engagement

How a Few Basic Ideas Will Transform Your Workplace and Your Life

This week, I was fortunate enough to see the Dalai Lama speak at an event sponsored by Emory University in Atlanta. I am not a practicing Buddhist, nor particularly familiar with his teachings. But I was excited to be in the presence of a leader who is changing the world by promoting peace, love and understanding. What I wasn’t expecting is how easily I related his teachings to the field of employee engagement.

What, you might ask, could a Tibetan Monk know about employee engagement? Do they even have employees at monasteries?

Technically, His Holiness did not explicitly address employee engagement. But he was close. He spoke about principles that lead to personal happiness and wellbeing including compassion, love and respect. The practice of these principles also becomes the basis for healthy interpersonal relationships. When scaled out far enough, they create conditions that lead to world peace.  In short, respect of self and others leads to trust, which leads to friendship and collaboration, which leads to happiness. Conversely, a lack of compassion and respect leads to distrust and competition – and other similar emotions that can be very bad for health, peace of mind and society.

Those of you have been reading this blog over time will appreciate that the word “trust” rang some bells for me as my dissertation research showed that trust is a critical factor underpinning employee engagement. In fact, I have argued that trust is the single most important workplace feature that a leader can cultivate. Apparently, not surprisingly, this truth holds over a variety of contexts!

Some other insights I came away with can be best categorized as “insights for the engaged leader.” For example, he called the audience to cultivate a “trained sense of concern for others’ wellbeing,” and to practice pairing this with wise discernment – as good a call to leadership as I’ve heard recently. He also modeled leadership behaviors, including being wholly present with his co-presenters, and asking smart, informed questions about the research scientists presented to him.

He also reminded us that in today’s world, real challenges require real change. The end to conflicts at a large and small scale requires that we value the common interest at least as much as our individual interests. He also noted that change starts from within, and action is more important than faith. Practicing respect and compassion is one way we can all lead change in our personal and professional lives alike.

What teachers from unexpected arenas have influenced your employee engagement practice and how?

#SocialMedia and Employee Engagement

#SocialMedia and Employee Engagement
Can you really Tweet your way to engaged employees?

How many social media apps do you have on your smart phone? How many do you use?

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Given that both are such hot topics, it was only a matter of time before employee engagement and social media intersected. At the last employee engagement conference I attended, for example, vendors offered to sell my company social media platforms ranging from experts databases to short messaging services to discussion forums. There was a presentation on adapting social media capabilities in common intranet platforms to drive engagement. Which got me thinking: can social media truly drive employee engagement?

Rather than rely solely on sentiment from the popular press or information from companies whose livelihood is tied to social media, I decided to do my own research. To understand how people trendier than me use social media, I threw myself into: blogging (obviously), Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. (If this sounds like a nightmare to you, I recommend trying it. It’s like that required statistics course in college: you hated it, but what you learn turns out to be surprisingly useful). I ran usage statistics and a user opinion survey on the intranet in my company. I gathered best practices through industry groups to which I belong. I re-read the interviews I conducted with experts during my dissertation research.

My findings can be simply summarized: social media is a tool, not something that in and of itself creates employee engagement.

In fact, social media tools are likely to be adopted or not based on whether an employee is already engaged, rather than inspiring her to engage. If you’re already excited to do your work, maybe you’ll follow your colleagues on Sharepoint. If you are just showing up for a paycheck, the following capability isn’t likely to get you on-board. This is particularly true the further removed from the Millennial generation an employee is.

Further, putting an internal social media platform into place without a clear understanding of how you want to use them to drive business results is a waste of resource. Although it’s cool and “Millennials are doing it,” the truth is, like any investment, when undirected, social media is not likely to produce improvements in business performance (with a few industry-specific exceptions, I imagine).  Some quick guidelines:

1. Social media is great for external communications applications like capturing a shallow amount of attention for marketing or PR. 
2. Socially, it’s great for staying connected to people you don’t know very well across long distances (literal or figurative). 
3. Internally, social media can provide mechanisms for collaboration and knowledge sharing, but not the motivation to do so. Just because you build it does not mean they will come. So, any foray into social media within an organization should be accompanied by a robust change management plan. 

Which social media tools has your organization successfully adopted to amplify employee engagement, and how?

So You Want to Hire an Employee Engagement Consultant?

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So You Want to Hire an Employee Engagement Consultant?
What to Know When Thinking Through Vendor Selection

The CEO just left your office. The good news? She is finally showing an interest in employee engagement. The bad news? She is finally showing an interest in employee engagement. If you are like most executive leaders in an HR function, you are already familiar with the concept of employee engagement.

If you are in a large-enough organization, you may even have staff whose job responsibilities include certain employee engagement related activities. However, it is unlikely that you have in-house a top-tier team of employee engagement experts. Perhaps the time has come to hire a consultant.

The purpose of this blog post is not to suggest which employee engagement consultant is right for your business. Instead, my goal is to help you think about what criteria to use when selecting a vendor. There are several dimensions on which employee engagement vendors vary, and on which an individual might select effectively among them. Here are some helpful questions in selecting an employee engagement consultant.

What are you aiming to achieve? For many organizations just getting started in employee engagement services, the list of options and opportunities can be overwhelming. In some cases, undertaking a big new employee engagement project can be more than an organization has the capacity to absorb. I generally recommend that a first foray into employee engagement services emphasize an engagement model and measurement practice that resonates with the organization in its current state. Most large consultancies are happy to discuss how they conceptualize and measure engagement: among those you consider, which feels intuitive and actionable to you?

What gaps do you need filled? Like any vendor relationship, the ideal partnership will deliver across a number of areas, but in the initial selection it’s helpful to think through what resources and expertise you have in house, and what you need to bring in. For example, some engagement vendors specialize in measurement, whereas others shine in follow-on advisory and HR services. Others are best known for robust benchmarking, whereas others have strength in a technology platform. Understanding your gaps ensures you select the vendor who best fills them.

What is your budget? Vendors have a variety of pricing models, and many will work to meet your business needs within a budget if you’re clear about what your needs and budget are. For reference, some vendors price per project, others per employee. The structure depends on the amount of consultant labor required to complete the project, which is almost always in the report-generation phase. Other factors influencing cost are the number of languages the survey and responses are translated to/from, whether a “pulse” follow up is required, whether the vendor is to also manage employee focus groups to collect qualitative data, etc…

Who has the best reputation in your region? Depending upon the size and scope of your business, you may be looking to use this consultancy to help you benchmark your firm against others in the area competing for top talent. If this is a primary consideration, and the above two criteria have already been met, consider which vendor’s stamp of approval is most likely to influence others in your business ecosystem positively.

Of course, the more experienced you become working with employee engagement, the more sophisticated your organization will become internally, so finally consider whether your vendor is truly an employee engagement partner who will learn and grow with your organization.

Did your organization use additional or alternative criteria? Please join the conversation with a comment!

A Little More Action: Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

A Little More Action: Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

What Leaders Need to Know Before Launching an Employee Engagement Survey

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How do you measure employee engagement? If you’re like most of the employee engagement experts I interviewed for my dissertation research, you’re conducting a survey. You’re asking 80-110 questions, sometimes translated into multiple languages, including an open-ended question.  The questions you use to measure employee engagement vary depending on which firm you are working with, and most of your survey questions measure the drivers of employee engagement, like culture, communications, pay and benefits, strategy alignment and more.

So surveys are ubiquitous, and both the responses and participation rates contain valuable engagement information. But there are plenty of other ways to measure engagement. For example, one approach is to track if people actually exhibit engaged behaviors: participation in and satisfaction with employee meetings and events, participation in opinion polls and online discussion threads related to critical business issues, social media participation, and participation in related programs like recognition programs. Other metrics include 360 degree feedback for leaders, focus groups, and intranet story readership.

The key idea for leaders, though, is not that there exist several ways to measure engagement. Instead, it’s to realize that measurement is a tool that can amplify engagement or disengagement, depending on how the company responds to feedback received.  In the words of one interviewee:

“In the area of engagement I think the big issue is, the measurement really only matters if you do something about it. That’ s one of our consults to leadership all the time is that don’ t measure it if you don’ t want to do anything with the feedback, because you are only going to exacerbate any issue discovered because they will think something is going to be addressed with things they bring up, and when they find out nothing happens, then you are almost worse off than asking the question to begin with.” – V.P., Communications, automotive corporation

In other words, measurement practices can make employee engagement better or worse! Unfortunately, too many of us know from personal experience how demotivating it can be to invest our time and energy in a project only to have it go nowhere. When employees complete a survey and nothing happens, that's the effect.

The good news is, there are a few simple things we can do to make measurement amplify engagement:

• Return results to employees promptly

• Communicate plans to respond to the feedback

• Provide regular updates on the progress of these plans over time

How is your firm measuring engagement? What best practices can you share?

Leadership Engagement: the Next Big Thing

Leadership Engagement: the Next Big Thing

Why the C-Suite Should Care about Executive and HiPo Engagement

You’re the CEO of a mid-sized firm, and the vendor you’ve hired to run your employee engagement survey has just told you that with the survey closing in 24 hours, only 25% of your executive population has responded. Is this good or bad news?

Recently, I described how the experts I interviewed for my dissertation research asserted that employee engagement might manifest differently based on population characteristics such as demographic traits. Besides millennials, the group they talked about most frequently as critical to engage is the executive leadership (e.g., Director and above) population.

Intuitively, this makes sense. Leaders are the agents of the employment relationship for most staff, so it is easy to imagine a snowball effect if a leader disengages. If a leader disengages, she is less likely to provide her team conditions that nurture engagement, such as authentic, two-way communication; recognition, or connecting the dots between individual objectives and business strategy. Conversely, when a leader is engaged, she is likely to empower, inspire and energize her team, leading to increased engagement and, of course, business performance.

But why executive leaders and not all managers? At the time I was conducting my research, the idea of executive engagement wasn’t on my radar and I didn’t think to probe – now, of course, I really wish I had. I have a theory: if one has a limited budget to invest, it makes sense to focus on the most influential decision-makers in the management ranks. I welcome alternative hypotheses from readers and leaders.

So, getting back to the original question, is it good or bad news that your executive team hasn’t completed your survey? If they are out working their tails off on high-value projects, maybe that's OK. But what if they are not responding because they are disengaged? That's bad news, not just for today but for tomorrow. 

It’s worth noting that not very many companies have implemented engagement programs targeted at executives yet. The progressive practitioners I interviewed are leaders in our profession.  I concur that they are right about the executive population, and I assert that there is an equally important and overlapping population we need to focus on through similar logic: high potential (or HiPo) employees, who not only perform exceptionally today, but who are also expected to lead the business in achieving results over time. 

I'd love to hear more from others who are thinking along these lines and your best practices.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation: Demographics and Employee Engagement

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Talkin' 'Bout My Generation: Demographics and Employee Engagement

How to Think about Building Engagement Models for Diverse Populations

Last month, you were promoted to a new executive-level role overseeing two teams: one is a young, enthusiastic group of experience designers; the other is an older, more experienced group of software developers. Your HR manager says that you need to engage your employee and recommends a social media-based approach. What do you do?

If the arguments I'm making about employee engagement being an individual's attitude towards their work in their organization comprising feelings of vigor, dedication and absorption; perceptions of empowerment and motivation to act both within and extra-role to benefit the firm, then it can be inferred that employee engagement is very personal. As such, it can manifest differently in different people. If it manifests differently, in different people, then the things that drive it in differing individuals might vary by degree as well. 

When I interviewed practitioners for my dissertation research, many spontaneously talked about how important it is to adapt engagement programs for differing employee populations. In the words of one, "There is an engagement model for every population." The most-frequently mentioned population of note was "Millennials," the group just coming into the workforce, born from the early 1980s-2000. 

Although many of us are familiar with the concept of "generations," in case you're not sure exactly what that means or how it differs from someone's age, let me clarify. A generational cohort is defined by birth year and comprises a group of people who have undergone a common set of experiences (in this case cultural) over the same period of time. These experiences are adapted into a sort of common identity. Think of "Baby Boomers" or the "Facebook Generation." The sorts of events that generations share can be diverse, but common historical events (wars, moon landings, etc.) and technological innovations (think internet for Gen X and social media for Millenials) are two significant ones. There's a scientific argument behind generational theory: the common stuff that happens to a cohort early in life effects brain development, specifically with respect to social identity.

Which is all to say that the people I interviewed are right: Millenials are substantially different from their colleagues in other generations. In the example above, having had access to social media during formative years makes it likely that a social-media based engagement program would be a natural fit for them. The same may not be true for their Baby-Boomer colleagues in the software development team. In fact, some might read a social media based program as explicitly excluding them if they've never used it before.

Does this mean you literally need to target engagement programs to each individual? Of course not. Because fundamentally, as human beings, we are substantially similar to one another too. The ideas I've laid out in prior posts about trust and communication driving engagement, for example, apply across generations and most cultural differences.

What it means is that as a leader, you should be discerning when someone comes to you with a "one-size-fits-all" approach to engagement. Ask questions like: 

1. Is this solution as appealing to me as it would be to a recent college graduate? If you aren't sure, go ask a couple recent college graduates.
2. Does this solution have a technology learning curve? If so, have a generationally-diverse set of team members preview it.

Although many practitioners recognized the value of population-specific engagement programs, few firms seem to be actually implementing such plans for differing generations. I'd love to hear from readers if they are aware of good work going on in this area!

Ch-ch-ch-changes: How Employee Engagement Can Make or Break Your Organizational Transformation

Ch-ch-ch-changes: How Employee Engagement Can Make or Break Your Organizational Transformation

Employee Engagement Matters More During Change than Leaders Might Expect

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If you still equate employee engagement to happiness fueled by free sodas in the break room and  perpetually cheery senior leaders … well, you’re missing out on one of employee engagement’s most important functions: to help organizations navigate through challenging changes.

In my dissertation research, the employee engagement practitioners I interviewed made a point to explain that employee engagement is meaningful not only during boom times, but also during some of the hardest periods that businesses face: leadership changes, mergers and redundancies. As one noted:

“During a redundancy, people may see colleagues leaving their jobs. If they understand why their jobs were eliminated and what the long-term outlook for the organization is, they may still be engaged with the organization because they know the rationale for the decision-making, and they can have a voice and say what they want to in the business if they like. But they wouldn’t be satisfied or happy.”

In fact, engaging employees during these periods can make or break an organizational transformation. Why? Fundamentally, many people don’t like change, and they really don’t like change that they didn’t choose. We may know intellectually that certain aspects of our environment are out of our control, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

When it comes to managing through change, the best leaders I've worked with are the ones who intuitively understand a few simple concepts:

1.       Change is much more likely to succeed if people are on-board. As the quote above illustrates, it is possible to align employees with the next right step for the business, whether or not they agree. All that’s necessary is to explain transparently how the business got to the decision it did. Remember that deep down everyone wants the same thing: a healthy organization in a strong position to meet its objectives.

2.       People don’t need you as a leader to have all the answers, they just need you to treat them with respect. This goes back to the one most important thing underlying employee engagement: a mutually trusting and communicative relationship. Your employees are bright and capable people – otherwise you wouldn’t have hired them. They know that sometimes there are no easy answers. But if you treat them like adults, they’re much more likely to act like them.

3.        Change will result in churn. It’s naïve to think that even the best leader can manage through change without consequences. Some people are not going to want to participate in an organization after certain changes. That’s OK – you don’t need everyone to like you. But you should be smart about identifying at the start of every change effort who you NEED to keep and taking actions to engage and retain this talent specifically.

Managing through change is always challenging, but having a foundation of employee engagement can help you navigate organizational transformation successfully.