In this piece I focus on four key findings. The surveys show that:

1. Employees are generally positive towards their line managers as people
2. But a significant proportion say those managers are poor at providing feedback on personal performance, coaching and discussing personal training and development needs
3. Few line managers are aware of these shortcomings
4. But 85% of organisations do recognise they lack leadership and management skills.                                          

Our own research supports these findings, and also points to the qualities people most value in their immediate managers:

• Setting clear and consistent expectations
• Giving positive feedback and recognition for work well done
• Encouraging and supporting people’s growth and development
• Valuing people’s unique qualities
• Showing care, concern and interest in people.

As the CIPD research shows, these qualities are frequently key drivers of engagement and they’re manifestly lacking in many line managers. The result is low engagement and poor performance.

So the question is: are your line managers your Company’s Achilles heel? And if so, what’s to be done?

Clearly there are no simple answers. Changing attitudes and behaviour is a major undertaking. But perhaps a good starting point is to ask five basic questions:

1. How effective are your senior team as people managers? Do their attitudes and behaviours reflect the attributes employees most value? Are they good role models for your line managers, team leaders and supervisors?
2. Do you recruit and appoint people with the right people management attitudes and behaviours? Or do you need to review your recruitment processes?
3. Do you recognise and reward people for their performance in terms of people management and raising the level of engagement?
4. Is the way you train and coach people consistent with the development of the right people management attitudes and behaviours?
5. Are care, concern and encouragement part of your company culture? Are they really part of “the way we do things around here”?

The answers should inform your next step.

——————————————–
This blog draws on the following:

¹ CIPD Quarterly Employee Outlook Report
 http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/employee-outlook-spring-2012.aspx
 ² CIPD/Cornerstone on Demand Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey Report
http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/learning-talent-development-2012.aspx

You may also want to visit our webpage ‘What impact do line managers have on engagement?’

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Nowadays there’s no shortage of statistics or case studies which prove the links between engagement and a whole range of business performance metrics. Nevertheless, there are still many companies who see an engagement survey as a cost rather than an investment. 

Very often it’s because they haven’t really analysed how it could link to and drive performance in their own business, and even act as a catalyst for change. Rather they see surveys as essentially HR activities which provide feedback on employees’ attitudes and feelings and input into people policies and practices. 

That doesn’t mean those surveys are without merit. They can be very useful. In many cases the engagement survey focuses on a consistent set of issues from year to year and provides a useful measure of progress over time. And companies which act on the feedback tend see a consistent rise in survey scores and engagement levels. This can support employer branding initiatives and help to promote the company as a great place to work. 

However, there are often limitations to this approach. Rising survey scores are not always reflected in improvements in business performance.  And rising engagement levels do not necessarily mean that attitudes and opinions are properly aligned with the needs of the business. So perhaps we should ask the question: is the survey making as big a contribution to business success as it could be? 

On the other hand companies which see engagement as an investment rather than a cost also attach importance to tracking progress over time and building their employer brand. But they go beyond that. They tend to use surveys more strategically. As part of their strategic thinking they appraise their current position and decide where they want to be in three or five years’ time. They determine the systems, processes, attitudes and behaviours that will underpin success in that future landscape. They then use the survey to measure the extent to which attitudes and opinions are in line with the new requirements rather than the old. In other words they use the survey to measure the gap between where the company is now and where it wants to be. The survey identifies what needs to be done to close the gap and guides managers in focusing on priority issues. 

This approach has certain key characteristics: it focuses primarily on the needs of the business and on linking employee metrics with key business outcomes; it is forward looking and aims at aligning employee attitudes and behaviours with the future needs of the business; it’s a process rather than an event and although it’s driven by HR it’s owned by the whole company: an investment for the business rather than a cost to HR. 

The alternative approach is rather different: it’s primary focus is on people issues and comparing the present with the past. As a consequence its impact on business performance is rather more limited. It’s typically an event rather than an ongoing process. It is driven by HR, and is seen as a cost to be borne by the hard-pressed HR budget. 

Which approach does your company take?

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Nearly twelve months down the line Neil Roden of PwC, one of the profession’s most senior figures, has resurrected the issue claiming that “…The quality of HR senior leadership is declining” and the profession is losing influence.  The reason, he says, is that “Not a lot of HR people do much on metrics and analytics, despite the fact that we all know that’s how most chief executives and chief finance officers think”.

And nowhere is that truer than in my area of expertise – employee engagement surveys. All too often the HR mindset seems to preclude a systematic approach to linking employee attitudes and behaviours with people performance metrics and key business outcomes; in some instances it seems to recoil at the very prospect. But when it does happen the results can be truly transformational: the survey becomes a vital business tool and HR quickly assumes a new and compelling relevance at the heart of the business.

Of course many companies have long understood the importance of metrics and analytics. Neil Roden quotes General Electric and in recent blogs I’ve referred to Marks and Spencer and Mitchells and Butler. Not surprisingly they all tend to be leaders in their fields.

This blog draws particularly from the following article in our Resource Centre:
“Quality of HR senior leadership is declining”, says Neil Roden – Rob MacLachlan, People Management

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It has been said many times that companies that have handled re-organisation and redundancies with sensitivity and focused on engaging their people are likely to retain  their key players. Those that have used the spectre of redundancy to justify ever increasing demands while giving less in return are likely to haemorrhage talent. 

This raises the perennial question: how can companies, regardless of their people policies, best understand and manage staff turnover. In most cases the answer is either the exit interview or the leavers’ survey. Both have their value but both have limitations. It’s often said that some employees will be less than truthful in an exit interview, and to a lesser degree that’s also an issue with leavers’ surveys. On top of that, while both approaches might help us to understand why people leave they seldom tell us anything about the journey that led to that decision.  

However, recent research suggests that there is an alternative to exit interviews and leavers’ surveys; one which does enable us to track that journey, profile leavers and predict staff turnover. At its heart is a detailed analysis of employee engagement survey data which enables us to a) identify the point at which the attitudes and behaviours of leavers begin to diverge from those of their colleagues and b) develop profiles for specific categories of leaver. 

These insights do not necessarily help companies to deal with the immediate triggers behind the decision to leave but they do help them pinpoint the policies, practices and behaviours which lead to disaffection over time.    

For further reading download our latest research paper:
“Using Survey Data to Predict Staff Turnover”

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In fact I couldn’t agree more with some of the ideas behind the bluster: that people are happiest and most productive when they feel they’re working for a business with a clear purpose, when they feel recognised and rewarded, are given clear and honest information about what’s going on, and know that the company takes account of what they have to say. But these aren’t revolutionary ideas. They’re about employee engagement. And I spend much of my working life persuading companies that they’re fundamental prerequisites of long term success.

It might surprise Mr Philpott to learn that many of those companies are very keen to embrace engagement and the “revolutionary” ideas that go with it. And in many cases it’s the CEO who’s the driving force. It’s not because of my powers of persuasion but because increasingly the benefits of having a highly engaged workforce are plain to see and translate into standards of customer service and performance that differentiate the business and drive profitable growth even in the current climate.

So let’s please drop the emotive and in many cases misleading references to people being “disengaged by the daily grind of toxic organisational cultures” and a “flawed ideology that crudely emphasises the role of the individual over the collective and seeks to maintain an imbalance of power to buttress management authority.” Apart from anything else they insult the many CEOs and HR professionals who commit considerable time and effort to championing engagement up and down the country.

Above all let’s distance ourselves from the them and us rhetoric that recalls the 1970’s. Instead let’s start talking things up. There are some really great British companies out there for whom engagement is a driving force.

¹ See John Pilpott’s blog “Britain needs bosses to put the Big Society to work” posted on 9th December 2011 at  www.demos.co.uk/blog/britainbossesbigsociety

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In our experience it’s usually the latter. Many companies do, indeed, commit time, effort and money to conducting surveys and measuring engagement but only a small proportion demonstrates the same commitment to acting on the results. Time and again we see companies endorse our recommendations, drill into the detail and ultimately do nothing. It’s as though measurement is an end in itself.

What separates the few from the many?The few have gathered hard evidence that links employee engagement to customer satisfaction and profit. And that evidence provides a compelling case for action which convinces their managers who then ensure that actions are implemented with vigour. The many, on the other hand, either don’t have that evidence or they’re not persuaded by the evidence of other companies. So they don’t have a compelling business case for engagement, their managers remain unconvinced, and there’s no imperative for action.

So what do the many need to do to join the ranks of the few? Start thinking beyond measurement and focusing on action. They need to start linking engagement to other key performance metrics and developing a structured action programme. We know from experience that the results can be transformational: a compelling business case, unprecedented management buy-in, rising engagement and better business performance. But don’t take our word for it – start learning from the few.

An outstanding example is provided by that bastion of the High Street, Marks & Spencer. At a recent presentation HR Director, Tanith Dodge, acknowledged that one of the biggest challenges is “convincing managers that there’s a need for staff engagement activities at all”. She went on to explain that she does it by providing them with hard factual evidence that they work: by comparing engagement metrics with other performance metrics such as ‘sales against plan’, ‘absence against plan’ and mystery shopper scores at stores with the most and least engaged personnel.

As a result of those analyses she knows that if the 25% of M&S stores with the lowest engagement scores in staff surveys performed as well in sales terms as the top 25%, M&S would increase its sales by £104m a year. A useful metric to have, she added “next time I’m stuck in the lift with a manager who doubts the value of employee engagement.”

And there are other good examples such as Mitchells & Butlers, the UK’s leading operator of restaurants and pubs (watch Corporate HR Director, Dulcie Shepherd, describe how M&B turns insight into action at more than 1,400 businesses in the video below).

The challenge for the many is to learn from these examples, change their
mind-sets and move from measurement to action. Rising engagement will follow.

This blog draws on the following:

¹ The State of Human Resources – A survey by Kings College London and Speechly  Bircham
²Towers Watson’s 2010 Global Workforce Study
CIPD 2011: M&S shares its predictors of employee engagement – People Management 10 November 2011.
Performance 2011 Conference: M&S’ Tanith Dodge on boosting customer service via staff engagement – HR Zone 7 November 2011.

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A ludicrous idea you might think, and as you’ve probably guessed it never really happened. But it’s exactly what some HR Directors do when they’re thinking of conducting an employee engagement survey and sourcing a supplier. Rather than inviting a consultant to meet the patient, discuss symptoms, examine case history and then discuss possible solutions they send out an invitation to tender, set up a beauty parade and compare the medicines and therapies on offer.

They’re missing a hugely important trick. The questions a good consultant asks, their ability to get to the heart of the client’s challenges, and their ability to relate those challenges to broad business issues will tell them far more about the consultant’s expertise, experience and potential fit than any beauty parade. 

Why do they miss this trick? No doubt they’d point to a number of reasons for the invitation to tender: compliance, transparency, competition, due process, due diligence etc. But I’d suggest the real reason is they haven’t fully grasped the idea of engagement and how it drives business performance. If they had their first step would surely be to share their key business challenges with the consultant and explore how their approach to engagement could help overcome them. Much more sensible I’d say that viewing their vital statistics at the beauty parade.

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As the assistant went to find a phone that might fit the bill he left me something rather fancy to play with – not at all what I’d come for. You could browse the internet on it, send emails and text messages, take pictures and even get a weather forecast. It was, of course, an iPhone and I’ve been a fan ever since.

I was reminded of this experience by the recent death of Steve Jobs, the man behind the iPhone. And it seems an appropriate moment to take a look at the company he created and see if there’s anything from its extraordinary success that we can learn about employee engagement.

It’s not easy to separate the man from the company but when you do you find three principles that underpin Apple’s reputation for innovation, excellence and customer delight:

• Give employees the freedom to own and improve the company’s products
• Challenge your employees to grow
• Build a culture of mutual respect between managers and employees

These principals have played a key part in making Apple a place where people want to work and feel part of something bigger. They’re engaged, not because of money, but because of their emotional connection to their work and the way they feel about the people they share their time with.

There’s nothing proprietary about these principals. They go right to the heart of engagement and they underpin many success stories. So when Sir Terry Leahy speaks about engagement it’s not really surprising to hear him talking about four basic tenets he would impart to all managers. “People really only need four things at work: a job that interests them, a chance to get on, to be treated with respect and to have a boss that helps them. It’s not a lot to ask.”

He’s absolutely right of course, it’s not a lot to ask for. Unfortunately the reported level of employee engagement in the UK suggests it’s too much for many of our business leaders.

Visit our Resource Centre for the articles on employee engagement or read our web page on designing and implementing an engagement strategy.

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I recount this story because it reflects one of the themes in our engagement review: one of the keys to employee engagement is devolving decision making responsibility and giving people a bit more space. The argument is a familiar one but no less valid for that. People want to be trusted, respected and involved. They respond to a little freedom and naturally step up when theyre given the opportunity. Providing them with challenges gives them a sense of ownership, and this can have a huge impact on both engagement and performance.

And nowhere is that truer than in the most challenging part of the engagement process: turning insight into action. Companies which delegate responsibility for action to front line teams and then trust them to generate and implement solutions tend, in my experience, to have impressive track records in driving sustainable improvement throughout the business. Many companies, however, will not delegate or trust their people. They enthusiastically endorse recommendations and give senior or middle managers responsibility for seeing that they’re implemented. They then await the transformation. And of course it seldom comes. As a result, the money, time and effort they invested in measurement is wasted. All for a little trust!

Another article in our review has a very different take on engagement but is all the more interesting for that, and it would be a shame to close without mentioning it. Its fundamental premise is that Employer engagement is the Holy Grail not Employee engagement. Companies, it says, should start giving employees reasons to be engaged and it turns some oft repeated principles on their heads:

• Belief in the company: does the company support individual initiatives that support the mission? Can it demonstrate that it really believes in its people?
• Desire to make things better: are people’s ideas on how to improve things taken seriously? Can the company demonstrate its desire to make things better for employees?
• Understanding the big picture: understanding is based on information. Does the company share with people the information they need in order to see the big picture?
• Respect for colleagues: Do policies and procedures and the attitudes of senior managers reflect a respect for people? Or are they focused on simply getting the job done?
• Willingness to go the extra mile: This is about discretionary effort. How much discretionary effort does the company put in to support and recognise people’s efforts?
• Keeping up to date with developments in the field: Does the company help people keep up to date? Or does it have a policy against time spent online?

Interesting ideas which can, I think, be neatly summed up by a twist on JFK’s words: “ask not what your employees can do for the company but what the company can do for them.” Particularly poignant given the sacrifices so many employees have been asked to make over the last few years.

This blog draws particularly from the following articles in our engagement Resource Centre:

• Engagement is more than communication, it’s about devolving decision-making – John Smythe, HR Magazine
• For business success, dump hierarchy and promote democracy – Trevor Ward, HR Magazine
• Employee Engagement? Maybe the Holy Grail is Really Employer Engagement – Steven Laird, TLNT

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Apparently it’s been said by some business leaders that as long as the spectre of redundancy hangs over their people self interest will drive commitment and performance, so there’s no need to invest in engagement programmes or initiatives? For more enlightened folk however, that’s dangerous short term-ism: the moment things pick up, key people will walk and the business will begin to suffer. In fact there are lots of references in our review to the growing body of evidence which demonstrates that engagement is a lead indicator of other business metrics such as customer loyalty, productivity and profitability. So the key question is why do so many business leaders continue to think of engagement as something that’s nice-to-have rather than mission critical? It appears there’s a challenge here: to convince business leaders that engagement is, indeed, a real driver of business performance.

That leads me onto a second theme. A particularly influential report says that the fate of HR departments in the year ahead may hinge on their being able to prove their value. Another suggests that the way they should do that is by starting to define the links between people practices and business performance, and properly measuring the business value of HR. In other words it’s time for some fresh thinking about using data to generate a talent strategy that’s linked to business results.

And the article goes on to say that the success of HR analytics will be dependent on:

1. identifying and prioritising issues that link people challenges and business outcomes,
2. enlisting the support of analytical resources from different parts of the business such as market research and finance,
3. going beyond traditional HR solutions and working with business leaders to address the root causes of problems and develop new ways of solving them,
4. building a lasting source of value creation by integrating analytics practitioners into day-to-day HR operations.

In other words it’s about starting a new dialogue about the links between people and performance which will help HR executives demonstrate the impact of their work so that they enter into a real strategic partnership with other members of the senior-management team.

Which brings me nicely back to my HR Director friend and her conference talk. As it happens, her subject had been the links between people challenges and business outcomes. That’s something we’ve been working on together for more than two years and it has become central to the way her company monitors performance. She was very excited about the number of delegates who grasped her ideas, but struck by the number who said that their own organisations were miles behind. Perhaps it’s time they started the new dialogue.

This blog draws particularly from the following articles in our Resource Centre:

• Relying on “fixed grin” employee engagement during economic downturn could be fatal – Joe Williams, HR Magazine
• The Challenge of Proving ROI in HR – Jason Lauritsen, Transforming Business Through Talent blog
• Question for your HR chief: Are we using our ‘people data’ to create value? – McKinsey Quarterly
• Employee Engagement – Maximising Business Performance – Right Management

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