Employee Engagement

A Brief Message From Peter Capodice...

Over the past decade, employers have scrambled to find new ways to stand out in the eyes of the top talent who possess the most in-demand skills. Many organizations optimized their strategies and embraced employer branding and employee engagement to wage the so-called War for Talent, the struggle to find and retain the best employees as a catalyst for improved business performance.

Simply put, employer brand is “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers, and other key stakeholders).” The primary concerns are the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.
1. Most often, employer branding is recognized as appearances on the “Best Places to Work” lists that appear in Fortune magazine or in local business journals around the country. Are employees proud to work at a company? Do candidates clamor to apply? If so, the company has a strong employer brand. A strong employer brand also has a significant bottom-line impact. Carol Parish at The Brand Union, a global branding organization, pointed out that companies that are most successful with employer brand also outperform the Standard & Poor index. “It’s a lesser known fact that companies with a high rating from both the consumers and their employees double that return. It’s extraordinary. If you can get the employees on board, what amazing business results you can have.”
2. Although employee engagement is a builder of an employer brand, many organizations approach brand building the wrong way. Most try to build their employer brand as they would a consumer brand – urging executives and managers to “live the brand.” However, branding can’t be exclusively a topdown initiative. In many ways, employee branding must start with employee engagement at the team level. For organizations rebuilding employer brands in the wake of the current economic slowdown,
work should begin with repairing employee engagement. Improved employee engagement must begin at the team level.

Employer Branding Has Suffered in the Current Economy
The economic conditions over the past 18 months have dramatically changed the business landscape, and organizations have seen both their employer brands and employee morale erode as a result of layoffs, salary freezes, reduced benefits, lack of job security and increased anxiety.
This deterioration can in large part be attributed to a loss of employee engagement, simply defined as an employee’s emotional connection to an organization that inspires greater discretionary effort.
Watching friends lose jobs, seeing pay and benefits reduced and worrying about keeping the job itself will diminish the effectiveness of even the most enthusiastic employee.
Research from the Corporate Leadership Council, which has surveyed over 500,000 employees on their employee engagement levels since 2004, supports this. Before the downturn, roughly 1 in 10 employees was highly disengaged, that number increased to 1 in 5 at the end of 2008, and the
preliminary data from the first quarter of 2009 shows that the number has increased to 1 in 3.3

Businesses feel that loss of engagement in decreased earnings. Research shows that organizations with more than four engaged employees for every one actively disengaged employee saw 2.6 times more growth in earnings per share than organizations with a ratio of slightly less than one engaged
worker for every one actively disengaged worker.4 In the past, Gallup estimated the cost of employee engagement on the U.S. workforce to be more than $300 billion.5 In the current economy, that figure could be much higher.

With this loss of engagement, employees are less able to find work stimulating or be the type of brand ambassador that would recommend the business to candidates or customers. What’s worse, former employees are hard-pressed to say anything nice about a company that let them go, no matter how much severance was paid or how well the offboarding process was completed.

To compound the problem, businesses that are letting people go are frequently hiring at the same time to bring in employees with key skills. The War for Talent has not abated in spite of the downturn, and many of the most in-demand workers are still hard to find. As the Aberdeen Group
explained in its April 2009 report on Employer Branding, executives they surveyed believe that increasing competition for top talent and a shortage of key skills in the marketplace are the top two pressures they face today.

Unfortunately, when organizations need a strong employment brands the most, most brands are suffering dramatically.

Trying to Fix the Problem, but Pursuing the Wrong Approach
In the words of advertising legend David Ogilvy, nothing will kill your reputation in the labor market faster than doing a great job advertising a work experience you don’t deliver. Organizations that promote themselves as a Best Place to Work when they’re anything but end up with an angry, cynical workforce that is only too happy to counteract their employer’s paid advertising with more credible word of mouth advertising.6 In a world of social networking, this negative buzz can spread like wildfire over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

The market response to deteriorated employer branding and weakened employee engagement has been led by organizations that offer programs that aim to rebuild what has been lost. Most employer branding programs follow a four-step process:
• Assess the current brand: Use a survey or questionnaire to understand how employees perceive the organization and how to focus the organization’s resources.
• Create a message: Develop a message platform that inspires employees and explains why you are a great company.
• Communicate the message repeatedly: Through every possible online and offline channel, reiterate branding messages as often as possible.
• Measure changes constantly for continuous improvement: Conduct more surveys and assessments to see if messaging is having an impact.

The problem is that this top-down approach is based on traditional consumer branding that does not take into account the different nature of the relationship between the employee and the employer.

That relationship – the source of any employee engagement – is dramatically different from the relationship a person has with a consumer product.

Research shows that the main driver of a good employer brand is employee engagement, but executives cannot legislate culture changes with mission or vision statements or through values clarification. Engagement must grow organically, one workgroup at a time. As two of the leading
experts in employment engagement explained in 2007, “Too many organizations build management models on the assumption that managers and leaders have the power in the company/employee relationship, but that’s no longer always the case. The answer is employee engagement or the ability to capture the heads, hearts, and souls of your employees to instill an intrinsic desire and passion for excellence. Engaged employees want their organization to succeed because they feel connected emotionally, socially, and even spiritually to its mission, vision, and purpose.”

However, many organizations still treat employee engagement as an employee communication issue or a management issue. Instead, most would be better served by pursuing a grassroots solution to the problem.

Engagement Must Be Fixed at the Team Level
You know the saying, “Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Employees, and particularly the newer generation of employees, care not only about opportunities for career development and financial compensation, they also want good relationships with their team members
and supervisors. Employees want to be respected and treated as individuals with unique needs and desires. The only way to address these issues is at the team level.

Employees are more likely to improve their performance when they are engaged not only with the work they do, but also with their co-workers, managers and any others that they interact with day in and day out. According to 2005 Towers Perrin research, 84 percent of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization’s products, compared with only 31 percent of those who are disengaged. However, employers must get them to believe it. That belief
must occur at the team level.

Improved relationships among peers and between supervisors and subordinates have a significant impact on employee engagement, which in turn affects performance. Work relationships thrive in an environment in which personal communication and work-style preferences are understood,
accommodated and respected.

Because engagement is built on trust, re-engagement must be built on overcoming mistrust. Awareness of behaviors that support employees’ feelings of trust can help overcome such dysfunctions as:
• Quiet resistance or passive-aggressive behaviors: Resentment can build among employees in organizations that have experienced layoffs or salary reductions. Rebuilding open, honest and productive communication allows teams to deal with bottled-up emotions in an up-front and non-personalized way.
• Feelings such as lack of belonging or solidarity: Employees who watch colleagues lose jobs and wonder if their job will be next may become detached from their co-workers and the larger organization. Organizations can’t pretend that nothing happened. Managers must find a way to acknowledge the past and learn how to draw these employees out of their detachment.
• Low energy levels experienced in the workplace or in team activities: Resentment and detachment can leave employees indifferent and result in them “just going through the motions” each day. To reignite employees’ passion, managers must show some empathy and not pretend that cuts and reductions never happened.

However, awareness of these behaviors is just a start. What’s needed is the organizational commitment to change behaviors that impede collaboration and productivity, change orientation and accountability, and encourage behaviors that support the positive elements of job performance. To
overcome workplace dysfunctions and reignite employees’ passion of their work through effective collaboration with their employees, managers must:
• Reaffirm structures: Managers need to know how employees want to work and provide the necessary structure. Do they need a very hands-on or hands-off work environment? Are teams expected to deliver the same amount of work as before layoffs with fewer people?
• Reestablish accountability: After staff reductions, accountability gaps may exist. Are managers and employees clear about who is accountable for what? Is everyone clear about who is accountable to customers?
• Rebuild relationships: After watching managers and colleagues laid off, many employees have been reluctant to make the emotional investment in extra effort. As the economy improves, managers will still need to rebuild trusting relationships with employees. Discussing issues in an objective, non-politicized and respectful manner is one step toward rebuilding this trust.

To begin taking these steps, managers need a tool to provide insight into the workplace needs and personal communication and work-style preferences of their employees. The Birkman Method is the tool they need.

Conclusion: The Birkman Method® is the Engagement Solution
The implementation of The Birkman Method has proven to be an effective tool to improve team performance. By analyzing and describing individual needs, The Birkman Method is a source of initiatives to drive and motivate workplace behavior that increases employee engagement and strengthens your employment brand.

Employee needs are the expectations they have about how relationships and situations should occur. When needs are met, they drive behavior in positive and productive directions. Unmet needs, meanwhile, can create potentially negative and less-than-productive behavior. The Birkman Method integrates needs measurements to assess the occupational interests that can shape careers and improve the fit of a person’s job role. As a result, The Birkman Method does not describe an individual in a vacuum, but rather in the complex, dynamic reality of the workplace.

The unique construction and comparative database of The Birkman Method provides powerful insight into the factors that specifically drive a person’s behavior, creating greater choice and more self-responsibility. It accurately measures social behaviors, underlying expectations of interpersonal and task actions, potential stress reactions to unmet expectations, occupational preferences and organizational strengths.