HR Pulse

Employee engagement: Just talking about it won’t make it happen!

Finding it hard to generate positive engagement in your organisation? Maybe it's time to be more disciplined in your push for change. Employee engagement has set the HR world alight. While this is great, because it deserves to be highlighted, too many organisations pay only lip service to the issue and end up trying, but failing, to get the results they expect.

Shining a light on employee engagement problems can sometimes make matters worse. For instance, if you ask your employees for their perceptions as to how engaged or disengaged they are, but then fail to do anything to improve their perceptions, all you've done is encouraged your people to think more negatively about themselves and your corporate culture. They are also less likely to want to participate in future surveys.

Our engagement expert is founding associate and director of research, Dr Drea Zigarmi. He's been studying employee engagement since 2006 and believes organisations can achieve the results they are looking for if they are disciplined in the way they measure, plan, and roll out engagement initiatives. So what are his top tips?

Start with a validated assessment

This is Zigarmi's number one rule. If the process you use to measure engagement and what is happening in your organisation isn't reliable or validated, and fails to provide you with information that your organisation can act upon, then it is pretty pointless. However, creating and validating an assessment is an expensive and time-consuming process.

Zigarmi knows from first-hand experience - the validation of the employee work passion assessment he created required almost seven years' work! The team looked at over 40 different studies to come up with a list of 200 original questions. These items were subsequently refined to a final list of 36 questions measuring 12 key factors.

Tie the assessment to specific outcomes

You have to connect the assessment to desired outcomes to make it actionable. In Zigarmi's case, he tied 12 employee work passion factors to five desired work intentions (see below) so he could test the effectiveness of his survey in pinpointing specific actions organisations could take to get results. Don't assume people who are satisfied will perform at a higher level. That's not necessarily the case. Being specific about outcomes is what will deliver success.

Devote resources to implementation — not just measurement

It's no good just sharing data with managers and asking them to fix the problems that data highlights. Awareness of an issue alone won't sort out anything! You will need to offer additional resources to managers if you are going to load additional priorities onto them.

Don't go it alone

Often, the intervention necessary to fix an issue identified through an assessment doesn't reside within the organisation. You must be open to bringing in a trusted partner. Employee engagement initiatives can be major organisational change initiatives, and most change at this level will require policy or system support. It will be worth the investment: employees performing at a higher-than-average level, additional discretional effort, retention of your best people, people who are excited and involved in what they're doing. You can't lose!