Employee Engagement Action Planning: Beyond ‘thinking locally and acting globally’

One of my core #leadership beliefs: you must win in the workplace before you can win in the marketplace.

— Doug Conant (@DougConant) October 22, 2017

Building authentic employee engagement represents a key challenge for business managers; it’s a hot topic that has quickly been absorbed into the HR agenda and has continued to capture the attention of business leaders and HR Professionals alike. Indeed, it is rare to find articles in popular HR magazines that do not include at least some reference to engagement and how to nurture it.

The benefits of authentic engagement are well-known, with increased employee engagement being linked to higher levels of productivity, and consistently correlating with individual, group and organisational performance on measures of customer experience and customer loyalty. Organisations with higher employee engagement also tend to have lower employee turnover, higher productivity, higher total shareholder returns and better financial performance.

In short, authentic employee engagement is pivotal to an organisation’s performance, with as many as 70% of business leaders agreeing that engagement is critical to business results.

However, what is perhaps most shocking is that as few as 20% of business leaders agree that their current engagement initiatives are effective in driving business results. Something appears to be lost in translation between implementing an engagement survey and converting the insight into meaningful action.

Where’s the disconnect? Research has shown that employee engagement in teams whose managers take action on their engagement data is more than double that of teams whose managers take no action. So, the message is clear: taking the appropriate action is key to achieving authentic employee engagement and in unlocking the aforementioned benefits.

What steps should be taken to implement effective action planning?

There is a range of different approaches. While no one size fits all, the effectiveness of a chosen approach is contingent upon your ability to:

• Communicate your findings clearly and honestly
• Clarify central issues and prioritise them accordingly
• Identify strengths to build on
• Categorise problem areas into macro (organisation-wide) and micro (team-specific) challenges, before finally offering a specific, actionable plan to address issues raised.

While each action plan may differ in terms of size and scope, in order to be truly effective, it must; be data driven (taking full advantage of the unprecedented access to different views across employee groups), foster dialogue, develop organisational and individual skills, complement day-to-day improvement efforts and involve your employees every step of the way.

In my experience, there are five broad, commonly used approaches to survey action planning, with most organisations typically using a combination of two or more approaches to help target various business areas:

1. Bottom Up – a ‘grass roots’ approach, starting at the lower levels of the organisation, focusing on local or micro issues. Issues are translated into meaningful action plans by team leaders, with all non-local (macro) issues being immediately escalated upwards to senior management.
2. Top Down – Senior Leaders consolidate survey findings and determine key issues to address collectively. Potential solutions are usually moderated using focus groups through the business in order to gauge the appropriateness of intended action.
3. Cascade – Each tier of the organisation selects which issues it needs to take ownership of, passing the remaining issues downwards in a clear and concise manner.
4. Process Ownership – Action planning is spearheaded by individuals or teams who have ownership over a particular issue or topic.
5. Survey Action Team – Key issues are defined by the Senior Leadership team who then in turn elect a survey action team comprised on a cross-section of employees to address each issue in sequence.

Whichever approach or combination of approaches that you select, an effective action plan must support your managers and equip them sufficiently to navigate the 7 most common barriers to fostering authentic engagement:

1. Managers don’t always have access to the data they need to take action
2. Managers are unclear on what needs to be worked on (i.e., too many priorities are identified)
3. Managers don’t always know how engagement impacts the achievement of their team’s goals
4. Managers sometimes feel that they simply do not have the time
5. Managers don’t know how to correctly implement the different types of survey action plans
6. Managers are not always held accountable for improving employee engagement
7. Managers do not receive the support they need to take action

The right technology platform can empower your managers and provide them with the tools, insights and data to navigate each of these barriers to success and help them design and implement the appropriate survey action plan.

The Ipsos Lead Archway Platform developed by our experts in Employee Engagement, allows managers unprecedented access to their results; to develop rigorous analysis, build action plans for work areas at every level of the business (from the team level, through to the organisational level), and share the results consistently across the business.

• For more information, please contact us here at [email protected].

References

• Soldati, 2007; HR Focus, 2006
• Helmsley Fraser, 2008, Cited in The HR Director, 2008; The Conference Board, 2006
• Baumruk, 2006
• CEB Engagement Research Survey, 2010
• Wiley: Strategic Employee Surveys, 2010