Assessing Performance, Leadership & Engagement

The Nerd Competency Model: What We Can Learn?

2012-01-30T17:59:00.000-05:00

Are you a Dweeb, Geek, Nerd or Dork?

Spend time surfing the web and you will find this Venn diagram describing the overlapping capabilities of the “not-cool” kids.

It is fun, but recently, I had a serious conversation about it.

A friend of mine, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard, is burning out from teaching. Looking at the model, she said “I’m not a nerd. I’m not obsessed enough—I don’t want to spend 90 hours a week perfecting technology.” However, she is smart; she enjoys doing complex math. She will probably change to a career that requires lot of smarts but less obsession and people skills.

I was surprised this internet joke provided insights! But, upon reflection, we can we learn a few things from this model:

Human performance is based on a mix of capabilities. Intelligence is never enough to be successful! Tech innovators like Mark Zuckerberg are smart, obsessed, and lack social grace. Change one of these capabilities and you don't get the full package
Sometimes lower or even negative capabilities are important for success. Consider McClelland and Burnham’s seminal finding that the most successful leaders are obsessed with power; they are concerned with relationships and influence. A corporate leader will only be successful if the power obsession is tempered with inhibition. Similarly, they found that leaders that are overly concerned with affiliative relationships make poor leaders
The competencies underlying performance are not always obvious. A nuanced understanding of competencies helps. If you want to develop leadership in general, you can develop a general competency model. If you want to develop specific types of leaders, you will be more successful if you fully research the model

Financing Costs: A Driver of The Jobless Recovery

2012-01-19T12:39:00.001-05:00

An analysis by the WSJ tells a story familiar story to readers of this blog—that labor productivity is soaring. Output per hour worked in nonfarm businesses has increased 6% during the recovery. Hours worked are up only 1.5%. Generally this is a good thing, at least in the long term.

What I found fascinating is that low financing costs of technology is a driver of this trend. Because of the low borrowing costs, many corporations are bulking up on labor saving machinery and technology.

Unfortunately for many, growth in jobs is not keeping pace with the growth in technology. In fact, some jobs are being replaced with technology, such as robotics.

According to the article, the U.S. today is second only to Japan in the use of industrial robots. Orders for new robots were up 41% through September from a year earlier, according to the Robotics Industries Association trade group. That has helped fuel the boom in productivity.

I’m not pessimistic about this trend. Ultimately, economic restructuring will occur and a skilled and engaged workforce will be needed to run these robots.

This should not be a surprise. The same trends have been in play for years, they have just been accelerated by the current economy.

Leadership Implications of a Jobless Recovery

2011-02-04T08:36:00.005-05:00

US unemployment is ebbing; this is good news for the global economy and many organizations. But we still have a long way to go in terms of reducing unemployment—which will drive general economic growth. We also have a long way to go in terms of corporate leadership and engagement.

Successful leaders will have to address the contours of this changing environment. The recession, and business environment, has made leadership more difficult by breaking trust.

Recently, an HR leader of a Fortune 100 company told me “corporate America has changed. Now, bosses make a choice to lay you off or loose their own job. Inevitably they will lay you off.” I was not surprised. But when I started to think about it, I realized this will make leadership and engagement difficult for managers as the economy picks up.

Actually, the economy has picked up and we are seeing a jobless recovery, which has become the norm in recent recessions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the 1990s, we have seen jobless recoveries.

Strangely economists have been confused by this trend. Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic, weaves together several forces in his theory of jobless recoveries:

1. Executive pay is increasing linked to the stock market, and thus quarterly profitability is of increasing concern to executives. One method of continuing profitability, when faced with reduced revenue, is to reduce costs with layoffs
2. Fewer barriers to lay-offs (lower unionization, rising personnel/medical costs)
3. An increasing contingent workforce, including part time and contract workers. The BLS would consider many of these individuals unemployed. Indeed 27% of US job growth since 2007 has been temp-workers. The real winner in the current economy are "temp-firms" like Manpower.

So, both the Atlantic and the HR executive agree on one thing—a dog-eat-dog work environment leads to layoffs.

As a consultant that spends a lot of time helping organizations develop leaders, I have to ask how to build leadership in this environment. No matter how you look at it, there is an element of trust in leadership—followers must trust leaders. Yet, in our current environment employees cannot trust their boss, well they can trust them --to lay them off to save their own job, which is the same as no trust at all!

So, the HR leader's statement seemed like a natural enough. But then I was saddened, shocked and yes concerned. I have to ask "can we develop leaders in this environment?"

Of course there are ways to address this—simply noting that the employee-employer relationship has changed is one way to honestly relate and build trust. Regardless, employers will have to develop a method of addressing this new world that requires bravery and yes, honesty.

Is your organization developing a plan to rebuild trust? Without authentic trust, I do not believe there will be employee engagement.

Is Engagement More Important Now?

2011-01-16T19:26:00.000-05:00

Work is drastically different today than 30 years ago. Does this change the extent to which employee engagement matters?

I would argue YES, employee engagement is more important now. I wonder if employers have considered this change and its implications.

Employers are getting more from employees. Since the 1950 labor productivity (output per employee) has soared globally. US productivity is high but other countries are even higher, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Much of this productivity increase is from employee creativity and good judgments in alignment with organizational strategy. As the BLS summarizes the gain is due to the “joint effects of many influences, including new technology, capital investment, capacity utilization, energy use, and managerial skills, as well as the skills and efforts of the workforce.”

In other words, work is more complex, there are more “knowledge workers,” and people work hard! As our jobs become more complicated, employee autonomy and self-direction becomes more important for organizational success. Engagement is about employees’ connection to the organization and to a degree it controls how he or she will act when not formally and directly supervised.

US employees' work has become more knowledge oriented. Managerial and professional jobs have increased as a share of total employment from 22%in 1979 to 37% in 2010! The rate of increase for professional jobs is even higher, according to the BLS.

The shapes of our organizations have changed too. Many now work in matrix organizations where lines of authority are fuzzy and we have multiple bosses influencing our behavior through feedback and coaching. Spans of control are wider so we receive less supervision. And, knowledge workers receive less direct supervision, perhaps because of their specialization. The sum result is increased employee autonomy.

I am merely summarizing the effect that the transformation to a new economy has had on our jobs and our work environments.

Underlying this transformation is a change in the relationship between employees and employers. In most cases, the relationship has become less formal and more incentivized. Jobs are more specialized and autonomous. Direct supervision has been replaced by informal control systems. In this context, employee engagement has become much more important.

Is your organization relying more on incentives and informal controls systems to manage employees? If so, are you assuming employee engagement to get better results?

Labor Productivity and Engagement

2010-09-26T08:14:00.000-04:00

Economist seem to be mute on the issue of employee engagement-- are any of you our there and willing to comment on the recent WSJ article on labor productivity and unemployment? The premise of the article is that companies cannot grow more though productivity gains-- to grow they will have to hire more: "many companies are reaching the limit of how much they can get their workers to do." An interesting thought; I know I am a dilettante in economics, but I have my doubts.

As I have blogged about before there are limits to how much employees can increase effort-- but those limits seem pretty elastic. Labor productivity is the value of output per hour of work-- the higher the value the more productive the US workforce is. Lots of things add to productivity, including new IT systems, capital investments and of course the the workforce disposition(skill and wills). If you can believe the premise, the employees' will is running out!

I am sure it is true that labor productivity is down. But I worry that corporations will not have the foresight to start hiring. It has been an "employers" market for so long it will be hard to get people to believe there is a still war for talent.

Trends in Leadership, Engagement and Culture

2010-08-02T16:17:00.001-04:00

A couple of articles to think about:

A report on the use of management tools by Bain that is fascinating, though a bit dated. What a great summary of trends in management thinking.

I was struck by their finding that 80% of global executives agree that “culture is as important as strategy for business success.” At first I was surprised—then I thought “I agree, culture is critical to success.” On the other hand, culture is developed and shaped by management and organizational practices. A clear and communicable strategy will do a lot for culture and employee engagement. The survey question is based on a false distinction-- culture and strategy are part of the same organizational environment, in an employees eyes.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal article summarizes that more companies are prioritizing leadership development. As before the recession, companies are concerned that they do not have a deep bench given expected retirements.

Who is Responsible for Engagement: Supervisors or Executives?

2010-07-21T08:54:00.000-04:00

Most of us think about engagement from our perspective—perhaps it is the strength of the concept that everyone can to relate to it personally. But it is worth asking "who is responsible?"

Conventional Wisdom: Widespread Belief in a Statistical Artifact
Authors like Marcus Buckingham put the burden engagement on first-line supervisors. There is some validity to this—supervisors build hour-to-hour work experiences. I suspect that the affect of supervision is especially high in low-autonomy work environments; job characteristics moderate this relationship.

There is also a research artifact that encourages this “supervisors as keepers of engagement” thinking.

Statistically, it is fairly easy to link supervision and engagement. If all the units in a company have the same measure of results you can correlate engagement with business results. VIOLA proof that leadership/supervision affects engagement. Since corporate strategy and context is the same for all business units it cannot be the driver of differences in engagement. Supervision must be causing differences in engagement. Engagement surveys are typically corporate wide, so there are many datasets that use this method to “prove” that supervision/management affect engagement.

Doing research between businesses is difficult because organizations tend to define engagement, and even success, differently. As a practical matter organizational strategy and leadership affect engagement as much as supervision. Corporate strategy, HR/Compensation systems, employee brand and of course core technology and processes all strongly affect engagement.

Disempowered Leadership
But here is the funny part; when I speak with management at any level, I hear complaints that others leaders have more power over engagement. Supervisors think executives have more levers to systemically shape organizational climate. Executives worry about encouraging supervisors to build engagement. Of course it takes a focused and aligned leadership team to build an engaged workforce. Recently, I have contributed a few short articles from the executive perspective, you can read them here, and I will be publishing a few more in the coming months.

Let’s Be Honest
My opening question is a trick/rhetorical, question. Rank-and-file employees build their own and others' engagement. Some are more likely to engage due to personality, upbringing, personal circumstances (e.g., family situation) and other simply choose to engage for personal/spiritual beliefs. Employees’ engagement is also contagious; work-teams affect each other. The mix of employees can make it difficult or easy for a leader at any level.

Do you have a bias in your point of view? We all do because of our position and history/experience. I consult with executives and tend to view things from their perspective. Balance is in order to make sure that we look at multiple levels of the organization and responsibility for engagement.

Global Trends in Engagement: Plot Spoiler?

2010-06-30T09:06:00.001-04:00

Conventional wisdom is sometimes right. The recent discussions in this blog are being validated, according to Mercer’s 2010 Attraction and Retention Survey.

The Financial, which is an English-language Georgian newspaper, has provided a very early summary of the Mercer report. This is an admittedly unusual source. However, since the Mercer report is scheduled for release in September, I read it with interest! Past Mercer surveys have been of large global companies.

The report, which was published on June 29, may be a plot-spoiler for Mercer. Key points:

Fewer companies (3%) are planning broad reductions in force, compared to a year ago when 15% were making such plans
A great majority of companies are concerned about losing valuable talent—especially R&D/scientific engineering and sales, followed by information technology and executives/top management. A pick-up in voluntary turnover is expected by 62% of respondents
Companies are measuring engagement in a variety of ways. Surveys are most common but focus groups, on-line forums and informal conversations are also used
About half of companies (47%) have seen an increase in engagement in the last year. While the summary indicates this is good news—I am more level headed. Strictly speaking, half the companies have seen an increase. I suppose the other half are unchanged or have gone down!

Charley Morrow

The Dark Side of Engagement: Burnout? Turnover? Suicide?

2010-05-18T22:02:00.002-04:00

I suspect that engagement is like many aspects of leadership and relationships, where you need “the right amount” and the “right kind.” We have all met leaders that over use a strength: talkers talk too much, thinkers over intellectualize. How about employees that engage too much?

In this post I will explore the dark side of engagement—the extreme ends of the scale—too much engagement or to little engagement. I know of no measures of these extremes—perhaps this will inspire one.

Too Little (or Too Much) Engagement
Being “burned out,’ defined by a lack of interest and energy for work, is the negative end of engagement. Burn-out provides a useful way of thinking about the negative end of the engagement continuum. Burnout, which is common in helping professions, such as social services and medicine, is a terrible thing to see. Burned-out professionals have given and given until they have no reserves left to give. In the social services I’ve worked with burned out leaders and it is terrible—people who work to give (they certainly aren’t doing it for the wages) can sometimes hit a wall and want to give more but just have no more reserves. Wikipedia’s summary of burnout is especially interesting.

Some think of turnover as the ultimate act of disengagement. This is a myth. Many factors, including pay, opportunities and family situation will keep a disengaged employee going to work. Unfortunately they are not doing much to advance organizational goals. Does your organization know the level of disengagement in the workforce?

Spouses who “give too much,” end up losing their own capabilities. Too much engagement can lead to employee burnout. Since engagement as an active effort to work towards the goals of an organization, extreme engagement can lead to burnout.

Being over engaged in a job can lead to other problems. Have you ever met someone who takes his/her job too seriously? I have. Self-important individuals are irritating, but over engagement can lead to dysfunctional organizational behavior. Consider a sales organization where competition between employees is so intense that useful information is not shared. Does your organization have pockets of over-engagement?

Over engagement, if taken to the extreme, might even lead to violence on the job or suicide. Imbalanced individuals could misappropriate employee engagement and translate it to workplace violence against others or themselves. Talking about suicide and engagement in the same sentence is sort of creepy—but it may be useful.

The Wrong Type of Engagement
The rash of on-the-job suicides in France can help to understand engagement and over engagement. Recently three employees at Euro Disney ended their lives, and in 2008 and 2009 thirty-four France Télécom employees, committed suicide. France’s rate of suicide is pretty high (14.7 suicides per 100,000 in a year compared to the US rate of 11.1).   But, these two French organizations have even higher annual rates of 25 per 100,000 Disney employees (according to my back of the envelope analysis) and 15.3 per 100,000 France Télécom employees ) during the periods discussed.

The suicides have turned into labor relations issues with the unions accusing management of terrible working conditions. Certainly France Telecom has changed drastically since privatizing and the employees who were civil servants may be shocked by the changes, which included cost cutting, reductions in force and job changes. However, it is also certain that an individual has to be pretty engaged in his or her work to committ suicide over work-related issues.

French employees are extremely engaged in work but in a way that seems to be different from Anglo countries. They engage socially and not necessarily in alignment with corporate strategy. While in the United States we think of job engagement about energy and a focus on getting results in alignment with strategy, it is different in France.

France is a much more stable employment environment. Employees statistics from the early 1990s report US manufacturing turnover rates of 40% compared to rates of 14% in France. In such a stable environment individuals are likely to personally identify with their job-- like the US "company man" of the 1950s.

Christian Baudelot, professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris thinks a french person's social identity is largely about their work and their employer. He says: “The truth is that we are very attached to our jobs. More than almost anywhere else, people define themselves by their professions. Ask an English builder to describe himself and he might well say that he is a Liverpudlian or a Geordie or a Manchester United supporter. Here, he will say that he is a builder. In Italy and Spain, people rely on the family for solidarity.... France is different. People are taught to get by in groups and it is in the workplace where they seek the solidarity they need. The workplace is the cement of our society."

Towers Perrin found the French have very low engagement, which they define as people's willingness and ability to give discretionary effort at work.

Source: Towers Perrin & Concours Group-2006

It seems pretty clear that the French employee's engagement in is more about social structures and self-identify and less about working in alignment to achieve corporate strategy.

It is good to have people self-identify with work, but it may be more important to have employee engagement that is in alignment with strategy. It seems clear that we have to be careful how we think about engagement—we have to be “careful what we wish for.”

I wrote this post to keep us thinking and to make sure we are not taking engagement too far. Please let me know your thoughts.

Charley Morrow

Engagement and the Employee Value Proposition

2010-04-27T14:31:00.009-04:00

Speak to many consultants and you may hear the suggestion that engagement is a free resource that you should tap and that you should always engage your work-force more—for better results. I encourage you to question this assumption. I don’t think much in life is completely “free.” There is an element of reciprocity involved in all relationships—even employer-employee relationships. Dilbert offers some wisdom about this.

Different Takes on the Psychological Contract

A psychological contract exists between employers and employees. Historically, the contract was a reciprocity of “lifetime pay and benefits in exchange for loyalty.” This month's HBR has an important article by Tamara Erickson that explains how this contract can be understood by generational differences (e.g., Baby-boomer v. Generation-X). I agree with Tamara.

It is more important, however, that the psychological contract reflects the talent management strategy. This contract is critical to understanding links between employee engagement, talent management, and leadership. In this post, I will describe these links in more depth.

Since the early 1990s, HR pundits have argued about the “new” employer-employee value proposition. The arguments goes something like this: large organizations in a more stable business environment offered continuing employment, pay and retirement in exchange for employees’ on-going loyalty and effort. As the pace of global and organizational change has increased, unfortunately this implicit agreement has been broken. The pundits, however, are still arguing about what will replace the old contract.

The arguments about the psychological contract can be replaced with a question: “what does your organization need from employees to be successful and what does it offer in return?”

Fundamentally, the psychological contract is about the employee value proposition. This value proposition has two points of view: the employers and the employees. Both must be balanced. Employees must feel like they are getting a reasonably equitable deal, or they will disengage or leave. My colleague Amy Bladen wrote about this in the the April edition of Leadership Excellence (read the article here)

The universal employee value proposition is gone. In its place are a number of employee value propositions that vary according to organizational strategy, employee class (some employees are more critical to organizational success) and generation.

Organizations can literally balance and harmonize the employers and employees value proposition—try using two columns and write some words. Be careful, the reciprocal relationship in employee engagement is nuanced! It is important to think about what your organization needs as well as what your employees, or classes of employees, need. When thinking about your employees’ needs, it must be from their point of view.

Reciprocity and trust are critical to building employee engagement. Without trust for their leaders and organizational direction employee have no foundation for inspiration let alone energy for achieving the vision.

From the Employers Point of View

Different organizations need different types of employee engagement and as such the value proposition varies with corporate strategy. To some organizations retaining employees is critical; to others only a few years of intense effort is needed. Yet others need to retain customers and as such employee engagement with the customer is critical. Others rely on employee innovation and skill as the strategy. The list could go on—ask yourself "what does your organization really need from its employees?" In all likelihood you will need different types of engagement from different classes of employees, so you may also ask "are there groups of employees that need to have a special type of engagement?"

Some organizations have a business model based on "employee churn." Life insurance sales organizations have a reputation for paying largely on commission and accepting that a large percentage of employees will leave when they cannot make ends meet. Employee churn is a reasonable business model. Life-insurance sales organizations need producers and they can use churn to find the one out of ten applicants who can actually sell life insurance to strangers (versus selling to family and friends).

Other organizations have an up-or-out value proposition. These organizations often provide great opportunities a highly stimulating environment and these organizations benefit from hiring younger employees with alacrity. If employees run out of engagement in a few years, more can be hired.

Companies pursuing a product innovation strategy often rely upon skilled employees who have a deep understanding of their product--for example consulting, technology and pharmaceutical firms. In these companies the value proposition has to do with retention and reward of the key talent that enables the innovation-- for example expert consultants, critical skill engineers and R&D/Commercialization professionals. Again, employee value proposition should vary with strategy.

Also some employees, within an organization, need to be especially engaged. Consider actuaries in the life insurance industry. Few life insurance companies want actuary turnover—the few individuals can accurately predict mortality to set insurance rates are rare and critical to a business success. While high turnover of sales representatives is acceptable, actuary turnover is not.

Organizations, for cultural reasons, often have a general employee value proposition. Thus, some life insurance companies may overlook low engagement or high turnover. In many pharmaceutical companies, retention-tactics are applied to all employees; these tactics, such as higher pay, lead to higher HR costs.

From the Employees Point of View
Employees view the world through their own eyes. As the Tamara Erickson's article highlights, Gen-X employees believe that their employer seems them as “replaceable,” and this colors their interpretation of corporate life. Baby-boomers are more likely to believe in the old psychological contract and act accordingly.

Employees will engage in any organization, even those with a churn or an up-or-out employee value proposition. However, the value proposition must be transparent to earn engagement.

A leader can build trust if he or she is transparent about the employee value proposition. I consider transparency to be part of being authenticity. A young and ambition prospective employee is likely to join a leader who says “I’m going to give you an opportunity and it will be challenging. You will learn a lot that will be useful in your career. If you are successful you are likely to make some reasonable money.” If, however, the employee value proposition is not made clear some new hires will have other expectations and be disappointed. This is the basis of the realistic job preview.

High potential employees may have another worldview. They may, realistically, see themselves as having more opportunities than typical employees. As such, they may require more opportunities or compensation in return for their engagement and loyalty.

Implications for HR and Leaders
The challenge for organizations is to understand the links between the value propositions and strategy and then to make the contract explicit. This becomes more difficult when you have multiple value propositions in the same organization. This is where front-line leadership comes in; supervisors need to authentically relate to employees and build trust on the basis of reciprocity. Organizations need to ask themselves:

"Are our managerial ranks are up to this task?”
“Does the organization support supervisors to have authentic relationships with employees?”

As ever, I would like to hear your thoughts. Does your organization have an aligned employee value proposition? Does your organization have multiple value propositions for different employee classes, or should it?

Charley Morrow

www.SageAssessments.com

How Surveys and Feedback Improve Organizations, and a Note of Caution

2010-04-13T08:32:00.003-04:00

Motivation to improve is the bedrock of employee engagement efforts. While engagement is intellectually interesting, engagement surveys are conducted to improve organizations. Let's revisit how this happens.

Last week I attended a conference for organizational psychologists and spent a lot of time on employee engagement. One presenter, Scott Brooks, provided a great model of “what employee surveys provide.” His work elaborates the above diagram . Dr. Brooks has clearly worked with, and thought about, organizational surveys a lot.

According to Scott’s model, Surveys help by providing
1.    Motivation to inspire/drive change
2.    Guidance by focusing action on what to change
3.    Enablement to help change
4.    Tracking to provide a measure of change

This model a clarifies why feedback works to improve engagement. Further, by targeting and amplifying these four areas, we can get better results from engagement surveys. When planning engagement feedback consider all four areas. The model also helps plan how leadership, HR, supervisors and others key roles can support improvement from the survey. For example, leadership can drive organizational change by interpreting implications of the survey results (Motivation), directing appropriate actions (guidance), supporting others to take action (enablement) and setting goals for improvement (tracking).

Use correctly, the model can organize the management team to work harmoniously for organizational improvement.

A Note of Caution
Many stakeholders want organizational change—it is not just management that hopes for change. The traditional advice is "do not complete a survey unless you plan to do something about the results." When employees complete a survey, their expectations are raised. Raising expectations and doing nothing only decreases engagement. Decreased morale can be an unintended consequence of surveying!

The model also highlights how employees view survey results. Many want to be in a different work environment and the survey results can provide motivation, guidance and enablement on how it should be better! But employees understanding of survey results can can hurt and help management. Survey results can provide negative and outspoken employee more to complain about. These employees may use the results to support their own negative agenda with work teams and peers. Results can help management focus employees on the positive aspects of improving the organization for all stake holders—employees, customers, and shareholders. It is better to proactively frame the issues and the forward-looking agenda.

When providing results to employees, it is important to communicate the four factors. It is especially important to state how the results will drive change (motivation), what will change (guidance), request employees help with the change (enablement) and to note how the changes will be measured (tracking). This will allow management to stay in control of the messages and conversations about the survey.

Measuring Employee Engagement

2010-04-06T21:31:00.004-04:00

As employers realize that they have “engagement issues,” many are trying to quickly assess the state of their workforce. Many will buy a “ready to go” survey that includes an engagement index. This is fine, but there are lots of options. I will write about a few.

What sort of engagement is important for your organization?
There are many types of engagement. Consider, does your organization need better engagement with safety, with customers or with the mission of the organization? I have an engineer friend who tells me he always is engaged. He loves his profession designing manufacturing controllers, but he has very stormy relationships with employers. As a result, this skilled and valuable engineer is constantly changing jobs. If this personable guy had closer relationships with his boss and co-workers he might stick around. A focus on retention is missing in his employers. Be clear on what is strategically important to your organization.

Your organization may be more interested in engaging certain types of employees—high potentials, hard-to-staff skill groups, or generational groups (e.g., Boomers, Millennials). Knowing what is strategically important to your organization is critical to measuring engagement.

Surveys
Most organizations will choose a survey to understand workforce engagement. At first blush, this is an easy choice. Surveys results are easy to stratify by demographic category (such as age, education-level, or department). These stratifications allow fine grained review and comparison of different groups. This helps to target intervention and to provide useful feedback to managers.

Surveys, however, do require expertise to write, implement and interpret. The difficulty in developing surveys goes beyond the technical aspects of writing and implementing surveys. Surveys are difficult to write because they require the developer to understand the dimensions of workforce sentiment that are important to employees and the strategy well enough to ask intelligent questions.

“Census” surveys, which invite the entire population of employees to take part, are most common. In addition to the time it takes to have all employees take part in the survey, asking about engagement can raise employee expectations that “something is wrong,” or “something is going to change” around here. It is critical to act upon survey results; raised expectations can actually reduce engagement!

Standardized surveys, such as Gallup’s Q12, the Great Places To Work Institute’s Survey and Sage Assessment’s REALI-Index are easy solutions in that they are research based and have evolved through use in multiple organizations. They often include norms that allow you to compare your organization to others. Ultimately, comparisons within your company are more useful, but people are often curious about “how do we compare?”

Successful organizations have a unique strategy, which suggests a need to develop your own survey. Yet, this is time consuming and requires experience and skill in developing surveys. Perhaps the best balancing act is to use a standard survey and add a handful of custom questions to ensure that your specific culture and strategy are included in the survey.

Focus groups
Compared to surveys, focus groups are blunt instruments. But, not all projects call for razor sharp precision—sometimes a more general tool is needed. Stratification and contrasts are not really possible with focus groups, rather you learn about general sentiments. While surveys do extremely well at slicing data, focus groups allow a nuanced understanding of the issues that matter to employees. Focus groups can be easy to conduct-- and can give you a quick directional sense of engagement.

Surveys are primarily static questions to which employees respond. Focus groups are more generative— groups of employees can frame the issues that matter to them.

Years ago I ran focus groups at a large organization with very high engagement. Most employees in this pharmaceutical company truly believed they were working in alignment with the words of one of the founders: “… medicine is for the patient. It is not for the profits...” While consulting, I was genuinely impressed by the engagement in the organization. It was a joy to be in this organization—employees were excited about their work and excited about their organization.

In the midst of the scheduled focus groups, however, a key product was pulled from the market. The media suggested the organization knowingly endangered patient safety by recklessly selling the product despite knowledge of deadly side-effects. The impact was immediately obvious in the focus groups. Focus groups were markedly different before and after the recall. Individuals whose self concept was built on working for an ethical company were wracked with doubt. Suddenly, employees in focus groups started doubting the company, distrusting management and disengaging. Concerns about management were voiced. The abrupt changes provided insights into how to proceed with a culture change initiative. I learned that informal focus groups tell you lots about engagement and they provide you with insights that you would never learn from a survey.

You can run a focus group of the key talent group to understand the engagement of small fractions of employees. This will provide you with insights into specific strata without a survey.

Remember Engagement, Not Measurement, Matters
Regardless of how you do it, I encourage you to understand engagement in your organization. I’m a measurement guy but I have to say the goal is not measurement. The goal is to understand and improve engagement. It is a mistake to focus too much on measurement perfection—what matters is engagement.

I’d like to hear about how you are measuring engagement. Please comment!

Charley Morrow
www.sageassessments.com

How to improve engagement and disengagement: Why feedback is the first step

2010-03-29T14:07:00.004-04:00

The link to leadership.

Talk to anyone about being disengaged in the workplace and they will probably say something about “trust” and something about “management.” Surveys show the same results, supervisor’s leadership style has so much to do with employee engagement and the differences between work groups can be astounding.

But what to do about it?

Feedback is the link to developing leadership for employee engagement. Most of us do not know, in a nuanced way, how we affect others. Leaders are no different. Feedback can help. The best feedback is measurement as well as understanding and learning from the results of the measurement.

Measuring employee engagement, for example with surveys or focus groups, is a great foundation for improving engagement. It can motivate and direct change.

It is important to make sure that organizational leadership understands engagement, the factors affecting engagement and the engagement of the functions they manage. When you measure engagement the results will tell you something about “trust” and the quality of “management." If leaders understand the engagement picture they are likely to try to change it for their own good!

Simply giving supervisors a report on engagement in their area is not enough. Feedback can be hard to take and even harder to act upon. Organizations that really want to improve engagement will ensure that managers have support, in workshops or with coaches, to understand and plan how they will act upon the feedback.

Many organizations (namely Dell and Ford) tie manager compensation to survey results. This puts a lot of focus on engagement, but it is not necessary for leadership development. My experience is that most managers want to be better leaders.

Organizations that complete engagement surveys must answer the questions “what groups will be reported upon” and “how many reports do we develop?” A lot of resources (time and money) are required to process feedback. If you have 300 department managers, does each get a report? Further, will all 300 managers get, understand and act upon the feedback? These questions must be practically considered.

Let’s be realistic

Anyone that manages knows that regardless of your leadership skills, other factors affect employees. Pay/benefits, strategy, competition, and organizational culture all affect individual employees and morale/engagement.

While leadership probably has the biggest impact on day-to-day engagement, there are many factors in building engagement. Successful organizations will consider both; why they need engagement and what to do about it.

I look forward to your thoughts,

Charley Morrow

www.sageassessments.com

Is Engagement A Buzzword?

2010-03-23T09:49:00.000-04:00

In my last blog I focused on the negative side: disengagement—people quitting and feeling stuck. I’ll talk about the positive side in this blog—engagement. If you can envision a miserable and disengaged employee, I hope you can envision an activated and positive employee.

Is Engagement A Buzzword?
Engagement is a big concern to HR executives—it might even be a “buzz-word.” People are writing about, and Google-searching, employee engagement more than satisfaction these days.

Google Trends: Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement

Are we thinking clearly? What is employee satisfaction and does it matter? Is engagement different? Despite being a humanist, I do not care about employee satisfaction. Many point out that employee satisfaction has NOT been proven to be related to company performance. But there are other problems with satisfaction.

It is hard to understand satisfaction because it is multiple things. To reliability measure satisfaction, you have to specify the facets of employee satisfaction. Satisfaction with pay, supervision, working conditions or senior management all are different.

Further, personality predicts job satisfaction;in fact, twin studies have established a genetic element of job satisfaction. (see meta-analysis here.) Said another way, satisfaction is a trait! So why worry about changing the work environment to have satisfied employees? If you want a satisfied workplace just hire satisfied people… or, well, maybe not.

I’d argue that dissatisfied people get more done! Most sales managers I know are looking for sales reps that are “hungry,” not those who are content and satisfied in life. Looking at history, dissatisfied people have made the greatest human innovations.

I wonder the importance of employee satisfaction. I applaud the move to engagement.

In the late 1990s, publications started to highlight that employees’ sentiment does matter. Tony Ricci’s HBR article on the Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears highlighted the importance of customer and employee engagement and Marcus Buckingham’s First Break All the Rules showed how employee engagement predicts company profitability. His index of engagement is called the G12 based on 12 questions.

Gallup's G-12 An Index of Employee Engagement

Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

If an organization has a big database of employee survey data and many identical operating units– like retail stores or chain restaurants-- research can demonstrate how employee sentiment is related to unit-level business results. The research validates that employee sentiments are related to metrics of interest, within a business.

This research is called linkage research, and is practical due to increased computing power and databases. The sentiments that relate to business results are called “engagement.”

There is a new idea here: employee engagement is active and related to passion and enthusiasm. While satisfaction suggests being satiated or fulfilled, engagement is dynamic. For example, I am satisfied with my clothing, while someone else might be much more engaged in the pursuit of fashion. (Those that know me well tell me I could never be in the fashion industry!)

Engagement is sensibly related to business results. An engaged employee might be in pursuit of organizational strategic success, professional excellence or any number of things. Leaders have intuitively known this for years; now HR is starting to understand, measure and worry about engagement.

What is Employee Engagement? / Defining Employee Engagement?

Engagement is about a personal relationship—relationship to work, organizations, and supervisors. In this sense it is a buzzword—there is no consensus on what it means. Like satisfaction, we think about a global idea yet there are different facets. Consider: engaged in work, engaged in organization, socially engaged. Buzzwords are not bad, but we should understand what they mean for us and our organizations.

Here are two of the best definitions I’ve seen:

Engagement is an individual's sense of purpose and focused energy, evident to others in the display of personal initiative, adaptability, effort and persistence directed to organizational goals. (see Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice and Competitive Advantage by Macey et al.[2009])
The degree to which a person commits to an organization and the impact that commitment has on how profoundly they perform and their length of tenure (see Employee Engagement: A Road map for Creating Profits, Optimizing performance and Increasing Loyalty by Federman[2009])

Let’s be honest though, people are different and engage in different ways—some individuals work for social aspects, some for financial reasons, and some for yet other reasons. A great review of the meaning of employee engagement (See Macey & Schneider's Paper ) notes that engagement is variously defined as

Psychological a state
A trait
The factors that lead to engagement.

We get even more confused when we try to measure engagement. Whether deliberate or not surveys and indexes always have some underlying theory of engagement. Some consultants have developed engagement surveys using empirical methods—survey questions that relate to business results are combined in an “engagement” index. It seems like one widely used index is a mix of social engagement and drivers of engagement.

I fear some indexes have caused more confusion and mystification than progress. If you are a team leader with poor engagement, as defined by an index, you have to understand and define engagement for your team. Let's not make it hard on our clients!

Further, organizations need to engage people in different ways—what sort of engagement does your organization need? These questions will have to be answered by practical individuals that understand our organizations' strategy. Organization’s strategy and the role of employees in organizational success is the best starting place for defining engagement.

Finally, we must understand the drivers of employee engagement as well as we understand the state of employee engagement. Without a sense of the drivers of engagement (e.g., supervision, connection to organizational strategy), how will we engage employees?

I have summarized research and past work to develop a model of the drivers and state of employee engagement.

The REALI Model of Employee Engagement

(See more here)

If you have a work-group that would like to pilot this assessment for free let me know. While I have used every question in the survey previously, I am looking for some small samples to test the psychometric properties of the scales.

Please let me know what you have seen and learned. I look forward to hearing from you.

Charley Morrow
www.SageAssessments.com

Engagement and the Workforce

2010-03-15T15:41:00.016-04:00

From reading the news and blogs one has to ask—"is there really a crisis of disengagement in the workforce?" Many are concerned about this. As most readers will know, employee engagement is related to customer satisfaction, company productivity, and retaining good employees. So, it is a problem if engagement is down in a company.

And, it seems like we are getting close to disengagement of crisis proportions. This is an acute concern to HR professionals. Let's look at the data in terms of employees leaving –quitting as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calls it and in terms of engagement and satisfaction with jobs.

Engagement and Moving Jobs

Anecdotally I've heard many say – "I'd leave now if I had an option." Well, it turns out that the "quit rate" of last year was extraordinarily low. I did a little poking around at the (BLS)—last year voluntary quits (excluding retirements) is was at the lowest level since they began keeping records in 2001. Typically some 24% of American "quit" in a year. The chart below outlines the percentage of employed Americans who quit in a year—it looks like people do NOT have options—they are not leaving voluntarily right now!

Total US Total (nonfarm) Rate of Quitting

But, job security is not gone. I was surprised at a Gallup poll from August 2009 that found American workers are not as concerned with job security compared 2003. In 2009, 50% were completely satisfied with their job security. It is as if many employed workers are not threatened that they will be forced out; employed Americans do not seem terrified of being laid off.

Gallup Poll of Satisfaction with Job Security

The parallel nature of the Gallup and BLS trend lines is interesting—job security and quitting seem related. People are more apt to quit in times of higher job security.

We are slowly getting out of this recession. I wonder if increasing job security will lead to future quitting? No one knows the future, but it sure seems as if there might be a spike in quitting later this year or the next. Of course, every company is different.

Given that many feel they "can't move" jobs right now, you might think that psychological job engagement would be down. Simply put, stuck people disengage. Everything I see is pointing to this trend—anecdotes and many converging surveys. To understand, I looked at some current surveys on engagement.

National Engagement Surveys Converge: Employee Engagement and Satisfaction is Down

A senior HR official at a fortune 100 technology company told me that when the recession first started measures of employee engagement went up—as if employees were happy to have a job. As the recession has worn on, however, engagement in her firm has dropped. It was as if the work load and stress has worn the spirits of employees down. National polls seem to echo this concern.

In a rare convergence of national polls, all data suggests engagement is down. Individuals have told me about divergent data, but I can't find it. As far as I can tell all sources say the same:

Right Management Consultants found that sixty percent of employees intend to leave and an additional one-in-four are networking and updating their resumes. They predict that turn-over will skyrocket this year. Here is the survey question/distribution of the survey of approximately 900 workers in North America:

Do you plan to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010?
60% - Yes, I intend to leave
21% - Maybe, so I'm networking
6% - Not likely, but I've updated my resume
13% - No, I intend to stay

http://www.right.com/news-and-events/press-releases/item1954.aspx

Gallup found employee engagement plummeted in 2009, much of this driven by job satisfaction. The Gallup organization's Work Environment Index includes four items: job satisfaction, ability to use one's strengths at work, trust and openness in the workplace, and whether one's supervisor treats him or her more like a boss or a partner. Gallup only asks these item questions of respondents who are currently employed by others. American workers' decreased job satisfaction (from an average 89.0% in 2008 to 88.0% in 2009) contributed most significantly to the decline in the Work Environment Index overall.

The Work Environment Index saw the largest year-over-year drop, declining to 49.2 in 2009 from 51.4 in 2008, a loss of 2.2 points overall.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125060/Americans-Lose-Ground-Areas-2009.aspxc

The Conference board, based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households reports that only 45 percent of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted.

http://www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressDetail.cfm?press_ID=3820

Untangling Engagement

In the technology company I mentioned above, management is aggressively addressing engagement by sharpening strategy and making sure that every employee understands how they contribute to the company's success.

I've heard from other consultants and clients fearing engagement and what it means for retaining top talent. This is the time to think about it—before resumes get out there and top talent are offered good deals.

What is engagement anyway? What can improve engagement? Is it just related to business cycles? What kind of engagement matters for different organizations? There are so many related questions. Please comment on this post and I will be back next week with more research, viewpoints and models as I attempt to answer these questions.

From Jackson NH
Charley Morrow
www.sageassessments.com

Who Am I, and What am I Doing?

2010-03-13T14:18:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my work life assessing performance, leadership and engagement -- I'll share my thoughts on this blog.

In the last few months many individuals have contacted me about engagement. Many have talked about plunging employee engagement based on anecdotes and data. I'm becoming very interested in this area and will be consulting, reading and researching it over the next months.

I will commit to blogging on this every week for the next ten weeks. I will bring research, viewpoints and models as I investigate and try to understand the future. Maybe we can sort it out—please comment to this and future blogs.

Charley C. Morrow
www.SageAssessments.com
781 639 9696