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1. We aren't actually trying to inspire employees in our day-to-day work even though we say we do.
2. We don't really know what employees value or how they truly want to work yet we make investments and changes as if we are in touch with them.
3. We force employees through systems, processes, and exercises that were invented in the mid-to-late 20th century.
But after a couple of these I was beginning to worry whether these case study sessions were going to live up to the challenge that E4S provides and David Guest described earlier - if there’s been such as huge management cock-up as there certainly has, we don’t get out of it by a slight shift in management as usual.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry as there were a couple of impressive case studies:
Firstly, BT, which has an interesting approach which was presented well by their head of engagement, Sharon Darwent.
But I still think their approach fits too much within existing management paradigms. Eg Sharon was talking about how data obsessed their people are and therefore emphasised the need for her to provide data. So she took us through more of the data from the ‘Nailing the Evidence’ report and some of the key data points from within BT too. Both of these are powerful. In BT in particular Sharon is able to show that the company’s 34% disengagement costs them £2 bn in salaries. This really got the accountants’ attention.
Yes, but does approaching engagement from an accountant’s perspective ever work? Or do we need to change the way many accountants think? (see for example this post on Mohan Pai’s move from Finance to HR.) I think it’s this accountancy mentality that often gets in the way of engagement and that providing data can sometimes add to the problem rather than provide the answer. An example is BT’s policy of giving feedback on their team’s engagement levels to every manager of more than 50 people. That certainly shows how important the company believes engagement to be, but I believe it can also put more focus on the transactional vs transformational approach to engagement.
I was also bemused that the presentation didn’t include anything about BT’s journey to organisational health which to me provides the most important context for engagement within that company currently.
Having said all this, it’s an impressive case study, and does show some signs of moving to a more human approach as well – eg in that half of BT’s engagement survey questions are now qualitative so that they don’t lead peoples’ responses.
However, I thought a rather better demonstration of the transformational opportunity for engagement was provided by Karen Bowes at Capital One. That’s partly just because of the improvement in engagement levels they’ve see there – see the graph at the top of this post. (And OK, I realise it must have been relatively easy to improvement engagement from their previous level of 26% particularly as these were exceptionally low as they followed a downsizing of the organisation from 2,500 to 1,000 employees following the failure of their earlier business strategy. But building this up to 83% is highly impressive regardless of the low start.)
But I also thought Capital One’s approach demonstrated what I was suggesting is important before - ie a sound logical framework, executed with emotional understanding.
The thing which was most important for Capital One was what E4S define as a strategic narrative (one of the four enablers). This is articulated in the company’s new vision, ‘Let’s Make Lives Better’ which come from the heart of their CEO. For employees, the company has committed to ‘dare to be the best’. Making this real has involved admitting they’ve had a problem in the past (a bit like being an alcoholic) which has included assuming that call centre staff, particularly in an outsourced environment, don’t care - they now realise they got that wrong.
The second priority has been engaging leaders and managers first (E4S’ second enabler) and the third has been sorting the basics eg IT and free milk???
Capital One have got data too, but it’s the qualitative kind that Karen spent most time on - the fact that they’re now the UK’s second highest Great Place to Work - and this quote:
“Capital One is part of my life, not just a pace I work. I love it and it’s made me a better person.”
OK, we can’t expect everyone to engage like this but we’d all benefit if we recruit people who can, and then provide the environment in which they can do so.
The first input has been from David Guest at King’s. I try not to post on the same academic more than once (though I do seem to mention a select few including Dave Ulrich, Peter Cappelli and John Boudreau much more frequently) but I do like David Guest’s work so am going to post on his inputs again.
David’s perspective on engagement is that this is generally the same as his wider focus on high commitment HRM (you can see another one of the slides he showed today at the bottom of my previous post on his insights.) I’m not sure this worked for everyone here – eg there’s been a bit of tweeting about a lack of humanity in his approach, linked to one of the key E4S beliefs that we’re all people, not a human resource’.
I’m a big believer in the need for a logical framework to underpin the way that we manage our people, so I tend to respond more positively to David’s approach (thought I’d reafirim that this then needs executing in an emotionally rich way.)
I also like David’s key premise that there’s no reason why employees should want to be engaged. In particular some people only work for instrumental reasons – they get their engagement elsewhere. We therefore have to earn an engaged response. Lack of engagement is therefore an enormous management failure (see my post on ‘Engagement or Entwistle’ - I wonder if a high proportion of fat cat CEOs are part of David’s instrumentalists group, which might be one reason for the failure?)
David suggested these 12 actions we can take to earn engagement (so a G12 vs Gallup’s Q12):
That strikes me as a fairly sound list.
Probably the one thing I’d add to it, which I think it particularly important for engagement, rather than just generic HRM, is a sense of purpose – the answer to the question ‘engagement to what?’.
Anything you’d add to it?
We’ve got a presentation from Harry Donaldson from the GMB talking about ‘what’s in it for the workers’ so I may come back to this topic again later on.
So far I've suggested engagement can't be about measurement or just about business benefits but has to start to put our relationships with employees first. So we shouldn't see employees as being like virus prone computers but ourselves - business and HR leaders - as the source of most of their - and therefore our - problems.
Because we continue to - and seem to do even more and more - dumb things.
And it's our actions as leaders that lead either directly, or indirectly as a consequence of the actions we take and the culture this creates to these dumb things.
So one of the points I did really like in 'Nailing the Evidence' was the suggestion right at the back of the report that corporate reputation also acts as an enabler for higher engagement.
I don't know if engagement at RBS can get much lower than I presume it has been over the last couple of years but Barclays as well as presumably HSBC and other banks fined for manipulating the LIBOR rate are clearly going to find their engagement scores hit.
If Centrica and the other energy firms are found to have rigged gas prices, they're hopefully going to be in similar trouble with Ofgem, the government and the firms' customers. But the companies shouldn't be surprised when their employee surveys suggest engagement plummeting either.
EBay, Facebook and Starbucks are already being hit by customer protests at their 'immoral if not illegal' tax avoidance strategies – in the Public Accounts Committee’s spotlight this week (I think it's harder to take action against Apple and Google) and I'm sure we'll see this filter into their employee engagement scores as well.
And closer to home, when Chris Patten and George 'loadsamoney' Enwistle play poker with viewers' licence fees it just makes it that bit less likely that BBC staff are going to try harder to make good programmes, when the evidence suggests that instead they could just sit back and wait for a good pay off when something goes wrong.
How Entwistle thinks he is doing the 'honourable thing' by stitching up the licence fee payer by taking half a million pounds for a few weeks work is beyond me.
But why on earth does Patten think he can throw another quarter of a million after the first 'contractual' £250k just because he can't be bothered to sack the guy for poor performance (did he not listen to the John Humphreys interview?).
And how did BBC HR agree to a £250k exit bonus for its new DG (CEO), irrespective of performance or length of service, anyway? I'd suggest this is inappropriate even in an investment bank. But it has no place at all in a publicly funded broadcaster and national institution like the BBC. Any candidate (particularly an internal one) requiring such a clause should in my mind have been immediately disqualified from the recruitment process. I'd have even had it as a selection test - anyone who puts their lawyer in touch with me is clearly not the person I need to do the job.
Oh, and by the way, suggesting your staff not comment (e.g. tweet) on your public problems or disagrements may help cover up these issues short-term, but it's just going to send discontent underground. Much better to have an open conversation - and regardless of my earlier comments on the report, I'm really pleased to see that Engage for Success understands the importance of this (see the other comments on my earlier post).
Also, just to note, I don’t really mean to single out those companies and people I’ve listed above – they’re just the organisations in the media’s headlights this week (though Entwistle did do an amazing impression of a rabbit in the headlights in his John Humphreys interview).
Also Barclays and the BBC are two of the organisations on the Engage for Success taskforce – doing a great job to promote the need for engagement – even if they perhaps haven’t yet quite got their own houses in order!
But next week it’ll be a different group of miscreants. That’s just the point – poor corporate behaviour seems to be pretty endemic these days. And we need to look within ourselves and examine this problem at least as much as why so many of our employees aren’t as passionate as we think they should be.
Also see:
Technorati Tags: George Entwistle, BBC, executive compensation, reward, reputation, employee engagement
It’s not that I’m not pleased to see it produced – I am. And it’s not that I don’t think it’ll be useful – I do (I’ll certainly keep it close at hand when I’m presenting on engagement as it’s got pretty much all – and quite possibly absolutely all - of the research I might want to refer to there in one place).
It’s just that I don’t think it’ll do that much to boost engagement. For me, doing this has to be about engagement. I mean we need to engage people (CEOs, some HR people, a lot of line managers) about why they need to engage their people.
To me, the report is just too dry to do that – starting with what must be pretty much the least inspirational report cover in history and followed up by stat after stat after stat.
So I will say that the report does what it says on the tin - or the cover - very well. It nails the evidence. Engagement works – that’s totally clear now if it wasn’t so before.
But to me, the approach a bit like thinking that if one soldier firing a gun at your head maybe isn’t going to kill you, then it’ll be better to have a firing squad of 100 soldiers – then you’ll really be dead. But are you really going to be any more dead than you would after the one single shot?
So I’m certainly not going to sit here and attempt to summarise or even provide some nuggets from the report – a blog post isn’t the place to do this.
Of course, I might be wrong (it does happen!). I’m already convinced about engagement (my issues about the concept are pretty minor and I truly do support the movement, if less so the report). But if I wasn’t already convinced, perhaps this would do it for me.
And perhaps not. But that’s largely just down to the fact that I’m not that into measurement (and therefore evidence) in the HR / people management space (unless the measures tell a story and if you want to tell a story, do you really need measurement to do it?). However a lot of people - possibly even more people in HR than in other areas of the business? - suggest they are all about measures.
So perhaps others – and perhaps you? - will find the conclusions have more of an impact than they do for me…
Do let me know if so!
To be continued…
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