10 Employee Engagement Steps To Drive Results

10 Employee Engagement Steps To Drive Results 10 Employee Engagement Steps To Drive Results 10 Employee Engagement Steps To Drive Results Louder Than Words: 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps that Drive Results PDF Note: Youll need Adobe Reader to view the PDF file above. Download Adobe Reader. Wednesday, August 28, 2013 Thought leader Bob Kelleher shares ten practical and transformative steps to maximize employee engagement at your organization. In his bestselling book, Louder Than Words: 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps to Drive Results, thought leader Bob Kelleher shares ten practical and transformative steps to maximize employee engagement at your organization. Distilling proven employee engagement principles, Mr. Kelleher illustrates the connection between employee engagement and increased discretionary effort. While highlighting win-win engagement solutions, the author makes a compelling case for creating and maintaining a corporate culture that attracts and retains the most productive and creative people. Throughout the book, specific best-in-class employee engagement and leadership examples are shared, including those from CISCO, The Timberland Company, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, ENSR, and AECOM. Readers will discover practical tools and examples to help them engage their workforce. The book has become a must read for anyone who manages people. Employee Engagement Drives Success 2012 engagement levels represented the largest decline in 15 years and actively disengaged employees annually cost the US economy $370 billion Employee Engagement is still the most crucial factor when determining organizational success. 90% of leaders recognize this fact by acknowledging that engagement practices directly impact the success of their business, yet over 75% also admit they have no engagement plan or strategy in place. Companies with high levels of Employee Engagement benefited from 19% increased operating income while companies with low levels of engagement declined by 33% Click here for our latest video! Presented by: Bob Kelleher Author and Speaker, Founder of The Employee Engagement Group Bob Kelleher is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Creativeship: A Novel for Evolving Leaders Louder Than Words 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps That Drive Results The latter achieved Amazon rankings of #3 workplace book, #5 HR book and #12 management book. Mr. Kelleher, a speaker and consultant on the subjects of employee engagement, workforce trends, and leadership, is also the founder of The Employee Engagement Group. Before opening his consulting business, Mr. Kelleher spearheaded award-winning employee engagement programs and initiatives at AECOM, a Fortune 500 global professional services firm and ENSR. His experience as a top executive at the above organizations has provided him with a unique perspective on employee engagement in todays workplace. Webinar Transcript: Louder than Words: 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps that Drive Results (28 Aug 13) Good afternoon! Im Jim Thompson, Senior Writer with Monster. I would like to thank you for joining us today for this exclusive webinar hosted by Intelligence. Todays webinar is entitled Louder Than Words: Ten Practical Employee Engagement Steps that Drive Results. Thought leader, Bob Kelleher from the Employment Engagement Group, is presenting this afternoon. In this webinar, Bob will share 10 practical and transformative steps to maximize employee engagement at your organization. Before we get started, I would like to mention a few housekeeping items. Todays presentation and the copy of the recording will be posted on hiring.monster.com within the next two to three business days. Please click on the resources tab and navigate to HR Events to obtain your copy. All registered participants will also receive an email with a direct link to todays materials. intelligence helps HR professionals improve worker performance, retain top talent and enhance recruiting strategies. We analyze and collect data from over four million unique job searches performed on each day. We invite you to visit hiring.monster.com to read our in-depth reports and analysis. For our latest materials click on the resources center tab when you visit the website. After the presentation, therell be time for questions. Our meeting manager will help facilitate the QA. Please feel free to type your questions into the available space during the event and we will make every effort to include them in todays session. And if youre listening to todays presentation via telephone, youll be placed on mute until the QA session begins. I would like to provide some background on todays speaker. Bob Kelleher is the author of Louder than Words: 10 Practical Employee Engagements Steps that Drive Results, as well as Creativeship: A Novel for Evolving Leaders. Bob speaks around the world sharing his insights and recommendations on workforce trends, and leadership and employee engagement. Bob is the founder and president of the Employee Engagement Group. Prior to opening the Engagement Group, Bob was the Chief Human Capital Officer for ACOM, a 45,000 employee firm headquartered in California. And now Ill turn the webinar over to Bob Kelleher. Please go ahead, Bob. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Monster. Its always great to partner with you folks, thank you so much. And thank you to the over 800 folks who signed up for todays webinar. Well try to make it lively and hopefully entertaining for you. So lets step right in. Are we feeling engaged these days? And let me explain what I mean. The recent Gallup survey of 150,000 U.S. employees just came out over the past couple of months, and I was struck at the findings. To kind of set the stage, Im going to share a metaphor with you. Imagine if you are on a crew team, and you are in front, pedaling like crazy. You turn around, and you notice two of your crew mates are also pedaling like crazy, and you conclude that while there are 10 of us, only three seem to be giving it their all. Then you casually look behind, and you see that five of your colleagues are looking at the scenery, and looking at life pass them by. But worse, you notice two of them are actually trying to sink your crew boat. They are adding water to the back. And you sit there and say, Boy, can we possibly win with that as our crew team? or according to Gallup, with that as your workforce? Because based on their report, 30 percent of the workforce is classified as engaged. That makes 5, or 52 percent, out of 10 are disengaged. And sadly, 18 percent are actively disengaged. Whats interesting about this statistic is of those who are actively disengaged, over 50 percent of them have no plans to leave. I think thats more astonishing than anything else. So half of you are actively disengaged meaning half of your employees who are trying to sink your boat arent even looking for a job. My question to leadership is, Why do you let them stay? Now that metaphor is really at the heart of a new video that we just launched a couple of days ago called, Whos sinking your boat? It has a lot of the latest engagement statistics that I will be sharing during this talk. So I invite you to visit employengagement.com to look at that video. It is a terrific four-minute call to action. In fact, we have had a couple of thousand views just on the first day that we released it. If you need help in getting your leadership team on board, we think this is a terrific, easy, metaphorically rich, plus wildly entertaining video to get their attention. Lets focus today on what I think you need to do if you are trying to build a culture of employee engagement. Let me set the stage in one hour or less when we begin QA; this is not going to be a deep dive in any of these contents. In fact, I do key note presentations all across the world on these 10 steps. We also have our signature 10 Steps of Engagement Workshop which is a deep dive, where we go in to a full day sharing practical tools, best practices and approaches to help leadership teams. But I think well give you enough even on this webinar to get you going. So were going to first start with step one, Link to High Performance, and if there were any of you on todays webinar who work in the human resource function, OD training, corporate communications or marketing, often the leaders will look at engagement as a warm, fuzzy, touchy, feely type of thing, which is why I think its so important to kick off your engagement efforts with the business case. Why are we looking to engage our work force? And Im going to start off by defining engagement. I will start by, first of all, saying what it isnt. Engagement is not satisfaction. Its not about how do I make my employees happy or how do I have a satisfied working population. Because I think the last thing you want is a satisfied but under-performing employee. The last thing you want is a group of employees who are satisfied working collectively towards a business or within a business model that isnt sustainable. Perhaps the company is not viable, so you have a lot of satisfied employees working towards bankruptcy. Neither one of those models is particularly a satisfying or a sustainable model. See, when I think of satisfaction as a goal, I see satisfaction as something that means your employees are there to get benefits. Theyre there to get paid. Theyre there to get the beer cut on Friday afternoons. They are there for the Ping-Pong table. Theyre there because they cant find another job. When I define engagement, its all about engaging your own employees to give how are they helping the company be successful? I understand that theres a quid pro quo, theyre getting something, but what really drives them is, How can I give, what are my contributions doing to help the company be successful? Another way of looking at the difference between satisfaction and engagement satisfaction is doing ones job. Engagement is doing above and beyond. Im doing my job, but Im giving it my all. Satisfaction is about getting the best of everything, every benefit. Think Detroit in 2008-2009, we had the collapse of Detroit, but yet we had some unions within GM and Chrysler and Detroit Ford fighting for more and more benefits while the companies are fighting for their lives. You cant provide the best of every amenity if the business isnt doing well. I believe employees should get the best based on performance. How well the companys doing, and how well the individual is doing. Satisfaction is about making, or avoiding making the tough decisions, where engagement is about making the right decision. And often that right decision involves the help of both the business, as well as the employee population. Satisfaction is about, how can I be successful? Again, this mutual commitment is the aim. Engagement is about making me successful and the company succeeding as well. Satisfaction is about pleasing people all of the time, engagement is about pleasing your performers. My definition of engagement is very much driven towards higher performance. Satisfa ction is a moment in time, engagement is, How do I build my business so that its sustainable? How do I build my career so that it is sustainable? Satisfaction is personal commitment and engagement is about mutual commitment between the employer and the employee, or the boss and the employee. We will talk in a moment about the importance of that first line manager the role of the boss. Satisfaction is about happiness as engagement is about succeeding in my career. Now in the spirit of full disclosure, if you have happy employees if you have satisfied employees thats okay, but I dont think it should be a goal. It should be the outcome. Engagement should be your goal. Now Ive seen hundreds of definitions of engagement. I will try to share the one that I think most resonates with clients and audiences when I speak. Engagement is unlocking the potential of your employees to drive high business performance. Another way of looking at it is this mutual commitment where we, as the company, will do everything we can to have our employees maximize their potential. But theres such an important quid pro quo. Your employees have to understand that they have to do everything they can to help the company succeed as well. Engagement is also about capturing your own employees heads, the intellectual aspects of your employees as well as their hearts; the emotional connection that your employees have with the employer. Let me explain the reason why Im so passionate on this project. I spent 20 years working for companies as chief HR officer, even spent a year as chief operations officer, and I saw experience first-hand. I was the living case study that if you can e ngage your employees collectively, the collective gains that come with your employees giving above and beyond compared to your competitors employees, is magic. And Ive often equated discretionary efforts as being Disney like. Its the magic dust that can separate you from your competitors. Now, lets make the business case. Most of you, probably report to highly left brain, analytical folks, and they always want to know what the return on the investment is, if youre looking into pushes, anything that they would consider maybe on the soft side. So, lets make the business case. Bruce Temkins team on the Temkin group has done some really significant research and work within the areas of employee engagement. In one particular study at the end of 2012, really says it all. They were able to prove that if you can engage your employees; your employees are 480 percent more committed to helping your company succeed. They are 250 percent more likely to recommend process improvement. How do you innovate in your business? And as youll see in a moment, it is so difficult to get your employees to innovate as we age, and as we increase our tenure inside business. So, how can you get your employee to challenge the status quo, to come up with new ideas, new ways of doing what youre curre ntly doing in a more effective and efficient manner? Theyre 370 percent more likely to recommend your company as an employer of choice, and when we get to step 10, youll see why that is so critically important. Now, I wont drown you with too much in terms of details. If you go on employengagement.com, we have a resources section that has all of these studies. We archive the best of the best in terms of the research, white papers and best practices. So Im just showcasing some of them during todays webinar. But again, its overwhelming that if you can increase your engagement levels, you will increase a lot of positive outlines that your CFOs and your CEOs are looking for, while also decreasing things like absenteeism, which will also play a significant role in the bottom line. It starts at the top. It really is about leadership. In fact, I recently did some work with the technology firm Silk Road, and learned of their 2013 global survey of over 2000 client global company. And they wanted to ask their clients whats the best method, organizationally, to foster employee engagement? And as you can see, the top respondents are listed. Their top, which is not a surprise, is the one that I most often see. If you want to build and engage culture, you have to get your employees to trust leaders. Your leadership team has to demonstrate that they can be trusted. I was in Abu Dhabi recently, and I worked with the Connexa folks on providing some information to a client in the United Arab Emirates, and Connexa shared with me some research that Im not even sure has been released yet. It was based on a global study that they did on how employees can build trust with their leadership team and they concluded, based on their research; there are three ways your leaders can build trust. In third place, your leaders have to demonstrate they are competent in the jobs that they hold. In the second place, which is kind of amazing that its only in second place, is your leaders have to demonstrate that they are leaders of integrity. When I first saw their study, I was struck by the fact that integrity came in second place. I said, What could possibly come in first place? Well in number one, the top way leaders build trust in their organizations, they have to show concerns about the well-being of employees. And the reason that is so challenging, since 2008-2 009 and the start of Great Recession, these have been challenging times in the work place. Leaders have had to make really tough decisions; often they have been in survival mode. They have been leading the efforts to count paper clips, to ask people to do more with less, to reduce spending and to manage lay-offs. It has been a really difficult time since the start of the recession. Now, theoretically we are out of the recession, but I would suspect many of you feel like I feel, that we are still not in the 2005-2006 when we were really at full employment. So these are still challenging times. So we are asking our leaders to lead in very challenging times. But are they leading in a way that is demonstrating empathy and in ways that they show concern in the well-being of employees? Because according to the research of Connexa, which really maps all my work, showing the concern about the well-being of the work force is such a key driver of engagement. I was recently with a client and I wanted to share something with you because it really speaks volumes about the Connexa research. I was having a conversation with Howard Cohen, who is the CEO of Beacon. Beacon is a residential developer and property management company headquartered here in Boston. And I asked Howard and this is a company that is a recognized employer of choice in their business. They are a market leader. They are highly profitable; highly successful from a growth standpoint. And I ask their CEO, What drives you? The first thing he said, and he said it in such a genuine way. I have 300 families Im responsible for. And when I heard him say that, I instantly said, Thats it. See, thats the type of commentary that when employees hear that and they see all of the practices, and how they lead the organization when people walk away and say, Now theres a leader who cares about the well-being of our employees. By the way, this doesnt mean you cant be tenacious for performan ce management, or you cant make tough decisions. But its that empathy that comes from a leader who cares about his or her employees. Now the good news is and I knew this is very positive the fifth week they get it today, in 2013 they know that they in their ranks have many disengaged employees who perhaps, in a more robust economy, may have left. But many employees have been disengaged and theyve kind of hung in there, and your leaders do understand, this is a threat to the business. However, I love this picture justification that down in Cape Cod in Chatham, Massachusetts, appears to be the shock capital of the nation. But theres trouble in paradise, not only in Chatham, theres trouble in the work force because although the C-suite understands that engagements important based on this study by Silk Road, less than 4 out of 10 of their pole companies even focus on engagement. So they understand its important but they havent yet reached a point in which they are developing time, resources, energy and focus towards employee engagement. Let s take a look at what drives engagement. I recently did some work with Dale Carnegie and they had a terrific study in 2012 that looked at, What are the drivers of the engagement within your work force? Rule number one, satisfaction with my boss. We will talk about this in a moment. Number two, belief in senior leaders. Again, this maps some of the work with Connexa and Silk Road. And number three, pride in the organization. Its being able to identify with the product and the service that we sell in such a way that connects not only my head, but connects my heart. Now lets take a look at step three, engaging first line leaders. Now look at this statistic. Its a little dated, 2010, but it maps what my personal experience has been in a 25-year-plus career. When youve a manager who is disengaged, his or her employees are three times more likely to be disengaged themselves. But if you think about it again, leaders have had to make tough decisions, and its been a really tough place for managers to work over the past five years as well. These managers and supervisors have had to make some tough decisions themselves. So are they engaged? In fact, theres increasing research that some of the least engaged employees are our first line supervisors and our middle managers, but yet the research is overwhelming. If you have a disengaged manager the person who is leading people the employees under them are three times less likely to be engaged themselves. Now I know this could be true from my personal experience, similar to probably many of your experience s. We tend to stay in a job longer when we like our boss. We tend to leave a job sooner, if we dont like our boss. And it goes back to what many of us have seen. We tend to stay in a company because of our boss; we tend to leave a company because of our boss. Ironically, the number one driver of engagement is also the number one disengagement driver, which is having a good boss or having a crummy boss. By the way, also, on the first line supervisor USA Today just had a great report that showed 35 percent, one in three employees would forego a substantial pay-increase if they could get their bosses fired. Think of that. What damning statistics? One out of three would actually forego money, if they could get their bosses fired. But we put so little time, money and resources into the development of our people who lead people. Step four is communication, the cornerstone of engagement. Never before have had we had more communication vehicles in front of us to help engage, communicate with, and align our employees. There used to be a point in time where communication experts would say that, Your employees dont hear something until they see it or hear it seven times. Today with social media, and technology, and communication overload, the experts now say, Your employees dont hear messages until they see it or hear it 13 times. So as you communicate within your organization, are you communicating via blogs? Are you leveraging texting? Are you communicating with video? Are you leveraging the variety we have in front of us today to communicate your message? And youre communicating not only the what, which is how you get the intellectual aspect of engagement with your employees, but youre also communicating the why. Are you trying to connect emotional aspect? Are you getting your employees heart? And often you ge t their heart by getting them to understand, Its not just what we do. Why are we in business? Who are we as an employer? Well, its not just about the products we sell or the services we offer, but why we are in business and how to articulate that why message to get your employees engaged in your brand in a way that again catches their head and their heart. I was in Mexico not too long ago when I happened to speak on a panel. I was the keynote speaker and this other speaker was from Whirlpool. I heard this executive speak, and one of the things that jumped out of her talk was, theres no right way to do a wrong thing. I was smitten with Whirlpool and in the spirit of full disclosure they are not a client. In fact, Ive never even met anyone who works for Whirlpool other than this keynote speaker. But I was struck with the message of, Theres no right way to do a wrong thing. If you look at Whirlpool, you also see that they are deeply interested in corporate citizenship. In fact, they had a partnership with Habitat for Humanity. Every time a home is built via Habitat for Humanity, the appliances are donated by Whirlpool. So theyre focusing on the business, wildly profitable, and the heart of their employees is to be able to engage the brand, as well as engage customers to the brand, in a way that you cant do if you remove that purpose as pa rt of your brand. Step five is individualizing engagement. We do a lot of work with the different generations and for those who are not Generation Y, meaning Millennials, on todays call, they are coming. They are coming in mass entering the workforce. There are thousands of them. In fact, there are millions of them. And right now, Generation Y, although theyre a minority, they will be in a majority by 2015. Meaning they will be the dominant generation in the workplace over the next three years. But if you look at Gen Y based on some studies, they are the least engaged work force. Why? I think its because we have policies and coaches that were established by boomers and traditionalists, and they dont really relate to this generation coming into the work force. So how are you looking at individualizing your engagement effort by generation? Thats the graduating class of Northeastern University 2011. My son is in the middle of that class. I was struck at what I saw during this commencement day and I turned to my wife and I said, This is remarkable. Northeastern University of Boston theyve given every single graduate a little flashlight to read the program. And my wife had to look closely and tell me they werent flashlights, but thousands of graduates, texting during the commencement speech. I laughed well, actually, I didnt laugh at first, I said Geez, Im not sure thats respectful. And then it dawned on me that were not going to change how they communicate, thats the world they live in. Theyre entering the work force so how are we communicating with this highly mobile, highly technology-savvy wave of employees that are entering our work forces every day? This is one college, one graduating class, one year, graduating thousands of graduates. And Ive since done a lot of work with Generation Y. They have a lot to offer but if we think were going to engage them like we engage the 50-year-old employee, were sadly mistaken. We also need to individualize engagement as it relates to diversity, and I would challenge you to change the name of diversity to inclusion. Because its really not about having your EEO 1 report tell you that youre underrepresented with the women or minorities in the workforce or within the leadership team. See, I think if youre underrepresented, its not a EEOC issue, its an innovation issue. The way you innovate is by introducing diversity of thought. So, as you look to individualize engagement, recognize that diversity and inclusion are significant engagement drivers that are going to lead to innovation. Step six: create a motivational culture. I was lucky enough to keynote a conference with Dan Pink. I think it was on a Tuesday and Dan keynoted on a Wednesday. Ive gotten to know Dan, and most of you probably know his book, Drive. Well, Drive is all about engagement. The reason its about engagement is because its about capturing and understanding the intrinsic motivational drivers of your employees. Heres a really quick, easy exercise that Im going to give you. I call it simply My Three Circles. By the way, a lot of these exercises and tools you can find on our Employee Engagement Library on employengagement.com. We offer a lot of these tools free to use and download and hopefully start using with your managers. But these three circles I have been using for years. When you can overlap these three circles get your employees to understand what it is they like to do, what they are really good at and get them in a job that needs to get done when you can overlap these three circles, its actually quite simple, youll have an engaged employee. So often people are not engaged, or they are under-performing because they are in a job that they shouldnt be in. They are doing things that perhaps they are not really good at. We squeeze them into a job description. By all means ask my clients, Is there a way to modify your job description to maximize the benefit of your employees? And using these very simple three circles is a great tool to arm your managers with a very effective solution on getting their employees focused on things they are great at, things that they love to do. Encourage creativity and innovation in the work force. If you can get your employees input, if you can get them to feel like they have something to offer, then your employees have an idea that perhaps is different than the idea of the department manager. Perhaps its a better idea. How do you encourage the input in a way thats going to foster creativity and innovation? And its not just technology. If I give a keynote, I often use a lot of videos, a multimedia to challenge the audience. How do you look at technology as an innovation driver? And its so easy to look at technology as part of your definition of innovation. But I also like to challenge that its not just about RND or technology. Steve Church of Mabnet has been able to quantify engagement scores going up when he gets his employees involved in process improvement. So anything that can improve how you currently do your business more effective, more efficient is going to drive engagement. So if you improve the number of days y our accounts outstanding are out, if you bring it down from 45 days to 42 days, thats process improvement, and the ideas that go into reducing that is actually an engagement driver. How are you getting your employees to look at your current process for them to challenge how you do business? Oh, we have a challenge in business as we age in life, we tend to get less creative. Im going to share a great summary of a book called What a Great Idea by Chic Thompson. Based on Chic Thompsons research, we are at our most creative self at age five. In fact he shares an example of the same creativity exam that NASA uses to test how creative astronauts are. 98 percent of five year olds pass. They then give that test to eight year olds, only 32 percent pass. Sadly, when we reach the age of 44, only 2 percent of 44 year olds pass this creativity exam. Now lets take a look at questions. We know five year olds ask a lot of questions. In fact, they ask 65 a day. That drops to 41 a day at age eight. It tumbles to only six times, six questions a day at age 44. That is tragic. What happened? Well, we stopped asking questions. We stopped innovating. We start following the norm. We dont challenge anymore and as we age, we lose some creativity. And you see this sadly reflected in this particular study. Now I also know that laughter is a significant engagement driver. But you probably see where were heading. We laugh 113 times a day at age five, which tumbles to only 83 at age eight. Sadly, we all become dark or doom at age 44, where we only laugh another 11 times a day. The research is overwhelming, if you can get your own employees to laugh, it will release endorphins that releases creative energy that will better allow them to innovate. So again, share some of these statistics with your leadership team. Its a great way to use it as a call to action to get your employees who normally arent in meetings to attend meetings and hopefully challenge the norm. By the way, good news, it does get better when we time it. I concluded, were in this whimsical world of exploration on zero to five, five to twelve, whereas were born in a creative state, were in a state of Why not? And then we turn into a culture or society of because. That wont work here because. In fact, I have clients that have taken the word because and put a big red x on it in their attempt to encourage more innovation and discourage the use of the word because. Step seven: create feedback mechanisms. Never before have had we had more vehicles in front of us to ask our employees, What do you think? Im a huge fan of engagement surveys. We can actually prove that if you do an engagement survey, you have a benchmark in which to monitor your progress with your engagement effort. So those who are on this webinar, if youre thinking about what to do first as youre just starting, I strongly encourage you to think of a baseline engagement survey to solicit feedback from your employees as a first step. Step eight: reinforce and reward the right behaviors with consequences for the wrong behaviors. Think money matters, and I would suspect that the vast majority of your employees do not want to hear that money does not foster engagement. But I am here to say that money does not foster engagement. It only matters when its perceived to be unfair. And then it matters as it relates to disengagement. So let me try to explain. Unless you are a waiter or a waitress, or a doorman, unless you are so closely connected to activity or the end reward, the vast majority of people are no more engaged if you give them $10,000 today, than they would be if you didnt give them $10,000 today. Now they might be happier, but their happiness is going to have a shelf life, and they will return to their pre-money level of engagement. Now, where it comes into play is disengagement. If everyone else is getting $10,000 other than John Doe, John Doe is going to be disengaged, unless he understands why he didnt ge t the same as everyone else. If you hire someone into your department with the same skills, qualifications, and you pay them more, youre going to disengage the others. See, money plays a significant role in disengagement, not necessarily engagement. However, where it gets even more confusing is that we are engaged by achievement. We want to achieve. And when money reinforces achievement, then you see an engagement driver, but its the acknowledgement that they have achieved thats the driver, not necessarily the money. Organizations need to focus on how to rebuild cultures of achievement. Sadly, according to this study by Blessingwhite, we are not doing a good job at it. About half of our employees are saying we do not create cultures that drive high performance, sadly. Step nine: track and communicate progress. Every organization needs to link achievement with something. Something might be your financial report; it might be your turnover statistics. It might be your health and safety, or your recordable stuff. It might be your revenue growth. Im not really sure what your up-skill metrics are. If you are a retail firm, it might be shrinkage. But it is the key to understand the metrics that are really important to our company, and how do we communicate these metrics in a way that we can track progress? It is so important to connect the achievement of our employees with their progress. Its not just organizational metrics, but its also the metrics that relate to individuals. So if were saying employee engagement is one of our goals, how are we measuring engagement? How can we track engagement all the way down to the employee level? Is it turnover? Is employee engagement a statistic? Is it training and development investments? Is it the number of employ ee referrals? The key is to track progress. Make sure your metrics are balanced and report on it. Because thats how you build cultures of engagement, and high performance and alignment. Youre trying to get your employees to understand this is where the companys going, this is where or how well were doing and this is where I fit in. And while youre tracking progress dont forget to focus on the positives and celebrate success. Organizations that have cultures of celebration, that they celebrate milestones, are more apt to establish positive cultures, and positive cultures will have more engagement than cultures that are negative cultures. Its why its such a hard thing to turn around a business when youre declining, when sales are down and turnover is high, because you have this negative cloud hanging over the culture. So how do you build in mechanisms, processes, ways that your managers are highlighting the positives that take place, and youre going above and beyond celebrating your successes? Step 10: hire and promote the right behaviors and traits for your success. Heres an acronym I will share with you its called the BEST concept. We know we need certain education, and certain skills to do jobs. And most of the resumes that we evaluate focus on the EMS. However, the vast majority of your employees that succeed is because of the behaviors and traits they bring to your organization, and its the same when people fail. You generally dont fire the accountant because he cant add. You generally fire the accountant because they have skills, or I should say they have behaviors and traits that are prohibiting them from succeeding in the job. Maybe his absenteeism, maybe theyre a non-team player, maybe theyre just a jerk. We put so much focus on the EMS, but in reality, success comes from the aptitude, or I should say, the attitudinal things not just the aptitudinal things. Now, Ive often told clients that, You need to know who you are before you can put in this concept of depth in your selection. You need to understand what are the behaviors and traits that we identify with? Do we know who were as an employer? I often start to work with a client and I say, You dont have an engagement issue you have a selection issue. Youre not hiring the behaviors and traits that would succeed in your culture. One of the first things that companies should do is build their stories. Whats our employee value proposition? Why do people work here? And if I go to your website today, if you reached out and said, Bob, we work for company ABC, what do you see? If I go to your website I would see what you sell, your product, and the services youre offering. And I would have to hunt down whats your employee value proposition, but unless youre an E-commerce Company or a retail firm, the vast majority of people who visit your website are probably looking for jobs or looking to kn ow who you are. We so under-invest in telling the world who we are and why people work here? I apologize for that typo, it looks like why do people walk here but how do you create that story, and how do you create that employee value proposition? See, you should be partnering your product service offering with your employment branding, and your customers and your potential applicants should see the same face of your business. I call that co-branding. Tony Hsieh from Zappos understands it. In fact, hes so big on co-branding and understanding employees that theyre branding their culture and they actually offer $3000 to any employee if they go through the orientation and decide to quit. See Tony Hsieh understands that it is more damaging to have an employee join us, go through orientation and decide perhaps theyre not a fit, then it is to stay and start looking for a job. So he will pay you to quit. Now, they also do a remarkable job on hiring the types of people that fit their culture, so they dont pay this out too often. Theres something else taking place, which is really showcasing my book Creativeship. Its this concept called tri-branding. Its no longer just partnering your employment brand with your service or product brand. Successful organizations are now leveraging third parties, customers, applicants, media, and the government to brand on your behalf. And there are some wonderful examples of companies that do this really well, such as these brands right here. These brands somehow create connections with their customers, in which their customers start branding their brand on your behalf. And because of social media being your brand accelerator, companies act and migrate from co-branding to tri-branding. I believe there are going to be those brands who are going to win because theyll engage both their employees, customers and other key stakeholders. Why use social media in such a component of engagement? Well, lets talk. Yesterday if I disliked my boss, I could tell 37 Kellehers that I liked my company, liked my boss, disliked my company, and disliked my boss. And I could have a reach of maybe a couple of hundred people, once my Kelleher buddies and friends and colleagues started telling others. Whereas today, the reach is exponential. If you dont like a company, or you dont like your boss, or better yet if you like your company or like your boss, you can tell your friends. They can tell their friends and your brand is exponential to engage your customers. Employees are the key stakeholders. I believe increasingly engaged employees are going to have a brand that can engage these various stakeholders. Of course, we have challenges in play. Use of policies Well, I was recently in Japan. There was a policy set in Japan. Not a lot of diversity not a lot of diversity in generations either. Often we have the architect of yesterdays b usiness designing the cultures and policies for tomorrows workforce. Tomorrows workforce, here they are. Those are my kids. I live in a laboratory, I study how they communicate and the millennial generation is coming forward. Unless we figure out how to engage them, we are going to have a challenge. If you think about branding as it relates to engagement, Malcolm Gladwell first taught us about the importance of connectives. Connectives are so important to connecting your brand, and I would argue your best, most engaged employees are probably your connectors. How are you engaging them in your business, in your branding efforts? Ill leave you with this closing point. Your best employees going forward, are those who are going to be able to connect people and information. Because going forward, its no longer going to be about knowledge. Its going to be about engaging your employees to know how to transfer knowledge. Thatll be the power. Ill leave you with this funny little story that just happened with my youngest son. He can take a Rubiks cube and put all the colors in sequence in a matter of 30 seconds and his older sibling, his brother, said, Hes cheating! And I asked, How is he cheating? He said, Dad, hes gone online and hes memorized the algorithm. That struck me as such a picture of the future. Those who can really figure that out, I believe will engage their employees and their brand and the years ahead. So with that well open it up to questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to register a question please press the one followed by the four on your telephone. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request, and your line will then be accessed from the conference to obtain information. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press the one followed by the three. If you are using a speaker phone, please lift your handset before entering your request. I would like to thank Bob for sharing his insight and knowledge with us today. As we wait for our operator to receive calls on her end, I have actually got a couple on my end here on the text line. So Ill begin Bob, with the first one here. What is the first thing you suggest we do to get our leadership on board with your suggestions? Yeah, thats a great one Jim, and its the reason why step two is also at the top. Getting your leaders on board is so key, and because so many of your leaders are highly left brained, quantitative return on investments types, I would say show them the business case, make the business case. And again my resource section on emplyerengagement.com has a lot of key studies on the Gallows, Howard Watson, the AONs, the Blessing Whites, the Silk Roads. So theres a cottage industry right now that can prove if you engage your employees it drives tangible business results, so try to have them make their business case. And the other thing I would encourage you to think about, usually theres someone on the seat sweep, someone on the leadership team who really gets this stuff. Try to get him or her to listen to further forge the efforts that youre trying to make on the engagement front. I also find pilot programs great. They may not be willing to endorse a company-wide initiative, so look at an emp loyee pilot on engagement. And of course, company-wide initiative, I would encourage you to think about even an engagement survey, because I think that will also provide some tangible quantitative information for this with technology. Excellent. Thanks very much, Bob. Well have another question coming in. Would you recommend or do you recommend creating a new role for employees who are failing in their current position? Yeah, if you think about someone whos failing I used to teach a lot of youth sports, or coach youth sports, and I would tell the parent that I dont believe that theres anything true about a bad kid. I think we have bad situations and bad parenting. And I think to a certain degree, there were some exceptions, the same is true with employees. We dont really have bad employees, We have disengaged employees; we have bad fits. And something happens with many employees after they join a company. In fact the honeymoon, the first 12 months, employees dont repeat the same level of engagement until year seven. So after year one, engagement levels drop. And I often ask clients, you know, Why is that? What happens? or What happens when you have under-performing employees? Why have they become disengaged? or Where did the performance go south? And, again, usually its not education or skill, usually its behaviors and traits. And I usually see its because of a misfit. They are doing things that the y are not really good at so they are frustrated. Or they are doing things they dont want to do, so they dont do a particularly good job at it. So, you know, look at those three circles that I shared earlier. They are a great easy way of having a discussion about if its because youre doing things that youre not capable of doing? Is it desire? Is it competence? How do we help you be successful? And a lot of times, by the way, when someone is a misfit maybe they dont have the competence or they shouldnt be working for you company, and the last thing you should do is keep that person. Once you try to save the person, once you realize you have someone who has performance issues and that performance is dragging on the performance of others, and theres no other place to transfer that person, you run the risk of disengaging your performers by not addressing it. Excellent. Thank you, Bob. At this point I want to shift gears and check in with our operator to see if shes gotten some questions on her end yet. We do have one question. Its coming from the line. Nicole Rimaya, please go ahead. Hello. Okay. So my question is, can we have this powerpoint? I live in a world of if you give, you get [chuckles]. So I always share, even when I speak at conferences, I always share my full deck. So I will give the green light to send copies of the deck to all attendees. Great, thank you. This is Lisa, just quickly. Copies of presentation as well as the recording will be available in about two to three business days on hiring.monster.com, under the resources center tab and HR events. And if youre registered for todays event, youll also receive a copy with direct links in the email. Okay, thank you. Yeah, were pretty good about keeping the majority of the presentations on the webinar, as you see here, all will be available at that location. And Bob, Ill go ahead on my end with an additional question. Do you have suggestions for organizations to engage, or just suggestions if they have limited funds? Yeah. There are some significant things you can do that cost zero dollars just improving communication. If you improve communication from the top down to the bottom, you will see a spike in engagement. In fact, if you go on our employee engagement library, theres a free tool in the library called the communication protocol. It is terrific and free a step-by-step way on how you build both consistency and redundancy in your communication. You can do that for nothing. The second thing I encourage companies to do is embrace corporate social responsibility. Get your employees involved in after-hours type of activities. Walk for Hunger, Habitat Humanity, and youll find that when your employee sees that the employer is helping to deal with the administration, not the funding, just helping to endorse and promote these corporate social responsibility type of activities, you start capturing your employees heart. And its not just about the business of business. You know, how do you show your employees that you are an employer who cares about the community, you care about corporate citizenship, you care about the environment? And the more you can link your efforts, even volunteerism type of efforts. You know it doesnt cost any money to do these things other than some time on the administrative front. And youll see a spike in engagement just by getting your employees to partner with the firm on corporate social responsibility type of activities. Excellent! Great suggestions, Bob! And I believe Ive got word, we may have cut off our last caller, perhaps had an additional question beyond the slide deck. If the operator could jump back in, Id appreciate it. I will open back up her line for you. Nicole, your line is open. For those who are looking for concrete suggestions, you can pick up Louder Than Words right on Amazon or Barnes Noble. And it really is a cookbook of ideas and practical tips. And thats another way, Jim you know. For probably $18, you can pick up some really good practical ideas that help you during engagement methods, as a manager or as the company. Excellent. Thanks Bob. All right, well moving on I do have an additional question on my side. Ill put that up there now. Any ideas on how to build, and engage culture when you do know that your leadership is not going to be on board? You have some tactics there you can share with us Bob? Yeah. You know, thats a question, Jim, thats often asked when I give it to keynote. Someone will sheepishly come up to me and say, Hey, I agree with everything you just said. But, you know, we have an organizational jackass in charge and boy, he or she will never embrace this stuff. Its all about the numbers, and its hopeless. And I often challenge that person that they themselves as an individual employee can do a lot. If they manage people, they can do a lot. So, this fear in which you work to engage the people around you can be a great first step. So dont look to build Rome in a day. Try to be engaged yourself and practice some of the engagement principles just within the world that you live in. And if you manage people, focus on how you can engage the people that report to me in a way that this little popular engagement is going to stand out in the company. Because that type of grassroots effort can really take root, and I dont believe a leader who doesnt embrace this stuff wil l survive in the upcoming years anyways. So there is hope [chuckles] you know, there will be hope on its way, but you can do a lot as an individual contributor while you are waiting. Excellent thanks very much Bob. I believe we did have an individual on the phone. Nicole, if youre still with us, theres a follow up question you may have had? Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So, we just completed our first employee Satisfaction Survey and Im just kind of struggling on how to broadcast results to our staff without fully disclosing everything that was given to us. So what is your suggestion on broadcasting survey results to the company? The first thing I would say is on your next survey shift the name from Satisfaction to Engagement because you really want to kind of push your employees that our goal is not to satisfy you. If you focus just on satisfaction, the survey results might be, Oh, we want more benefits. We want more this, we want more that. So just a micro-suggestion. Its very specific, Nicole, to the client or the company to the organization of readiness. My last employer, we would post all engagement scores. We would not do it in a way that would embarrass anyone. We would only post, say, company-wide scores; we wouldnt post narratives. It would only be the statistical aspect that we would post and we would also post okay, we have a committee thats looking at these results, but its transparent youre seeing what we see. What we would not post other breakdowns by gender, or breakdown by departments, PNL, or breakdowns by service lines or age, because then you would run the risk of embarrassing groups, and the goal should not be embarrassment; it should be full disclosure. But again it depends on your scores, it depends on what your company plans on doing. The biggest mistake companies make with engagement surveys is the lack of follow up and follow through. One of the things that I like about posting your results is holding your leadership accountable. Then you need to do something. Youve just kind of shared the results with your employees. Okay. Can I ask one more question actually? Yes. Okay, sorry. In relation to our survey -Is there any common action steps that people, or that companies, do that are successful? I have a couple things in mind that I want to implement. Anything that has shown its a successful action step for an engagement or satisfaction? Yes, I would its very different per company. Its sort of like roses. There are no two roses alike, theres no two action plans that would be identical. That said, I can tell you I almost never seen an engagement survey that didnt include some action or some attention around three areas. Number one, staff recognition. Your employees are begging for more staff recognition, so how do you put in some vehicle or pathway in which youre going to encourage more people to recognize more often? Second is communication. How do you create increased communication including soliciting feedback from employees? Number three, how do you boost career development? So how do you get some focus on helping employees advance and develop towards their careers without knowing who you are, who your company is, I will be shocked if you dont have some metrics begging for some help in those three areas. When you say you recognize employees, is it bad to recognize individuals to the company? Does that make it feel other employees are not recognized? If you are recognizing individuals, thats something that I think would maybe be something with low morale. If youre praising one person and not praising others people people feel theyre not getting recognized. Do you suggest individual recognition? Yeah. Im going to turn this into a commercial because we could be here all day. But what I want to suggest, Nicole, is I have a book coming out called Employee Engagements for Dummies. That will be published by Wiley, it will go out in December. Theres an entire section, a big section in there all about employee recognition. I am not sensitive to people who say they shouldnt recognize because theyre afraid to not recognize those who maybe they forget. Ive never seen an employee say, I quit this company because theres too much recognition. I think companies mostly under-recognize. And they often use that as the excuse, Well, I dont want to recognize John because there are others who deserve as well. Well recognize John, and tomorrow well recognize the other deserving folks and come Monday, recognize someone else. Cultures of recognition foster positive goodwill in the replication of other positive behavior. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Nicole. Okay, if I could step in, Bob. Unfortunately we have run out of time for the webinar this afternoon, but we will pledge to forward any unanswered questions to Bob for follow up to get everything answered and to forward along. Bob, first I would like to say thanks very much for sharing your expertise with us today. This does conclude our webinar. A recording of this event, as well as the presentation materials, will be available shortly on our hiring site, and that can be reached at hiring.monster.com. Simply look under the resources center tab for that information, and thanks again for watching us. Please do join us again on September 18th for our webinar on Keeping your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive. Thank you, and have a great day. Thanks all.