10

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done and self restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

 

—Theodore Roosevelt

The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important—and then get out of their way while they do it.

 

—Jack Welch, General Electric

Is there a common theme in both these quotes by two legendary leaders? Both talk about ‘getting out of the way’. Is that significant? Yes and No. It is significant because it leads to the concept of empowerment leading to active engagement of an employee. No, because getting out of the way is the second step. Chapter 5 dealt with ‘the sense to pick good men’ but how do you ‘make people believe that what they think and do is important’?

10.1 DEFINING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Organizations that function with the mentality that employees should do their jobs and keep their mouths shut are sure to flounder. Organizations have recognized the importance of reaping proud, motivated and loyal employees. The trust that was existing in companies, in the good old days, has now simply vanished. Gone are the days, when job seekers wish their first companies to be the last ones, where they would retire from. Layoffs and cutbacks in a difficult economic environment have generated fear and suspicion among employees. Companies recognize that their long-term viability depends on finding, motivating and retaining good employees.

But, is that not the objective of all the functions of HR? The fact also is that so much is being written, talked and discussed about employee engagement as a separate subject that it deserves this attention. Consider this Accenture Research Report: ‘The High Performance Workforce Study 2007’ says that ‘the key talent management challenge for Indian companies is how to keep workforces highly productive, and, at the same time, satisfied, engaged and committed.’ There is mounting evidence that employee engagement correlates to individual, group and organizational performance in the areas of productivity, retention, turnover, customer service and loyalty. There is enough to prove that before the term employee engagement started going around there was a lot of stuff being done, the nature of which would fall in its realms.

Some would argue what was earlier called employee satisfaction survey has now become employee engagement survey. Does that mean it is the same wine in a new bottle or a different wine altogether? To say that it is the same wine would mean not recognizing the subtle difference between engagement and satisfaction.

Satisfaction is measuring a passive employee state, while measuring engagement is measuring an active state. Let us understand this through an example. Certain employees might very well indicate a high level of satisfaction with their organization. They might be getting everything they wish: a steady salary, benefits, leave and paid vacation. Their actual contribution to the well-being of the organization in terms of innovation, creativity and productivity is negligible. But, they are satisfied. Take another set of employees. They are enthusiastic about their work, are creative, innovative and want to contribute. It is possible that their level of satisfaction with the same organization is lower than the former. So what is the point? The point is that engagement is not the same as satisfaction.

Let us try exploring the various meanings of employee engagement as they have emerged from corporations, consultants and academicians.

Engagement is a set of positive attitudes and behaviours enabling high job performance of a kind which is in tune with the organization's mission.

 

—John Storey, Dave Ulrich. Theresa M. Welbourne, Patrick M. Wright

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees put discretionary effort into their work, in the form of extra time, brainpower and energy.

 

—Towers Perrin

An individual's degree of positive or negative emotional attachment to their organization, their job and their colleagues.

 

—Scarlett Surveys

Employee Engagement can be seen as a combination of commitment to the organization and its values and a willingness to help out colleagues (organizational citizenship).

 

—CIPD, UK

Employee Engagement is the extent to which employees commit to something or someone in their organization, how hard they work and how long they stay as a result of that commitment.

 

—Corporate Leadership Council

Engagement is the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do and feel valued for doing it.

 

—DDI

Engaged employees are those who work with a passion and feel a profound connection to their company and drive innovation and move the organization forward.

 

—Gallup

We define ‘engagement’ as the emotional and intellectual involvement that motivates employees to do their best work and contribute to your organization's success.

 

—Hewitt Associates

We define engagement as a psychological state in which employees feel a vested interest in the company's success and are both willing and motivated to perform to levels that exceed the stated job requirements.

 

—Mercer Consulting

10.1.1 Benefits of Employee Engagement

Given the fact that people today are the competitive edge, the value of employee engagement can never be underscored. But at the same time, it is not easy to measure the benefits of employee engagement in rupee terms because there is a lot which goes into the performance of an organization. It might be worthwhile to just know a few statistics which have been brought forth by various consulting organizations.

Watson Wyatt's 2008/2009 Work USA Report, ‘Driving Business Results Through Continuous Engagement’, released 10 February 2009, states that highly engaged employees are twice as likely as their less-engaged peers to be top performers. Moreover, when employees are highly engaged, their companies enjoy 26 per cent higher employee productivity, have lower turnover risk and are more likely to attract top talent. The companies of highly engaged employees earned 13 per cent greater total returns to shareholders over the past five years. Such workers miss 20 per cent fewer days of work, and three-quarters of them exceeded or far exceeded expectations in their most recent performance review. Additionally, highly engaged workers tend to be more supportive of organizational change initiatives and resilient in the face of change. ‘During periods of turmoil—when the organization is undertaking cost-reduction measures, consolidations or other dramatic change events that will profoundly impact employees—maintaining or enhancing employee engagement can be critical to the organization's return to profitability,’ the report notes.

In August 2009, Gallup presented a report ‘Q12^® Meta-Analysis: The Relationship between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes’. The organizational outcomes which were included to reflect performance of the organizations were customer loyalty, turnover (reverse scored as retention), safety absenteeism (reverse scored), shrinkage (reverse scored), quality (reverse scored as defects) and financials (profitability and productivity). The study found that there was a direct correlation between these organizational outcomes and employee engagement. It also pointed out that amongst all the strongest correlation was with customer loyalty metrics, productivity, employee turnover, safety, absenteeism, patient safety and quality.

In February 2011, in its report ‘The Power of Three: Taking Engagement to New Heights’, Tower Watson has reported that there is a growing body of evidence over the past decade which validates the quantifiable relationship between the levels of organizational engagement and financial performance. They go on to say that through their client work and global workforce studies, they readily correlate high engagement with better financial metrics. For example, in a three-year study of 41 global companies, they found that operating margins improved nearly four per cent on average in organizations with high employee engagement levels, and declined about two per cent in those with low engagement levels.

Hewitt (2009) shows a clear correlation between employee engagement levels and financial performance. Organizations with high levels of engagement (65 per cent or more of employees are engaged) outperformed the total stock market index even in volatile economic conditions. During 2009, the total shareholder return for these companies was 19 per cent higher than the average total shareholder return. Conversely, companies with low engagement (where less than 40 per cent of employees are engaged) had a total shareholder return that was 44 per cent lower than the average.

For example, as a part of the endeavour to make Broadridge a great place to work, the employees proactively contribute towards new and creative employee engagement initiatives. One such programme is ABLE (attract, build, lead and engage associates), under which initiatives of engagement, talent and leadership are covered. ‘Subject Matter Expert Programme’ has been introduced for associates who have a flair for understanding the business more deeply. They also introduced a unique initiative targeted towards teachers who have made a difference in the employees’ lives. The employees invited their teachers (school, college or university) to visit Broadridge office, understand the work done and interact with senior management on how their students are contributing towards company growth.

Creating the conditions that keep employees engaged result in documented benefits, such as:

• Greater productivity
• Increased passion for and commitment to the organization's strategy and goals
• Greater alignment with the organization's values
• A high-energy work environment
• A greater sense of team
• Higher levels of creativity and innovation
• A greater sense of loyalty to the organization
• Higher staff retention, lowered attrition rate
• Better recruitment and selection
• Higher talent retention
• Employees being brand ambassadors
• Attractive reputation
• Improved customer experiences and customer loyalty
• Boosted business growth
• Greater value creation
• Sustained long-term success

10.2 DEGREES OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

We have now understood what employee engagement is? But is an employee either ‘engaged’ or ‘not engaged’? If you were to be asked to comment on your fellow student or colleague and rate them as engaged or not engaged more often than not you will find that most will not be either, but lie somewhere in between. It is, therefore, important to grade the level of engagement that an employee has with the organization. If you check out any survey on employee engagement, you will find that the report always captures the graded level of employee engagement. The nomenclature that each study uses is different and specific to the institution which conducts it. Some put them in disparate buckets depending on certain parameters, yet some recommend that engagement levels lie on a continuum starting from the least desirable to the most desirable. At the end of the day, it is all a question of what you choose to look at it as. None of them are right or wrong, good or bad. It is important to understand a few popularly professed levels of engagement to enable you to choose or build your own.

 

10.2.1 Gallup's Model

Gallup's (2008) survey distributes employees into three categories:

1. Engaged
2. Not engaged
3. Actively disengaged

Engaged employees are motivators for others at the organization. They have a positive outlook towards their work, make effective use of their talents, develop productive relationships and increase their effectiveness through those relationships. They always perform at optimum levels. They are highly passionate about their work too. Whenever, any change occurs, they blindly do not accept anything that comes their way, they want to know the reasons behind it and the manner they can relate to the change. They create more work for themselves within their area and are always energetic and enthusiastic and never run out of things to do. They are committed to their organization, to their function and to their role so much, so that their commitment overcomes barriers and transforms relationships. Those who are not gainfully engaged, need not be negative in their approach and they take a wait-and-see attitude towards their job, their employer, and their co-workers. They just hang in there, and do not commit themselves. Curt Coffman, an ex-Gallup Consultancy, calls the actively disengaged employees, Cave dwellers as ‘Consistently Against Virtually Everything’. Not only are unhappy but they also act out of their unhappiness and could possibly tear down what engaged employees build.

10.2.2 Blessing White Model

Blessing White (2011) uses two axes of contribution and satisfaction to determine engagement levels. By plotting a given population against the two axes, they have identified five distinct employee segments (Figure 10.1):

 

Figure 10.1 Blessing White model (adapted)

• The engaged—high contribution and high satisfaction: These are the employees who bring discretionary effort and initiative to their jobs. They strongly contribute to developing a positive environment around them. If a recruiter calls, they would politely cut the conversation short.
• Almost engaged—medium-to-high contribution and satisfaction: These are high performers who are reasonably satisfied with their jobs, but, do contemplate that there might be better avenues for them to work. They contribute positively to the organization and when they leave, there is always an impact on the performance of the organization.
• Honeymooners and hamsters—medium-to-high satisfaction but low contribution: This segment includes two sub-categories: (1) Honeymooners are new to the role or the organization and are usually happy and take their time to understand how to contribute fully to the organization's goals and (2) Hamsters are those who are happy being around. They might not be contributing to the organization but at the same time they are happy being around. Consequently, they contribute little to the organization.
• Crash and burn—medium-to-high contribution but low satisfaction: These are employees who have done their bit for the organization, but, are now bitter and dissatisfied. They are individuals who have contributed to the organization but perceive their contribution to not have been recognized. If not dealt with these employees could potentially slip into the disengaged category.
• The disengaged—low-to-medium contribution and satisfaction: These are the employees who drag themselves to work for the pay cheque. They are either disillusioned with the organization (if they were the crash and burn variety) or they are negative about everything about their job and their organization. They are the ones who rub off negativity to their colleagues to in the organization.

10.2.3 Mercer Model

Mercer Consulting (2007) grades the engagement of people along a continuum with four stages (Figure 10.2):

• Satisfied: The employees enjoy their job and are satisfied with the terms and conditions of employment but do not go ‘above and beyond’ the call of duty.
• Motivated: The employees contribute energetically, strive to achieve their personal goals, value achieving personal goals more than team/organizational goals and are, therefore, more loyal to personal professional goals than to the organization.
• Committed: These employees see the bigger picture, with a sense of how job fits in. They collaborate to achieve team goals and are openly ambitious not only for their own but also for the team and company. They have a strong sense of belonging to the organization and hence feel valued and involved.
• Advocate: Such an employee contributes discretionary effort and proactively seeks opportunities to serve the mission of the organization. They are, therefore, resilient to short-term dissatisfiers. They consistently speak positively about the organization's products and services and recommend the organization as an employer.

Figure 10.2 Mercer model (adapted)

10.3 DRIVERS OF ENGAGEMENT

Research has proved that there are two elements which are essential for engagement (Figure 10.3). One element is the rational element where the employees look at their role, where their roles fit into their larger organization. The second aspect is the emotional aspect which is about how they feel about being a part of the organization. This would include intangibles such as their relationships at work, the pride of belonging to the organization, whether their work gives them a sense of personal accomplishment and how they relate to their manager. These two elements can be analysed into a number of factors that influence levels of engagement. These factors, which can be termed as ‘Drivers of Engagement’ for an organization are:

• The work itself
• The work environment
• Leadership
• Opportunities for personal growth
• Opportunities to contribute

An interesting observation, as per a report by Lloyd Morgan (2004), outlines that the effect of ‘Emotional Commitment’ is four times stronger than ‘Rational Commitment’.

10.3.1 The Work Itself

The work itself can create immense job satisfaction and give reasons to the employee to stay engaged. The factors involved are interesting and challenging work, responsibility (feeling that the work is important and having control over one's resources), autonomy (freedom to act), scope to use and develop skills and abilities, the availability of resources required to carry out the work and the opportunities for advancement.

 

Figure 10.3 Employee engagement

10.3.2 The Work Environment

An enabling environment creates conditions that encourage high performance, it creates an experience that impacts the engagement by influencing how people regard their roles and carry them out. These include work processes, equipment and facilities and the physical conditions in which people work. A supportive environment stresses on achieving satisfactory work–life balance, a place where personal growth needs are taken into account, working conditions which are healthy and safe and above all a job which is secure. An inspirational environment will be where the organization has a clear vision and a set of integrated values that are embedded, collectively measured and managed.

The environment is affected by the organization's climate. An organization's climate can be described as the relatively persistent set of perceptions held by organizational members concerning the characteristics and quality of organization's culture. It is influenced by its HR practices, policies and procedures. The work climate and the experience of actually doing the job (pace, demand, stress) all influence the way the employees experience the work environment. This has an important effect on how they react to HR and reward practices and how these influence the organizational outcomes. Employees react in a number of different ways to the practices in their organization, and this affects the extent to which they want to learn more and are committed and satisfied with their jobs. This, in turn, influences engagement—how well they do their jobs and whether they are prepared to contribute discretionary effort.

10.3.3 Leadership

The degree to which jobs encourage engagement and positive discretionary behaviour very much depends upon the ways in which jobholders are led and managed. Consider this, a young management trainee in the HR department reads about how the intranet can be leveraged to build camaraderie at the workplace and comes up with a comprehensive proposal to the manager. The manager looks at it, appreciates the enthusiasm and then recommends sticking to the job which is high up on the priority list for the department. What do you think the response would do for the management trainee's engagement levels? Not much—right?! Engaged employees see and experience their leaders acting in accord with the expressed values of the organization and allocating resources in ways that support strategy. Strong leaders believe in transparent ways that generate involvement with customers and employees. The leaders can help employees see how strategy relates to various processes and procedures that build engagement. Managers and team leaders often have considerable discretion on how jobs are designed, how they allocate work and how much they delegate and provide autonomy. They can spell out the significance of the work people do. They can give them the opportunity to achieve and develop, and provide feedback that recognizes their contribution.

10.3.4 Opportunities for Personal Growth

Most people want to move ahead, i.e., grow in their jobs. Learning is a satisfying and rewarding experience and makes significant contribution towards making the employee feel that the organization cares and is fair to its people. Satisfaction of growth needs depends on people finding the opportunity to be what they want to be. The opportunity to grow and develop is a motivating factor that directly impacts on employee engagement.

10.3.5 Opportunities to Contribute

Engagement is enhanced if employees have a voice that is listened to. This enables them to feed their ideas and views upward and feel they are making a contribution.

10.4 DRIVING ENGAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS

Engagement strategies can be developed along the lines of the factors affecting engagement as outlined in the previous section (Figure 10.3).

 

10.4.1 The Work Itself

Intrinsic motivation comes from the work itself, engagement depends on the way jobs are designed. In order to find their job motivating and engaging, an employee should (1) experience meaningfulness of the work, (2) experience responsibility and (3) knowledge of the results of the work done.

Every job, therefore, needs to have certain core dimensions to ensure that an employee experiences all of the above psychological states. These are:

• Skill variety: This would involve making use of different talents and skills in a job. If one has a greater variety of skills to be used at work, it would reduce boredom and would allow the employee to express different aspects of their personality in their day-to-day work.
• Task identity: This involves doing an entire piece of work, rather than bits and pieces. If your boss asks you to write a training manual and then request another colleague to continue the same and complete it, nevertheless you feel that your work would be more meaningful if you are able to work on the training manual from start to finish. You have a sense of task identity.
• Task significance: This is the impact of one's work on others. Employees may desire to feel that they are making a significant contribution to the organization, which could foster a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.
• Autonomy: It refers to the condition or quality of being autonomous also known as independence. In business, autonomy means the degree or level of freedom and discretion allowed to employees over their job. Imagine your boss asking you to do something and then breathing down your neck to see what you are doing!
• Feedback from the work itself: It ensures that the employee knows how their work has been taken. It gives them the opportunity to hear their work getting acknowledged as ‘good’ or lets them know how they could have done it better. This does not underscore the ill effect that feedback can also have if not done in a constructive manner.

10.4.2 The Work Environment

A strategy for increasing engagement through the work environment will be generally concerned with developing a culture that encourages positive attitude to work, promoting interest and excitement in the jobs people do and reduces stress. This strategy should also consider particular aspects of the work environment, especially communications, involvement, work–life balance and working conditions. It should also work on traditional and new methods of building effective relationships with people in their roles, treating individual employees fairly, recognizing their value, giving them voice and providing opportunities for growth.

Organizations are increasingly introducing fun at the workplace to create a conducive work environment.

Ensuring Organizational Justice

A very important concept in organizational behaviour is of organizational justice. This is the study of people's perception of fairness in organizations. There are four categories of organizational justice (Figure 10.4):

1. Distributive justice: The form of organizational justice that focuses on people's beliefs that they have received a fair amount of valued work-related outcomes (e.g., pay recognition).
2. Procedural justice: People's perception of the fairness of the procedure used to determine the outcomes they receive.
3. Informational justice: People's perception of the fairness of the information used as a basis for making a decision. For example, feelings valued by others in the organization.
4. Interpersonal justice: People's perception of the manner in which they are treated by others (typically authority figures). For example, feelings about one's leader.

Figure 10.4 Organizational justice

 

This can serve as a quick-check list while implementing any policy, procedure or practice. For example, while implementing a reward and recognition scheme, it is not only important to ensure distributive justice, but also to ensure that employees perceive that the process is fair, get enough information on how the plan would affect them and then ensure that all queries and apprehensions are addressed respectfully by the line managers. This is an overlying concept which has to be borne in mind while driving any of the engagement drivers.

Communication

Communication forms a crucial role for most part of the organizational process. Effective communication leads to not only successful implementation of other processes such as change and divestitures but also positive organizational perceptions among employees. Successful implementation of processes leads to greater job satisfaction and performance among employees. They assess their satisfaction with communication inside organizations on four different facets: (1) with supervisors, (2) with peers, (3) with top management and (4) with the organization as such.

Involvement

Organizations that take employee opinions seriously definitely stand a better chance of engaging and involving them in their work and driving productivity. Who else but effective leadership can involve employees and make their opinions count? Employees’ involvement seeks to increase members’ input into decisions that affect organization performance and employee well-being. It is the broad term for diverse approaches to gain greater participation in relevant workplace decisions. Employee involvement can be achieved when influence and authority are pushed down into the organization, relevant information is shared with members, and opportunities for internal and external rewards are tied to effectiveness. Needless to say, employees also ought to have relevant skills and knowledge and opportunities to gain more knowledge. HCL Technologies conducts surveys on the intranet whenever it wants to make a change which is going to affect people. In Makemytrip.com, the business plan for the company is outlined bottom-up. The following are some features of high involvement organizations:

• Flat or lean organizational structure, team-based work processes
• Individually enriched jobs and many self-managing teams
• Decentralized, team-based, participative goal setting
• Variety of career tracks and counselling available
• Open job posting
• Potential and process-skill oriented selection processes
• Heavy commitment to training and education
• Open reward system
• Egalitarian perquisites
• HR policy formulation through participation through representative group
• Safe and pleasant physical layout

Work–life Balance

The nature and complexity of work has undergone a drastic change over the last few years, work–life balance has occupied a significant place in an employee's list of expectations from an organization. The perception of work–life balance is moving up considerably, as reported in the Great Places to Work survey since the last couple of years. The ones that feature in the Top 25 companies are focusing on providing unique and special benefits that cater to different employee segments, for example, day-care centres, education assistance, concierge services and health awareness programmes etc. According to a study by the Corporate Executive Board among more than 50,000 global workers, work–life balance now ranks second only to compensation as one of the most important workplace attributes. In addition, the employees who feel they have a better work–life balance tend to work 21 per cent harder than those who do not. It is not just flexi time, job share, work-from-home, child care and elder care support, but also training in work–life integration skills. The 24×7 world we now inhabit requires different decisions, clarity around high value work, and a workplace culture that value the whole individual.

Working Conditions

The most common conditions of work in a given workplace can be called working conditions. It could include information such as normal hours of work, safety, paid holidays vacations, rest periods, free clothing or uniforms and possibilities of advancement. Over the last few years, working conditions in the Indian workplace has been improving. However, in common organizations, not much emphasis is laid on occupation safety and health. While factories come under the purview of the Factory Act and have to adhere to the guidelines, other workplaces have an unstructured approach to deal with this.

Building Effective Relationships

Building effective relationships at work is an innate need of every employee. It cannot be denied that the workplace is an arena for social interaction too. Effective relationships at work translate into productivity and high performance. Organizational processes can act as catalysts in this process. Organizations seek to give a social platform for the employees to relate to one another whenever it organizes a picnic or sponsors a friendly cricket match inside the organization. Accenture has an ‘Hours That Help’ feature in their leave policy. In this employees who have extra leave can put them into a virtual bank and have needy colleagues use them in emergencies. This initiative avoids a situation where a genuinely needy employee can take more leave (with pay) to overcome a personal health problem or some such thing. For employees, this works as a feel good factor, an instant gratification of being able to do something substantial beyond work at work itself. Also, it helps employees build strong relationship with one another.

10.4.3 Leadership

The leadership strategy should concentrate on what line managers need to do as leaders to play the vital and immediate part in increasing levels of engagement. In a study done on employees, it appeared communication from the top management and their immediate supervisors is of greater importance than the general communication from the organization as an entity. Hence, how the line manager deals with people decides to a large extent the level of engagement of the employee. A manager needs to do the following:

• Enable learning through a variety of methods: This could mean direct learning through training programmes, workshops or on the job learning such as cross-functional team exposure and new projects. Apart from formal learning initiatives, it is also important for the managers to learn how to coach, give feedback and mentor their people to develop them.
• Manage performance of team members: This would require a formal performance management process with the activities of role definition, performance improvement planning, continuous feedback, monitoring and support to the employee.

For example, Symantec has an employee engagement initiative directed at employees who have demonstrated commitment to the organization. Unlike the traditional practice of conducting exit interviews at the time of an employee leaving the organization, the ‘Anchors’ programme facilitates getting employee feedback when they are with the organization through’ anchoring interviews. Symantec believes that these Anchored employees are the best critics as well as champions of organizational practices. They can provide an unbiased perspective on the organization's strengths and ways to build on them. The anchors programme revolves around employees who have been with the organization for five years or more. The programme has been conceptualized to hear the voice of employees and reward them for their loyalty and commitment to the organization. At the time of writing the book, the ‘Anchors in Action’ team was working on four themes that they had identified during the workshops—recognitions, accessibility to management, career planning for employees on technical track and employee communication. These workshops were very helpful in drawing meaningful insights from the participants about the organization and devise a constructive approach to address employee feedback.

 

10.5 MEASUREMENT OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Now that we know what employee engagement is, what it takes to keep employees engaged what do we do next? Should managers reading this book throw themselves into launching all initiatives in a planned manner to achieve enhanced engagement? Obviously not! It is neither feasible nor advisable to take any step without looking at the current situation. An analysis of the present will help in diagnosing the gaps, which if closed would enhance engagement levels. Then these gaps have to be prioritized to see which of these if tackled would have the maximum benefit. Then initiatives around these prioritized areas would have to be designed and implemented. To do all of this, the primary step is to measure the current level of engagement in the organization. It is helpful to benchmark your organizations’ level of engagement with other businesses in a similar market or sector. It is also useful to know the different levels of engagement of different clusters and groups in the organization, for example, engagement level in the support function versus the others, engagement level of employees at the corporate office and the branch office etc. This is because there are varying microclimates in each organization and it is important to know them in order to choose the kind of an engagement initiative to drive there. For example, research shows that the so-called generation X (the under 35 years) have a more detached view of work. For many, work–life balance and making a difference in the community may be more important than career advancement or financial reward.

Having established the importance of measurement of employee engagement, i.e., how do you go about doing it? There are two ways in which this could be done. One way to do it is by using a structured employee engagement survey periodically. The other way, which can be an ongoing process, is the capturing and interpreting the data which comes out of exit interviews and by analysing attrition.

• Employee engagement survey: The employee engagement survey is a proactive method of enquiry of employee engagement in an organization. The employee engagement survey can be done with a sample group of people or with the entire organization—it is always advisable to do it for the entire organization.
• Attrition analysis: Attrition in any organization is a natural phenomenon. However, analysis of why people leave generates a lot of information on what causes disengagement.
• Exit interview: Most organizations nowadays follow the practice of interviewing employees that leave the company. HR, in turn, must obtain feedback and should put in efforts to improve the system.

10.5.1 Employee Engagement Survey

Employee engagement survey is a combination of questionnaire administration and focus group discussions to ascertain the level of employee engagement in an organization. Three important aspects of the employee engagement survey are as follows:

1. Survey design
2. Survey administration
3. Post-survey action planning

Survey Design

Let us begin with an example. The Kenexa Employee Engagement Index is measured through four items:

1. I am proud to tell people I work for my company.
2. Overall, I am extremely satisfied with my company as a place to work.
3. I would recommend this place to others as a good place to work.
4. I rarely think about looking for a new job with another company.

All these four items are rated on a five point Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree). The Employee Engagement Index (EEI) is typically reported as per cent favourable, that is the average level of agreement across the four items. This is an example of one kind of a survey.

Engagement surveys can be conducted using the services of a specialized consultant. A more cost-effective measure is to design one yourself. The best way to go about it is to establish a working group made up of employees from different parts of the business to help to do this. You can decide on the kind of survey you want from a variety of choices you shall find consultants offering on the Internet. Refer to the Field Guide to get one such idea as to how to go about it.

Another way could be to decide on a positive statement for each of the drivers of engagement as outlined in this chapter. Then you can ask the respondent to indicate their level of agreement with the statement on a continuum as decided by you. For example, in the category work itself, there are five separate drivers which are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback from the work. Given in Table 10.1 are some sample questions which could be prepared. You could further modify this by giving weightages either decided by you or by the respondent.

Once the survey questionnaire is ready, it is also important to decide whether you would want it anonymous or not. Most surveys are and it lets the employee share their true feelings and feedback about things. The survey can be anonymous, but it is necessary to collect some data points around which you would base your analysis. For example, if retention in one branch office has been soaring you would definitely want to find out what could be the reasons, so it is important to know which branch the employee is based out of.

 

Table 10.1 The drivers of work itself category

 

Though it is difficult to analyse open responses, it is always a good idea to give the respondent a chance to share something which your feedback might not have covered. Second, it also makes the employee feel respected when their opinions are sought on anything which affect the employees’ as well as the future of the organization.

Survey Administration

It is often said that the devil lies in the details and it holds true for the administration of employee engagement surveys too. You can have the best design but if it is administered sloppily you can be sure that it will do more harm than good. It is very important that you position the survey well depending on what the organizational reality at that time is. There should be a proper strategy and a tactical plan to follow for the communication and dissemination of the survey. Anticipate all apprehensions and queries which can decelerate the initiative and incorporate the responses in a properly designed communication programme for the same. Also when you ask people to complete the self-assessment, stress that the survey is completed anonymously (if that is true), so that people feel that they can answer honestly. It is acceptable, however, to ask for business function or location/branch so that you can gain a true picture of the variations of levels of engagement are in your organization.

Post-survey Action

Not doing an employee engagement survey is a lesser sin than doing one and following it up with no or half-hearted action. There are many organizations which do this mistake and have to pay dearly for the same.

Often the results of an engagement survey end up with a complex set of numbers. It is important to unravel the mystery in the numbers to come to some concrete conclusions. At times, the numbers might be such that they might not indicate anything concrete. In such a situation, it is important to follow up the survey results with focus group discussions. Here are some best practices which can be followed:

• Communicate the findings of the survey. Often organizations may not like what the survey results indicate but it is important to let employees know all the same.
• Encourage senior leaders to share results and to discuss freely what improvements employees need. Open discussions are the best way to communicate to employees the seriousness of the intent that the organization has about the results of the survey.
• Set specific organizational goals as a result of the survey.
• Involve people in each unit and function in developing improvement actions.
• Identify ‘quick wins’.
• Focus on getting one thing right at a time.
• Recognize the positive aspects of the survey as well as the improvement areas.
• Communicate progress of action plans on a regular basis.

Let us take the example of the travel division of WH Smith Travel which sells a range of newspapers, magazines, books and convenience items for people at railways stations and airports. The company commissioned consultants to undertake a survey to see which aspects of its engagement with its employees could be improved. Clear career progression and open line of communication were seen to be the biggest areas of development. However, the survey also highlighted some strengths about the company that employees identified. These were their good relationship with their line managers and the freedom to speak their mind. When the company fed back the results of the survey to the employees, it made it a point of recognizing the strengths that the audit has revealed. The Royal Bank of Scotland undertakes a global engagement survey among 150,000 workers. It asks questions about employees’ desire to give discretionary effort to contribute to business success, to say positive things about RBS and to stay with the company. It also looks at local survey results and entry and exit interviews. From these, it calculates an engagement index that is shared with managers in each division and business unit. Each unit then is tasked with developing an action plan for improvement.

 

10.5.2 Attrition Analysis

As the term suggests, attrition analysis is the analysis of attrition. Attrition is usually calculated by seeing the number of employees separating (voluntarily or involuntarily) from the system as a percentage of the total number of employees in the system. This is a quantitative indicator of the level of attrition. This number can be used to:

1. Compare it with the industry benchmark to ascertain whether the organization is doing better or worse than the industry.
2. Measure the result of the organization's retention efforts.

Beyond this, the number does not mean anything more until and unless it is analysed to draw useful information from this. How can attrition be analysed? One important thing to understand is that all attrition is essentially not bad for the organization.

Attrition can be analysed only if there is enough data captured in the organization. Every employee separation should be classified into voluntary/involuntary and functional or dysfunction attrition. In addition to this, more data are required for analysis—data about the employees who are separating their age, department, date of joining, source hired from, performance, manager's name etc. Analysis with these data may help in identifying certain trends such as follows:

1. Is there any specific manager whose team has a higher turnover? For example, you might find a certain manager's team is facing attrition but only of those employees’ whose performance is below par. You might want to send the manager for a coaching workshop rather than reprimanding them for not managing their people well.
2. Is there one source from where people hired are prone to leaving? For example, you might see a trend that people hired through a certain recruitment consultant leave within 3–4 years—does it tell you something?
3. Is there a trend in terms of age and turnover? For example, in one oil exploration company, such an analysis revealed that attrition is limited to those from the drilling division and financial services division. Those who left the drilling division were found to be older in age and those who left finance department younger in age. Those who left the drilling department left with VRS and got good jobs elsewhere because experienced people are in demand. Those who left the finance department left because the demand for young CAs and financial managers had gone up in the outside environment.

But, when one is dealing with employees one also knows that the reasons which encourage people to leave cannot be found out by such structured analysis only. Take this example—UPS found that they had a lot of attrition among its drivers who pick up and deliver the parcel services. They were a very critical part of the organization as they were most familiar with the routes and clients. Could UPS have done anything with this piece of information? Not till they knew why these people were leaving. They later discovered that the driver's job included loading and unloading which they hated. It then became easy for UPS to hire loaders and save the drivers from this work. This reduced the attrition rate remarkably. It is evident that there has to be a collection of softer data for a complete attritional analysis. One way of doing it is through the exit interview process. For example, Datamatics uses exit interview inputs as an integral part of attrition analysis where a further dissection and causal analysis is done. Trends of exits during various quarters, periods when exits peak, are analysed. Analysis is further used to investigate issues, initiate interventions, provide feedback to senior management and improve the processes.

Exit Interview

An exit interview is an interview with departing employees focussed on collecting relevant information about their reason for leaving, obtain feedback on their experience with the organization and get inputs for improvement. An exit interview should seek to capture information about what the real reason for an employee's exit is.

 

 

Benefits of an Exit Interview.   Exit interviews serve as a mechanism to assess and improve all aspects of a company's working environment, including culture, values, processes, systems, quality, employee's perceptions about management, career and development. It can provide useful insights about anything that determines the quality of the organization, in terms of its relationship with its staff, customers, suppliers, third parties, the general public and competitive positioning of the company in retaining and attracting talent. For example, if an employee leaves quoting that they felt they were underutilized for a job, it gives the HR and the line manager a cue to check if the qualification or experience level that is specified for hiring for a particular role needs a relook.

How Should an Exit Interview Be Conducted?   There are many methods that organizations adopt to conduct exit interviews. They can use a paper questionnaire, a face-to-face interview, an electronic feedback or automated surveys. Usually, organizations give a paper questionnaire to the departing employee as a mere formality. The employee also does not want to take the risk of invoking the ire of their previous bosses and respond with ‘personal reasons’ as the reason to leave and no quality feedback to the organization. It is, therefore, advisable that HR does a face-to-face exit interview to elicit quality information from the employee.

Recent Trends in the Practice and Use of Exit Interviews

• Use of outsourced services: Globally, the trend of getting exit interviews done by outsourced agencies is catching up. Apart from the obvious advantage of it being convenient for organizations, the larger reason is that the objectivity and neutrality of an outside agency makes the process more meaningful. Vendors offer corporates detailed reports that can correlate responses from departing employees and analyse it across various dimensions to pinpoint trends. In India, Mafoi Management Consultants introduced third-party exit interview services to India.
• Exit interviews after sometime and not at the time of leaving: Many organizations have realized that the process works best when departed employees are contacted two or three months after their last working date. The time lag helps the departing employee reconcile with any emotional trauma experienced at the time of leaving. An example of this is the Coca-Cola Alumni Programme of soft drink major Coke. As part of this initiative, Coke gets valuable feedback from people after they leave the company.
• Used as an opportunity to reinforce employer branding: When an employee leaves the organization, more often than not they have a lot of ill feelings for the organization. An exit interview is now being leveraged as an opportunity to treat the employee respectfully in a way that they leave the organization with may be ill will for the manager but not for the organization.

1. The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement: Better Business Performance by Sarah Cook.
2. http://www.gallup.com/consulting/126806/Q12-Meta-Analysis.aspx. This is a report prepared by Gallup after intensive research on ‘The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes’. This report also explains in detail the Gallup construct to measure employee engagement.
3. Handbook of Employee Engagement: Perspectives, Issues, Research and Practice by Simon L. Albrecht.

1. Which definition of employee engagement would you subscribe to and why?
2. What are the benefits of employee engagement? Explain how they impact the financial performance of the company.
3. What are various levels of employee engagement?
4. What are the drivers for employee engagement in an organization?
5. How can employee engagement be measured?
6. What is attrition? How is attrition analysis beneficial?

1. Group Exercise: Does employee engagement translate to employee retention? Do a research of the ‘Great Places to Work’ list of companies and present to the class your analysis of the correlation between these two.
2. Group Exercise: Find the drivers of engagement for students in a class. Then design a student engagement survey and administer it amongst your class. Present your findings to the class.

 

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‘Best Companies to Work for 2011: How Companies Create and Celebrate Fun at Work’, ET Bureau, 24 June 2011.

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Cooks, Sarah. Essential Guide to EE Engagement.

HCL Technologies: Employees First Customer Second. Darden Business Publishing, University of Virginia, 2008.

Jose, Tojo. 1999. ‘Unveiling the Hidden Truths about Exits’, Human Capital, July.

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Ramesh, P. R. 2011. ‘Running on Empty’, Economic Times, 7 July.

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Sengupta, Devina. 2011a. ‘Anti-Burnout Measures: Companies Provide Staff Counselling, Sabbaticals & No Fancy Targets’, The Economic Times, 12 July.

Sengupta, Devina. 2011b. ‘Performance Stress Drives Executives to Quick-Fix Drugs’, The Economic Times, 19 March.

Storey, John. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Strategic Human Resource Management. Taylor & Francis.

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Welch, J. and Welch, S. 2006. ‘Ideas the Welch Way: How Healthy is Your Company?’ Business Week, 126, 8 May.

 

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