Employee engagement is a key factor in the success of organizations. You can read about it in a lot of research, and since so many people say so, we took the opportunity of a recent project to share with you some thoughts on the subject.
People Engagement: what tools to measure it?
Many companies periodically measure the engagement of their people. They do this mostly with established tools, such as “Great Place to Work” and “Top Employer,” which are all the rage these days, but there is no shortage of other solutions as well.
Although with different characteristics, these tools presuppose a periodic survey (annual, biennial, …), and the identification of certain areas for improvement that should then trigger refinement actions by the company.
Recently, as HRI, we accompanied a large international company with Head Quarter and “heart” in Italy, precisely in this “deployment” exercise.
Specifically, the data collected allowed for a reading by professional family, age and seniority range in the company, geography, classification/level, and gender.
From the evidence of the data, we facilitated a workshop with HRs from different parts of the world to address which “global” and which “local” actions should be implemented (also with the goal of improving engagement results for the next survey).
The workshop was an excellent opportunity to discuss “high” issues and not only the urgent matters of the day-to-day, which too often crowd the agenda of HR Business Partners, accomplices also being geographic, cultural and time zone distances.
In the end, the workshop was intense, generative, effective, and the (ambitious) goals we had set ourselves were fully achieved by the working groups!
Engagement Survey, a powerful tool today… But with obstacles to overcome
When we did – as an HRI team – the retrospective exercise (as is our practice to do on projects), one reflection came to us spontaneously: it concerns the confirmation of the relevance of this approach for working on engagement issues.
In general, the timing of the Engagement Survey process is as follows:
- Summer / Fall -> detection (survey)
- Winter -> data processing
- Spring -> identification of actions to implement (hoping that some budget has been set aside)
- Summer -> informing people of what came out of the survey and what actions the company has decided to take (and so we are about 1 year after the survey is completed)
- Fall/Winter -> we begin to implement the actions that have been decided upon
- Spring -> any delays are made up and it is made clear to people that the actions have been done.
After 24 months, you go back to measuring….
In the meantime, however, about 20-30% of the population has gone out, just as much has come in, so the people who will respond are about 50% different.
Are we really sure that-in a technological, hyper-connected, fast-paced world-this is still the most effective mode?
Several solutions have appeared on the market in recent years, offering quick surveys on single topics to trigger single actions, or exploring people’s “feelings” in the workplace by analyzing interactions on internal communication platforms and other public sources.
The goal is to identify in an increasingly timely (as early as possible) and widespread (what characteristics do people have that they care about certain issues?) manner, in order to be able to give quick and personalized responses.
In the evolution we are all witnessing, the HR function is also shifting in the management of its activities from a “Process” logic (leading to standardization and operational efficiency) to a data-driven logic (to have a more targeted analysis and responses by population clusters), and progressively toward an approach supported by data but analyzed by Artificial Intelligence, which allows for personalized, extremely timely and – over time – “anticipatory” responses.
We can reapply this concept to several other “core” processes of the HR function, from Talent Attraction & Acquisition, to Training, Performance Management, Welfare, etc.
The Future of Employee Engagement (and HR Processes)
In the next few years we are likely to see the gradual decline of HR processes that require very long time horizons, toward faster and more personalized solutions.
It has already happened with the technological evolution that-as consumers-has already seen us adopt (more or less unconsciously) many AI-based solutions that anticipate our desires by offering personalized solutions.
And this fuels a demand from the Employee, or employees, towards the companies they work for, to receive increasingly personalized solutions and answers based on specific knowledge of each person’s needs.
AI technology is enabling what-until recently-was a utopian (or dystopian?) vision, and we will be able to see its evolution in the next 2-5 years (technology time estimates are frequently overestimated, so let’s expect even shorter time frames…)
Employee Engagement: data is useless without KPIs
A final thought concerns the concept of Engagement itself. To me, the use (even in the common usage of Italian companies) of a word that originally means “engagement” keeps lighting a light bulb. Then, in common usage, we also attach meanings such as “motivation,” “loyalty,” but also “well-being” and “happiness.”
…But at the end of the day, what do companies really want to measure?
This sounds like an almost philosophical question, but it becomes more pragmatic when we think about the actions that result from it. The actions to work on “loyalty” are very different from those to work on “happiness” for example …
It would be useful to start again from this question, “What do we really want to measure (and improve) and for what reasons?”, in order to better seize the opportunity of the HR transformation we are witnessing, sometimes without fully understanding it.
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