The future of employee engagement

1.1 What engagement research doesn’t tell us

No-one disputes the engagement research findings. In fact, at a fundamental, intuitive level, they make perfect sense. If a team member feels committed to the work they do and the company they work for, of course they’ll go the extra mile.

But the research is retrospective and observational. It tells us there is a link between engaged employees and better business outcomes. What it doesn’t tell us is:

1. Which specific behaviours and beliefs are linked to which specific outcomes
2. Or which specific areas businesses can address to improve employee engagement, and therefore business outcomes

In other words, simply knowing that engaged teams are better for business does not give you any information about how to improve specific business results.

1.2 Frustrations for senior leaders and teams alike

To many senior leaders, measuring employee engagement has felt woolly, and like there’s a piece missing. However much they’ve liked the idea of engaged teams, they simply haven’t been able to link what people say in surveys to value in the business.

This has caused frustration for some – and even calls for companies to disregard engagement altogether.

Peter Clark, organisational scientist and co-founder of Qlearsite, says the situation hasn’t just been frustrating for leaders. It’s been deeply unsatisfactory for teams too.

He says: “In a pulsing process, you’re always asking these questions. But respondents can feel that at the top level, the company isn’t always listening.”

The unfortunate irony, of course, is that if a survey cannot produce actionable information, the people responding to it can feel less important to their organisations.

2.0 Why didn’t Engagement 2.0 deliver?

“There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of engagement”, says Clark. “But the thinking behind traditional engagement surveys and approaches is 30 years old.”

He adds: “Traditional surveys have not done a good enough job of connecting the challenges of everyday working life to the language that leaders speak, so that they can really connect them to underlying reasons for lower or higher engagement across different themes and areas of their business.

“If you have that common language you can close the gap and convert a grumble from being seen as unconstructive criticism to feedback where you can immediately take action and start to make improvements.

2.1 No link between employee voice and value creation

“Lots of these surveys are revealing important elements of the employee voice, but they’re really struggling to connect that back into business leaders’ language. Which means leaders don’t know how to convert this information into meaningful change.”

In other words, traditional approaches to engagement don’t give you a way to plug the voice of your employees directly into the strategic management process. With traditional engagement approaches, there is no link between the voice of the employee and value creation.

2.2 The timing of traditional surveys can be off

If an HR team’s sole focus is boosting satisfaction numbers, the whole engagement piece can become disconnected from the decision-making process quite quickly.

“Management teams process big, strategic changes in organisations probably once every six months or once every quarter at the most,” says Clark.

So if you offer up imprecise satisfaction results the week after a major initiative has launched, you may as well not have bothered. In fact, it’s slightly worse than that, because your teams have spent time giving input that cannot be acted upon.

Learn how to increase employee engagement survey participation

2.3 You need to ask the right questions at the right time

‘Asking the right questions at the right time’ is a neat little phrase. But it represents a significant shift in employee engagement thinking. It expresses the fundamentally different approach to good employee engagement that’s the basis of Engagement 3.0.

Instead of asking traditional questions that give people an opportunity to say how happy they are in the workplace, Engagement 3.0 directly links feelings and behaviours to business outputs.

So instead of asking, “How satisfied are you?” it asks specific open-ended questions like, “Do you have the right tools to do your job?” – and then connects that question to levels of customer service, attrition or absenteeism.

In the traditional employee engagement survey scenario, Bob would only be able to tell his organisation that he was unhappy – and Magneto Plus Plc would have had limited ways to respond.

In Employee Engagement 3.0, he’d be able to tell the organisation that he couldn’t do his job properly because the system keeps crashing. Our advanced analytics would then link Bob’s dissatisfaction with a likelihood of him leaving the organisation or taking time off sick. We’d also be able to link his dissatisfaction to probable decreases in productivity.

All of which means that Bob’s input – or rather, the aggregated comments of Bob and all his colleagues – can be translated into likely, costed outcomes.

So Carole would be able to tell the board that attrition is costing £X and that an intervention costing £Y would result in savings of £Z. Suddenly, Alex is listening.

Read more on our blog about pulse survey pitfalls and asking questions at the right time.

3.0 Engagement 3.0: The promise finally comes true

What Engagement 3.0 does is provide the missing piece – the hard data that shows where value can be unlocked.

And it’s in Engagement 3.0 that Qlearsite is leading the way. Our combination of advanced business thinking and sophisticated analytics technology gives senior business leaders a tangible, quantifiable way to use the voice of the employee to drive strategy.

Clark says: “Every leader wants to engage their people and put them at the centre of the process but what they’ve never been able to do is link what people are saying to the value.

“Qlearsite changes this because we have a robust methodology that allows us to link questions to value drivers.”

3.1 Turning what employees say into useable, objective data

The Qlearsite approach is based on our QlearFit framework for understanding specifically which behaviours and characteristics of a business drive growth. This framework allows us to ask questions about topics we know are scientifically linked to growth and productivity.

© Qlearsite 2019

So our framework guides us to ask the right questions. And our advanced analytics technology lets us unearth the deepest, most specific insights so that senior leaders can prioritise and allocate resources.

Clark says: “We’re creating new, powerful metrics that business leaders can use. Which means leaders can now truly build people into the change they want to make and factor people into business priorities.

“When this happens, people actually feel heard. You can show that you’re listening, that their input gets results – and that builds trust. It’s a virtual circle.”

3.2 Opening channels between teams and senior leaders

“This whole approach becomes really effective when you place a continuous listening strategy at the heart of business decision-making. This is when you’re listening at scale, asking the right questions at the right time and building the voice of your employees into the management decision cycle,” says Clark.

He adds: “If people give voice to things that leaders can take action on, they can create change. People feel like they’re part of a process of improvement and they become more engaged, they trust more.

“Then the company grows in value and trust – and you get to a situation of what people always thought engagement would deliver – which is better, healthier companies full of productive, innovative people who are connected not just to their work but also to the agenda of the whole organisation.

To learn more about Qlearsite’s employee engagement framework and how it can enhance your engagement approach, please use the link below to learn more.