TM - August 2007 - (Page 22) recruitment & retention assessment & evaluation compensation & benefits performance management learning & development succession planning The challenge for the retailer now is to not hold corporate pride days or pep rallies but rather to get at the underlying factors contributing to (and detracting from) pride in the company. Here, the openended survey comments and follow-up small group discussions are proving invaluable — this is good insight and will help the firm build engagement. Validation of business outcomes supported by hard data is the next step for the company, and it should provide far greater line of sight between employee engagement and ultimate business success. Effective linkage must be made at the level that hard data are available. A global luxury hotel brand links its engagement results to measures of quality, customer satisfaction and profitability. Analysis of engagement scores identifies two key drivers of customer satisfaction among elements of its engagement framework: “Employee facilities provide opportunity for community and sharing” and “What I do is important to company’s overall success.” These findings make sense in the context of their business model, and they illustrate the continuum of engagement required for fully engaged employees. Getting Personal low-performing companies (how the companies are assigned to these categories is often highly subjective). These studies invariably point to high engagement scores as a driver of high-performing companies. Your antenna should go up about now! Getting the Cart before the Horse Do engaged employees make companies successful, or do successful companies make employees Talking Back: Tegan Jones It’s well-known that when employees enjoy their work, their performance improves. Good relationships with managers, team members and senior leaders also help increase worker engagement and productivity. In a large company, however, it can be difficult to determine which factors are tied most closely to employee engagement. To truly understand the cause of engagement problems, identify employee concerns and make the adjustments required to achieve their goals, companies must get meaningful feedback from their workforce. With 35,000 employees in 11 countries, BMO Financial Group, the parent company of Bank of Montreal and Harris Bank, is no stranger to this challenge. To get a clear understanding of its level of employee engagement, the organization uses its annual employee survey to gauge workers’ opinions about the company, their managers, their work groups, their jobs and company interaction with customers. April Taggart, senior vice president of talent management and diversity, said learning where employees stand on these issues can help the company determine where it needs to focus its efforts as it continues to grow and evolve. “We’re trying to become a higher-performing company, so this is a very important feedback tool for us to let us know whether our employees think we’re on the right track,” she said. Making individual-level linkages can deliver significant additional insight. This can be supported easily through confidential data-collection and dataintegration methods. A unique identifier for each individual respondent links survey responses to his or her performance-rating data. The value companies find in these individual-level links causes many of them to opt for this type of confidential (but not anonymous) survey approach. Thoughtfully implemented through an independent third-party provider, they access added insight without suffering a participation decline. A financial services firm links individual performance rating scores in this way to its survey response data. This approach has enabled the firm to identify two key engagement elements that drive superior performance: “Trusting your immediate supervisor” and “Receiving adequate training.” These findings make intuitive sense (interestingly, they also illustrate the continuum of engagement from emotional to rational), and they have allowed the organization to focus its efforts in these critical areas. Raise Your Antenna Engagement surveys often fall short in making compelling links to desired business outcomes because they don’t integrate valid and incontestable external data such as production and quality numbers, financial results or customer satisfaction scores. Good external information often doesn’t exist or is too hard to get in a form — or at a level of analysis — that works. As a result, external validation studies often resort to generalized categories such as comparisons between high-performing and engaged? Are these linkage studies getting the proverbial cart before the horse? If you were a part of Apple in the early 1980s taking on IBM (and the world), wouldn’t you have been an engaged employee? How about if you were working at Google today? Successful business models clearly hold the potential to create the conditions for employee engagement. Conversely, engaged employees alone might not 22 August 2007 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com
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