TM - August 2007 - (Page 24) recruitment & retention assessment & evaluation compensation & benefits performance management learning & development succession planning Figure 2: Optimizing for Success: Strategic Context for Employee Engagement Conditions for Engagement properly designed and implemented workforce survey programs should be an integral part of the journey to business success. Strategy Deployment Superior Financial Performance Employee Engagement Customer Loyalty Strategy Deployment Operational Execution We don’t expect all employees to participate in strategy development (that would clearly be a recipe for disaster), but we certainly should expect them to be involved in the deployment of that strategy. Otherwise, how could the strategy take hold? Tapping into employees’ experiences with strategy deployment is critical to business success, allowing for invaluable feedback direct from the front lines. Four strategy-deployment elements or factors matter most: • Clarity of Goals: Is the company’s strategy communicated effectively to guide employees’ day-to-day work? Discretionary Effort Positive Experience • Operational Exe c u t i o n : Organizing properly for the journey. • Customer Loyalty: Validating the journey’s value. In this framework, employee engagement is an integral part of a bigger concept, as Figure 2 depicts. Strategy deployment creates the appropriate conditions to foster employee engagement that will promote the discretionary effort required for operational execution to deliver positive experiences that yield greater customer loyalty — all of which drive superior financial performance. A Journey Not an Event , • Market Conditions: Is the company’s strategy responding to “conditions on the ground” as employees experience them in their day-to-day work? • Competitive Position: Is the company’s strategy responding to the competitive climate and providing differentiated solutions as employees experience them in their day-to-day work? • Innovation and Change: Is the company’s strategy creating the conditions for innovation and change required for success? A consumer apparel firm with a legendary brand and great employee work environment wasn’t worried about engagement. “Our employees love working here,” one senior executive said. “Our turnover is in the single digits, and we literally get tens of thousands of applicants a year looking to work here.” But the company had made several bad strategic bets that had damaged its channel partner and customer relations. Management was worried about successfully repositioning the business strategy to reinvigorate the product offering, as well as reignite channel and customer excitement. “If we can communicate our new direction effectively to our organization, our people will execute passionately and can help us improve the strategy along the way,” the senior executive said. For this company, the workforce survey program is an early-feedback system that tells whether the strategy repositioning is taking hold and how it should be fine-tuned for business success. Operational Execution The metaphor of a journey is appropriate, and the focus of such journeys is not employee engagement — it’s business success. An effective workforce survey program should capture vital knowledge about issues beyond engagement itself. Strategy deployment and operational execution are just as important to business success, and without optimizing performance along all three dimensions (strategy, engagement and execution), business success is far from assured. Employees can provide critical insight on all three, and the company’s flagship workforce survey program is a great vehicle for this. Too often, the employee survey program is viewed as a necessary (if tedious) event, disconnected from the important stuff the organization is doing. This is an understandable lament, but it shouldn’t be the case. Advances in survey process and technology have largely relieved the implementation tedium. They’ve also made possible the kind of data (timely, dynamic and relational) on which other functions depend to make business decisions and arrive armed for executive-level meetings. Survey results now can be available instantly, linked to hard data and delivered through powerful tools that support on-the-fly analysis to spot issues, seize opportunities and avert problems. In sum, Highly engaged employees can tolerate a lot of operational inefficiency — accepting long-established defect levels rather than taking the risk to do something differently or constantly reinventing the 24 August 2007 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com
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