by Kevin Keohane

 Kevin Keohane is a Client Partner and Head of Brand and Employee Engagement at Publicis Group strategic communication agency SAS.  With more than 15 years' experience in business communication, Kevin is an Accredited Business Communication and a longtime member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).  In addition to his core expertise in communication, brand management, marketing and PR, he also has five years experience in HR and organisational development.   He holds an M.A. in Social Science and is a graduate of the Georgetown Institute on Political Journlism. 

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of employee engagement through focussing on three key fundament

 

  • engagement strategy
  • stakeholder analysis and
  • engagement as a journey

 

  

This chapter purposefully avoids deeply technical discussions, particularly about effectiveness measurement and ths selection, development and management of particular communication channels and engagement techniques. Instead, it focuses on ensuring that the strategic thinking that lies behind the tactical delivery of engagement efforts is robust and will help practitioners deliver engagement that will make a difference to the organisation and its people.

 What is engagement anyway?

Over the past decade, employee engagement has emerged as a term describing a range of organisational communication and development activities broadly related to internal communication, strategic human resource management, and internal marketing – helping people share information and participate effectively in where the organisation is going. 

There are many definitions of employee engagement, from the CIPD’s “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship)” to the IES’s “belief in the organisation; desire to work to make things better; understanding of business context and the ‘bigger picture’; respectful of, and helpful to, colleagues; willingness to ‘go the extra mile’; keeping up to date with developments in the field.” Best practice internal communication, human resources ‘people’ activities are inherently “engaging,” yet the boundaries between and among practices are sometimes fuzzy.  Because of this increasing overlap of responsibility and accountability for the “people” side of the business, getting employee engagement right has presented significant operational challenge for organisations. And getting it right has major business benefits.

  The problem with defining the term is that many of the definitions stray into a list of elements that demonstrate employee engagement and how to measure and enhance it rather than saying what it is.  These lists are generally, and naturally, biased towards the perspective of those defining the term.  Rather than descend into a lengthy discussion about the component elements that define employee engagement, it’s probably a good start to say that employee engagement is broadly how much people care about, and are willing to do something extra for:

 ·         their career

 ·         their company

 ·         their colleagues

 ·         their communities and

 ·         their customers. 

The foundation of the organisational “business case” for employee engagement is that the more people care about these things, the more effective they will be, the more effort they will make and the more they will enjoy delivering value with and to other stakeholders.

When it’s working well, therefore, employee engagement is a good thing for everyone on the list.  Employee engagement delivers:

 ·         commercial and cultural benefits to the organisation, and

 ·         personal and professional benefits to the stakeholders involved.

 

 

 

1.  Strategy.  Where do you begin?

There are numerous angles from which different practitioners approach employee engagement. This generally ranges from one extreme (highly rational) to the other (highly emotional).

 

Fig. Keohane 1 - Employee Engagement Approaches

 

From a process perspective, the most effective engagement efforts generally incorporate a range of approaches, rather than depending on a single approach.  Many employee engagement efforts struggle at this fundamental level, since often there are a range of activities, processes and initiatives in operation across different functions at any given time within the organisation which may or may not be conscious “engagement efforts”.

The reason this is important is that the approaches you select depend on your situation and your objectives.  As obvious as that sounds, all too often engagement efforts get underway without explicit links to the organisation’s strategy and a clear set of objectives.

Your employee engagement strategy is your answer to three simple, but big, questions that you should work with your leaders and colleagues to address:

  ·         What are the problems facing your organisation, or what opportunities does the organisation want to capitalise on, that you believe are connected to involving people?

 ·         To the maximum degree you can quantify this, what is the impact of these problems on:

 

o        your people

 

o        their company

 

o        their colleagues

 

o        their communities and

 

o        their customers?

 

·         If you solve these problems or tackle these opportunities, what is the benefit for the organisation and its stakeholders – and what will this mean for their future?

  

Not only will this simple framework (based on Mahan1 footnote Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play, Mahan Khalsa, Pub: Franklin Covey; 1999.) help you define the issues and their impact on the business, it will also help you define the cost implications of the issues and the relative value of providing a solution.  This helps you establish in relative terms:

 

·         the relative business cost and the impact of the issues on the organisation

 ·         who “owns” the issues – and who they affect among stakeholders

 ·         the resources needed to deliver a solution.

 

 One of the most important outcomes emerging from answering these questions is generally a realisation that no single part of the organisation actually “owns” the engagement agenda – although many would like to believe that they do!  This is why best engagement efforts generally involve a cross-functional team from across the business, so that the engagement agenda (and accountability for it) is shared across key functions – human resources, internal communications, organisational development, information technology, marketing, corporate communications and the leadership/strategy team. 

 

 It’s also why the reverse is true – where one function believes it is the sole owner of the employee engagement agenda, engagement efforts tend to be less effective because:

 

·         efforts come from only one functional perspective, so they are not integrated and aligned and address only part of the issue,

 ·         efforts have less buy-in and commitment from other parts of the organisation,

 ·         efforts have less impact since they have fewer resources deployed from a single function.

 ·         efforts are inefficient as different functions pursue different approaches and objectives.

 

 2.  Strategic centre of gravity

 Once you have agreed the issues your employee engagement effort are going to address, assessed their impact on the organisation and thus the “size” of the solution required, and aligned key functions behind the effort with a set of shared objectives, a key question arises: what actually sits at the centre of the engagement effort?

  

This is where it can all get quite complicated -- and potentially political.  There are a number of core drivers you can select to form the main focus of the effort.  These include:

 

  ·         Your vision

 ·         Your mission

 ·         Your values

 ·         Your commercial business strategy

 ·         Your customers/clients

 ·         Your people agenda

 ·         Your leaderships’ style

 ·         Your corporate responsibility agenda

 ·         Your brand

 ·         … and many more.

 

 Many employee engagement practitioners have a deep belief in the supremacy of one or more of these potential central drivers – again, naturally biased towards the perspective from which they view and approach engagement professionally.  It’s probable that HR professionals will see the natural centre of gravity in the human capital corner, while marketing may well believe it’s all about living the brand, and IT believes it is about the user experience and improved functionality. 

However, where to tie your engagement strategy depends a lot on your situation (of which, by now, you should have a pretty clear picture).  Fundamentally, there are some issue-based guidelines you can consider:

 ·         Urgency.  “Burning platforms” provide a context where commercial strategy and customer-centricity may be more appropriate than other drivers.

 ·         Complexity.  Where numerous initiatives in the strategy and vision have been launched or tried before, it’s best to go with the most simple and over-arching approach – often leading with Vision (if lack of direction is a key issue) or Values (if inconsistent behaviour and execution is a key issue).

 ·         Opportunity.  Business strategy and brand-centric approaches can be powerful tools in moving an organisation into a new space.

 ·         Alignment. In a people business or an organisation where the product or service has become homogenised, your brand can be a key driver, particularly when it is closely tied in to HR and OD processes.

 

While there is no single rule for which approach is best, the following table may be useful in considering your “centre of gravity.”

Fig. Keohane 2 - Engagement Centre of Gravity

This is a very broad guide to spur your thinking -- you’ll notice that some approaches appear in more than one place.  The bottom line is that there is no “one size fits all” approach to employee engagement – but it’s important to know on what platform your approach is founded.

Why is a “centre of gravity” so important to an engagement strategy?  Considering the increasingly wide range of stakeholders that engagement efforts need to connect with, simplicity is not a “nice to have.”  Complexity kills engagement efforts – and, unfortunately, most change-related engagement efforts are fraught with masses of complexity and scores of work streams.

Looking at the list of possible employee engagement drivers above -- vision, mission, values, strategy, customers/clients, people agenda, corporate responsibility, brand – chances are your organisation is already communicating about all of these, and more, and probably all at more or less the same time.  It’s no wonder employees can be confused.

As a stakeholder, there is a lot of information to process and try to make relevant to one’s day to day role.  While the difference between Vision and Mission, Strategy and Brand might seem very clear to a few enlightened people, the reality is that most people have a hard time understanding how they are different, and why the difference even matters.  As Scott Adams says in The Dilbert Principle, if you’re not careful you can have people doing Mission things when they should really be doing Vision things, and vice versa.

Therefore, having one central organising thought, or centre of gravity, or big idea, to link your efforts to helps ensure that it’s easy to understand and remember.  While all of the corporate initiatives mentioned should be implicitly linked, a centre of gravity makes the links clear and explicit.  It’s an organising idea.

This is potentially the most challenging part of crafting an employee engagement strategy – working through the dizzying complexity of organisations, considering the objectives, and gaining either consensus or a mandate to hang your hat on what some stakeholders will consider to be the ‘wrong’ strategic peg.  This is where you’ll need nerves of steel, tolerance for ambiguity, diplomacy skills, and a single-minded determination that you will not allow the organisation to wallow – or revel – in its complexity.

A great example of this is Tesco, one of the world’s most successful retailers.  Retail is fast moving, fraught with complexity around supply chain, pricing and a myriad of other issues, but Tesco manages to ensure every employee from Board to Till is clear on a core set of ideas: Every little helps – Treat people how we like to be treated – No one tried harder for customers.  Of course, there is a larger framework – but the basic core idea is indisputably cle

 

Some examples of powerful “centres of gravity”

 

Organisation

 

Internal centre of gravity

 

Drivers

 

Vodafone

 

Red, Rock Solid, Restless.

 

The organisation’s brand essence permeates every facet of organisational life, not just marketing.  Translatable across geographies, cultures, job functions and goals, it’s a great example of making values personal to the organisation and its people.  Red is about passion.  Rock Solid is about reliability.  Restless is about challenging and never settling for good enough.

 

·           External market conditions – a need to be clearly differentiated in a fast moving, converging marketplace

 

·         Internal requirements – multiple operating companies around the world with different strengths and market conditions, all requiring a simple set of clear rules by which to evaluate their behaviours and activities

BT

 

Being first for customer service means we all must share these values:

 

Inspiring

 

Straightforward

 

Heart

 

Trustworthy

 

Helpful

 

Inspiring

 

·         Values can be shared in a very complex business with a wide range of different roles

 

Apple.

 

Think different.

 

People before systems.

 

Man is the true creator of change in this world.  He should be above systems and structures, not subordinate to them.

 

·         For Apple, it is not about the technology.  It’s about   people and the role  technology plays in their lives.        

 

 

 

3.  Stakeholders

One powerful way to help focus your thinking and decisions in this area, and across the entire engagement effort, is to be very clear about your key stakeholders – who they are, what they need to do, what this will mean for the organisation, and how you will involve them in the process. A stakeholder analysis is simply thinking through who are all the people that are affected by the employee engagement effort, how they are affected, and what you want them to think, do, or do differently as a result.

 

Depending on your objectives, your stakeholders may not be limited to employees of your organisation.  Often, engagement efforts need to take into account other stakeholders who may be affected by changes in the way people inside your organisation think and behave. 

These can include:

 ·         Your organisation

o        Senior executives and leaders

o        Business and people managers

o        Employees (and their families and friends)

o        Contractors (and their families and friends)

    o        Former employees

o        Future (potential) employees

 

·         Other organisations

        o        Outsourced functions (HR, IT, etc.)

        o        Suppliers

        o        Partners

        o        Regulators and government & related bodies

 ·         The broader community

        o        The investment community

        o        Shareholders / investors

        o        Environmental and CSR interests

 ·         Your customers/consumers or clients

        o        Potential customers or clients

        o        Current customers or clients

        o        Past customers or clients

 

·         Your competitors

        o        Direct ‘traditional’ competitors

        o        Non-traditional and indirect competitors

 

Fig. Keohane 3 - Stakeholder Analysis Framework

 

 

Your internal stakeholders

While it is important to do a broader stakeholder analysis for the reasons noted, employee engagement is by definition about your employees.  Like any internal communication and change effort, it is imperative that you know your audience.  Although it is desirable to segment your employees as much as possible, using both quantitative and quantitative information, three key groups are critical to consider – leaders, line managers and all employees.

 

Leaders – It has become a truism that leaders must “walk the talk” – practice what they preach.  What is equally important is that they buy into and not only understand, but actively demonstrate and champion, your engagement effort.  If your leaders are saying one thing and doing another, your engagement effort will suffer.

 

 Managers  – Most current communication research demonstrates time and again that the most important and trusted communicator to employees is the line manager.  Engagement efforts should include this group not only as an audience to inform, but a group to equip and empower with the tools to ensure employees can make the engagement effort relevant to their part of the business and their day-to-day jobs.

 

All employees – Much research in this field indicates that at any given time, only 1/3 of employees are actively “engaged” in their jobs and their organisations.  The remaining 2/3 are either not actively engaged, or worse, could even be actively disengaged.  Making sure that the engagement effort provides a clear and compelling case is important, but equally important is making sure that employee understand what the effort means to the organisation, their part of the organisation, their team and their own role on a very real, day to day basis.

 

 

Fig. Keohane 5 - Critical Audiences

 

Messaging frameworks

 

It’s therefore a good idea for any engagement effort to make use of simple messaging frameworks.  These are flexible frameworks, tied to the centre of gravity, consisting of:

 

 

·         Key message – the one overarching idea that everybody needs to “get”

 

·         Supporting messages – no more than three to five more specific supporting points

 

·         Evidence / Proof Points / Reasons to Believe – for each supporting message, what is the evidence that the message can be believed?

 

 

 

 

fig. Keohane 6 - Messaging Framework

Such frameworks can be overarching, for the entire engagement effort, or smaller versions can be created for particular engagement situations.  The key to their effective use is not that they are necessarily used word-for-word in a mechanistic manner, but rather than engagement and communication efforts align themselves to these ideas, rather than generating new and potentially inconsistent messages.

  

4.  The employee engagement journey

An area where employee engagement efforts fail is where leaders believe that change can be achieved through short-term programmes and initiatives. Such efforts are generally characterised by large, highly-visible launches including significant events, multimedia presentations, and communication cascade efforts that run for a short period of time. If such efforts are not sustained and adequate “follow up” maintained, they tend to be treated with cynicism and ultimately disregarded by employees and managers alike.

Successful engagement efforts begin with the understanding that in order to succeed, change takes time – and is a journey. There are numerous models describing this journey, but most of it is based on social marketing theory – that is, that in order to influence behaviour, people must go through three stages of a “K-A-B” model:

  • Knowledge – Stakeholders must become aware of what is happening, what the change or engagement effort is, and what they will see happening across the organisation, to and by whom, over what time period. This is the “launch” part of most engagement programmes, and is also where much of the effort is focussed – often to the detriment of the subsequent stages.
  • Attitude – Once stakeholders have internalised the knowledge, they need to form an attitude about what they know. Generally, this means they must see tangible, positive evidence that the organisation is serious about and committed to the programme. Evidence of behaviour change emerges in key leaders, managers, and employees as, for example, processes begin to evolve and changes are made.
  • Behaviour – Once stakeholders have internalised the information and formed an attitude about the change and what it means to them, it is essential that they are given the tools, guidelines and support needed to change their behaviours. The organisation must recognise and reward the right behaviours, and must be visibly intolerant of behaviours that do not align with achieving the objectives behind the overall engagement efforts.
Some models break this journey into four, five, six, even seven or more distinct phases, but the idea is the same: sustain your effort and manage it differently through different stages.

Change the order

An interesting thought to ponder regarding the so-called “K-A-B” model is that is does not necessarily need to run in this order.

For example, it is possible to change Behaviours first, which then results in an Attitude which over time results in Knowledge. A perfect example of this is military training, where doing things in a certain, uniform way is drilled into recruits, who then grow to realise why it is important to do it this way, and eventually appreciate the strategic thinking behind doing it that way.

Similarly, many advertising and marketing approaches begin with attempting to create an Attitude about an idea, which then may result in either Knowledge (seeking more information about it) or Behaviour (trial and adoption of the product/service).

Depending on your objectives and situation, you may well want to consider the implications of this on your engagement strategy.

Giving your engagement effort teeth

 

The uncomfortable truth is that a properly developed and implemented engagement effort will inevitably not only reflect the business strategy and the organisation's operating model and processes -- over time it should actually start to drive and change them. In particular, strategic human resource management should be affected, since behaviour change across different roles in different parts in the business will inevitably result in changing needs in performance planning, people and career development, recruiting processes, and indeed reward and recognition practices and policies.

For this reason it is critical to ensure that the effort remains cross-functional, so that engagement is managed as a business operational imperative -- not just an internal marketing programme. Its internal KPIs (based on a combination of, for example, employee survey results and engagement drivers, as well as business performance metrics) should directly link to, and its success evaluated on the basis of, external Key Performance Indicators such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, spend, share price performance, and so on.

The employee journey

It’s also important to think about the journey any employee makes in their overall relationship with the organisation. The reason this is important is that often employee engagement efforts only deal with one aspect of the employee journey, leaving critical personal experiences about the organisation to operational processes which may not reflect the engagement strategy and objectives.

Most frequently this is seen in three areas:

  1. Where there is little alignment between the employer brand -- and its expression in relation to the consumer/corporate brand (that is, reasons to join the organisation) - and the internal communication, HR processes and engagement efforts.
  2. Where there is focus on employee engagement to improve employee satisfaction and effectiveness regarding career development and business operations, but without reference to the externalisation on the consumer/corporate brand. In other words, engagement efforts that are all about the employee experience (e.g., I have a friend at work; pay and benefits are fair; my manager listens to me) and not about how each employee should be making an explicit contribution to delivering the brand.
  3. Where little or no attention is paid to how the exit is handled, whether on good or less favourable terms, in creating an advocate for the organisation or a detractor.
The ten stages of the employee journey

In broad terms, thinking through how your engagement effort applies to people at each of the following stages of the employee journey can provide great insight into who needs to be involved and what actions need to be taken.

  1. A person knows something about your organisation, or learns about it, through a variety of touch points. These may include your consumer/corporate brand, product and service experience, word of mouth, recruitment advertising, or online experience.
  2. At some stage, the person considers your organisation as a place to potentially work. They seek information about your organisation – again from a range of sources, most of which your organisation has no control whatsoever over.
  3. The person decides to find out more about you, and to seek a job offer from your organisation.
  4. The person experiences your attraction and recruitment process.
  5. The person decides to join you or not join you.
  6. The person is inducted into the organisation and experiences “on boarding”.
  7. The person experiences their initial time with your organisation, including initial perceptions, setting of initial goals, objectives and expectations, and forms a picture as to whether what you offered is what they receive.
  8. The person continues to develop in their role (or not)
  9. At some stage, the person considers looking for a different role of challenge – with your organisation or with another organisation. Or, the organisation considers finding a different role for the person with itself or another organisation!
  10. The person leaves employment with your organisation – and may (or may not) consider rejoining at another stage, continuing to advocate your organisation as an employer, and its products and services.

 

Summary and conclusion

 

Through looking at three key considerations – Strategy, Stakeholders and the Employee Journey – this chapter provides a way of looking at developing and managing employee engagement.  These three fundamentals are key to delivering a successful engagement effort.

 

·            Strategy, because you need to be clear on where you are, where you are going, why you are going there and how you will get there

 

      Clear centre of gravity, because complexity kills employee engagement

  

            Stakeholders, because engagement an communication is ultimately about understanding and influencing the people involved

 

·         The employee journey, because engagement takes different shapes and approaches at different moments in the organisation’s and the individual’s lifecycle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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