Employee Engagement Strategies - Recap

Report-Back from September 17 Meeting

Linda Heffernan, director of Change Initiatives for the University of Arizona , and Daphne Gilman, senior events coordinator for BIO5 Institute and owner of Palm Cottage Creative, led a roundtable discussion over lunch on how to improve employee engagement. They defined three levels of engagement and addressed the role of business communicators in developing it. 

The levels, based on a Johns Hopkins Hospital engagement survey, are

• Engaged: These employees are loyal and psychologically committed to the organization. They are more productive and more likely to stay with their company for at least a year.
• Moderately engaged: These employees may be productive but are not psychologically connected to the organization. They are more likely to leave.
• Disengaged: These employees are physically present but psychologically absent. They are unhappy with their work situation and insist on sharing this unhappiness with their colleagues.

Engagement and its impact
An engaged employee devotes considerable discretionary effort to bettering the organization. As a result, organizations with the most engaged employees universally have

• more dedicated discretionary effort
• low turnover
• high loyalty
• lower rates of on-the-job accidents.

Drivers of engagement
Top members of the organization must drive engagement. Top managers need to make sure the CEO understands the bottom-line effect engagement has on the organization; for example, the high cost of replacing an employee and the allure an engaging organization has to top-quality potential employees.  

The role of business communicators

• Work with the organization’s top managers and human resources staff to determine the best ways to communicate engagement to employees.
• Emphasize commonalities between departments.
• Act as internal consultants to exploit engagement opportunities.

Engines of engagement
An organization needs to effectively communicate its mission so that employees can see how they fit in to it and its mission. 

Its BEST communicators need to do the communicating. While the CEO may not have the skills to communicate the mission to the employees, his or her top managers must constantly communicate, project and reinforce the mission honestly and acknowledge realities within the organization by:

• not sugar-coating situations
• being direct
• emphasizing “we’re all in this together.”

 Ways to communicate engagement

• Newsletters should highlight commonalities between departments, but should not try to create connections or interdependencies where none exist. Keys to an effective newsletter:
  • obvious benefits
  • extremely user friendly
  • purposeful items
  • appropriate style; for example, technical writing for engineers.
• Occasional e-mail communications should
  • come from CEO and top managers
  • be used strategically.
• Regular meetings incorporating appealing activities
  • must have purpose, even if it is just to have fun.
  • be careful of tone. “Mandatory meetings” may convey a gloom-and-doom message.
  • have “fun” activities appropriate to audience and engage employees on their terms.
  • promote interaction between departments.

Identify and work with engaged employees to

• help convey the organization’s engagement
• make them models for other employees
• seek their input on ways to engage others.

The IABC Research Foundation and Buck Consultants Employee Engagement Survey that was distributed at the meeting highlighted other social media that organizations are using. To view the survey, go to http://www.iabc.com/rf/pdf/EmployeeEngagement.pdf.