Three engagement mistakes you're probably making

Employee engagement programs really can be a "silver bullet" for struggling organisations, but many employers continue to use engagement surveys that ask the wrong questions, effectively robbing themselves of valuable insight, an expert says.

Speaking at a breakfast function in Sydney earlier this month, Right Management senior vice president of talent management, Scott Ahlstrand, said that whether a CEO is looking for more productivity or more profitability, greater customer satisfaction or a safer work place, increasing engagement will help.

Many organisations, however, find their engagement programs produce encouraging results in wave one or two of their strategy, but then plateau, he says.

He says there are a number of common mistakes to avoid, including three associated with a traditional survey approach.

Mistake 1: Failing to link the survey "directly and immediately" to business and workforce strategies

According to Ahlstrand, most organisations still fail to "directly and immediately" link the content of their engagement surveys to both their business and workforce strategies.

If there is a link, it tends to be from an outcome perspective - "we hope to accomplish this" - rather than "an intimate strategic perspective on how the process can give you insight".

Further, most organisations "obsess" over comparison rather than improvement - they focus on the benchmark instead of year-on-year improvement and what that means for the business.

Ahlstrand also warns never to release a survey unless it's "the perfect survey for you".

Don't use surveys from outside suppliers aimed at getting three or four staple priorities for the annual report, and don't just rehash the questions asked last year, he says.

Before devising the survey, the organisation should conduct a quantitative exercise that asks the executive team and HR leaders about a couple of key issues.

The first is, "What is critical to the long-term future of the organisation from a business and workforce perspective?" In other words, "What do we have to do well at this organisation in order to succeed and accelerate our business strategy?"

The second question, which is equally important, is: "What's our current capability?" and this consideration includes "What's critical for our future that we're not very good at?"

These questions will help provide "tactical insight" that can be used to inform the engagement survey, Ahlstrand says.

Mistake 2: Asking all employees the same questions

Another common practice is to ask all employees the same questions, which has very limited value, Ahlstrand told the breakfast.

Employers commonly assume that asking different employees different questions will disengage them if they find out about it, but this is simply not the case, he says.

The standard employee engagement survey asks all employees the same 40 questions; "the survey you should be using" asks 35 core questions and five variable ones.

"[Give] up five questions. Then create modules for every degree of strategic or tactical insight that your previous quantitative survey on strategic priorities indicated.

"So let's create five questions on innovation, or knowledge management, or collaboration, or thought leadership, or diversity - but let's just not ask it of everyone."

In some cases, random sampling will be appropriate, in others stratified sampling (selecting people at random, then making sure every business unit is represented) will be more suitable, Ahlstrand says.

Other possibilities include geographic sampling (only asking employees in a particular country or city a particular question), functional sampling (only asking workers with a particular job function) or experiential sampling (only asking people who have, for example, completed a particular training course).

Instead of getting insight into 40 questions, employers can get answers to 140 questions, with no additional burden on employees.

A good question has explanatory power - "it indicates a link or a lead to a business outcome that you're targeting", he adds.

"That's very important, but what I would say is, we obsess so much on that that we forget that a good question has several other criteria that are just as important to your people."

A good question, for example, should be right for the organisation's unique circumstances - "it's not a question that was generically included or that you're forcing on your population; it's something that feels intuitive and acceptable to them".

And for every question, an employee should at least be able to say, "I understand why you're asking this", Ahlstrand says.

It might not be important to them personally, but they should be able to understand the question and see how it could be important to some workers.

To avoid answers based on misunderstandings, questions should also be clearly and simply worded - a year-eight student should be able to understand the language - and users should be able to "curser over" key words for definitions, he adds.

Mistake 3: Asking questions without knowing what to do about the answers

"Lastly, and by far most importantly, for every question you ask you should know what you're going to do about it before you ask the question," Ahlstrand says.

Professionals fail to do this "all the time", he says; instead they should "take the test before they take the test".

If an organisation scores low on a measure, HR should have already planned a response, by knowing, for example, exactly what senior management should do about it, or what concrete steps managers could take.

But organisations should avoid relying solely on managers to solve problems and increase engagement.

"I think right now we totally put it all on the manager - we put almost all levels of engagement increase on the manager and very little on senior leadership or mid-level leadership," Ahlstrand says.

Employers also try to make each of their managers into something they're not - for example "a focus group expert who's going to lead this brilliant focus group with their team and come up with these brilliant unique innovative actions", he says.

Only five-to-10 per cent of managers might succeed at this, but the "vast majority" will be mediocre, and five-to-10 per cent will be "hopeless".

Trying to force this kind of thing on managers is "incredibly inefficient" and bound to stress most of them out, Ahlstrand warns.

Further, organisations must accept that not everything is within the power of a manager. Problems relating to compensation and benefits, or the tools and equipment a worker needs to do their job, should be handed to senior leaders, he says.

Reference: 19 August 2013 HR Daily