| The frequency at which the word
"engagement" appears in any discussion about employee communication has begun to
make me wonder whether we clearly understand what the term means. More importantly, do we
understand what it means to our clients, particularly CEOs, when they talk about
engagement? We have engagement tools, but can we really say that these tools actually
engage employees in the process of change? Or are employees merely engaged with the tool
itself?
There is only one question that you need ask yourself to
find out whether your employee communication strategies are going to engage employees,
rather than simply inform. That question is: Can you establish whether the tools and
methods you are using to communicate with employees are changing attitudes and behavior or
providing information?
Employee engagement is a shared understanding of the issues
that affect the business, and that understanding leads to changes in employees' attitudes
and behaviors. Unless employees truly understand the issues and make a meaningful
connection between their jobs and those issues, their attitudes and behaviors will not
change. To achieve engagement, three things have to happen: The business issue has to mean
something to the employee personally, the employee has to understand the issue (and I mean
truly understand it, not just read about why it is an issue), and most important, each
employee must be made to feel a part of the change process.
As communicators we have the opportunity to become creative
in how we communicate and engage employees. The ultimate aim in employee communication has
to be to create the "Aha!" moment. This is the moment when employees have the
necessary information and can say, "Now it makes sense," "Now I understand,
" "Now I can do something about it."
Tools are important in this process but generally they
just communicate information. What we need to strive for are creative communication
methods to engage employees in the process of change.
There are five steps for identifying what the
"Aha" moment is and they include the following:
1. Focus group research. Ask employees about their thoughts
on the organization and its competitors.
2. Identify the largest gap between what customers think and what employees think
customers think.
3. What would create a paradigm shift in employee's thinking?
4. Can you measure the impact of the change in thinking?
5. How significant is it to achieving the business objectives?
So let's look at an example that would be familiar to
communicators: the annual report announcement. Typically an online annual report would be
made available to employees via the intranet. Some employees read it, but most tend to
scroll down to the last pages to check the annual salaries of the senior executive staff
and then close the document.
Let's imagine that the results in this annual report are
very poor and the CEO is determined that employees understand the issues surrounding the
poor results and become fully engaged to help turn the company around. Here's how one
organization accomplished this.
The company held four brown bag lunch meetings over four
weeks where employees could attend for free for one hour and hear from an outside
professional about how to invest in the share market. Importantly, there was no obvious
link between the meeting topic and the organization the employees worked for. At week
three, they were analyzing annual reports and generally deciding whether they would invest
in a particular company based on the information contained in the report. By the fourth
week they were given another annual report and asked the same question, "would you
invest in this company?" The answer was overwhelmingly no. And of course this last
company was the one they all worked for, which brought them to the "Aha!"
moment. Now the organization's employees understood and were engaged and ready to become
involved in turning the company around through teamwork and new initiatives.
Here are some steps you can follow to ensure that you can
come up with creative ways to communicate with employees and engage them in the process of
change.
To challenge beliefs that your employees have about your
organization, you need to have facts. The marketing department is an excellent source of
facts about the business, with research on brand image, customer satisfaction, customer
and non- customer views on competitors and information about market segments. Each of
these areas provide valuable information on opportunities to link employees with business
issues that can be measured. For example, the organization should have facts about how
customers feel about the service provided by the organization's call center. Employees
will also have an opinion about how the believe customers perceive their service. By
taking the results of the customer feedback and presenting it to staff this often creates
an "Aha moment" because customer feedback is typically better than what
employees anticipate. Once you have shared this information, the objective is to then
explore ways that employees can become engaged in further improving that customer
feedback. Focus groups are another excellent way to find out what employees think about
different aspects of these areas and how their beliefs can be challenged as you need to
help them better understand the issues that affect the business.
Key sources of business data are customer experience data,
business results by product or service stream, competitor customer feedback, and measures
of the attributes of your brand. These are sources of data that you can use as a measure
of improvement as a result of your employee engagement strategy.
When selecting business outcomes as a measure for your
employee communication strategy, you need to be quite certain that the strategy you
implement can actually affect the business outcomes you have decided to focus on.
Finally, when it comes to any employee engagement strategy,
whether it be total transformation of a business or improvement in one aspect, you can
rarely go it alone. Partnering with other areas of your organization including marketing
and human resources will ensure that the optimum outcome is achieved for your
organization. |
