Are Managers and Leaders of the Organisation the Key Influencer for increasing employee engagement and how can we improve post-survey change efforts?

[Agnes Goh]

I read the article that Paul Mastrangelo shared in another discussion thread on "Will Engagement Be Hijacked or Reengineered" and found it to be very real and practical.

Paul mentioned that the Manager Focused model is flawed as a post survey action. I agree, coz my HR/OD has been focusing on this approach for the past few years and there has been no transformational change. Paul mentioned that we should be designing our change efforts to address what is frustrating employees and preventing them from being engaged.

I have heard some say that leaders/managers are key to employee engagement. Get that right, everything else will fall into place. But what if the business problem was the leadership or the manager (lack of direction, not walking the talk, busy manager issue, etc)?

Leaders and Managers most certainly would not like to hear that the problem lies with them. What kind of post survey change efforts can be done to address this if we don't take a Manager Focused model?

[Rob Fox]

Most often managers and leaders wish to inspire higher engagement - from and for themselves, and from and for their people. After all, higher engagement is a good thing across almost all psychological, social and commercial dimensions.

However, they also often lack the tools, ideas, and support required to do this, and so need a helping supportive hand in order to get started.

For ideas and inspiration here see www.engagingideas.co.uk

Thank you Agnes, or as we say in Portugal, Ines.

[Tom Rausch]

Agnes,

The thing that jumps to mind for me is whole-system change interventions, most notably integrating Appreciative Inquiry processes such as summits and dialogues. This has worked at thousands of organizations of all stripes. The AI commons is a good place to see case-studies and get a handle on what AI is all about: http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/

Typically, we encourage clients to embrace both approaches- leader focused and whole-system. They tend to feed each other and keep the momentum going.
Help for organizations committed to cultural transformation:
http://www.leadershipbeyondlimits.com

[Linda Gottschalk]

Agnes - Great questions. Two ideas from my experiences: 1) Use a survey that measures more than just engagement. At one company I know they used a survey that measured both engagement of employees and behavior of managers, and then correlated that with revenue, safety, and other results based on sales, manufacturing, etc. This allowed us to be very specific with leaders about how their behavior could drive engagement and results for their sales office, plant, etc. 2) The other thing is that managers can learn more from their peers than from their leaders or from us in HR. At another company, they built a story-board on the intranet where managers could share the actions they took, at their level and in the day-to-day operations, as a result of their own survey results. Hope these ideas are fodder for your success!

[Agnes Goh]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Great ideas. I was thinking the same as your 2nd suggestion. Putting the various managers best practices/ action plans on the intranet to share with the organisation. Increasingly, my strategy is to stop talking about how to improve engagement or what needs to be done, but instead to just keep talking about the success stories, the positives. When people see success, others will want to do something and follow as well.

[Scott Schwartz]

Hi Agnes --

Two quick thoughts:

- leaders/managers are part of the solution but so are peers. For years Delta ran a recognition program where 80% of the recognition awards were peer-to-peer (and no money value attached.) Managers can't be omnipresent, seeing everything an employee does well, but collectively one's peers can, and Delta employees made sure to single each out for doing the right things. The net effect was the same: employees feeling that their actions mattered and made a difference for the company.

- in general, leaders and managers aren't taught a "right" way to praise an employee, it's assumed people just know how to do it, leading to situations like this one described by Lucy Kellaway of FT where badly constructed praise can do more harm than good. One of the obstacles to manager adoption is the absence of a good model of how to do it -- but that's something easily rectified with a combination of communications and examples.

Scott