blue collar engagement

[Lucie tremblay]

Hello everybody !

I work  for  a public utility for many years now and my interest for engagement is very strong. We have an engagement survey since 1995, so I have 15 years of specific data for our organization. During those years, engagement improve a lot, but there is still an important group - blue collar - who scores very low.  In my  researches I found very few papers specific to this group.

I assume that  blue collar employees don't engage the same way  professionals do ( we did the same things for all groups) but from here, this is a big puzzle...

Does someone can help me start somewhere? I look for:

• papers
• specific researches
• successful experiences
• best practices
• insight
• practical tools
• and so on....

I am eager to hear from you

Lucie

p.s. I hope my english is understandable...

[Ben Simonton]

Lucie,

Surveys of engagement are of little value if the organization does not know how to engage disengaged employees.

Does anyone in your utility have this knowledge?

Best regards, Ben

[David Zinger]

Lucie:
here is a little snippet from the folks at Gallup:
http://gmj.gallup.com/content/22735/can-managers-engage-union-emplo...
David

11 May 2006
Can Managers Engage Union Employees?
Business leaders offer insights into overcoming labor-management conflicts
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
SAFETY
UNIONS
by Steve Crabtree
PAGE: 12
If management takes a more active role in engaging its unionized workers, does that reduce the need for organized labor? Will unions view systematic efforts by management to keep employees happy and fulfilled as an attempt to undermine their own support? If so, how can companies defuse the situation by working with unions to support employee engagement?

Executives and managers tackled these and other questions at a recent Gallup roundtable discussion on engaging union employees, which took place in Washington, D.C. The 25 participants came from companies in a variety of industries, but all either had a large proportion of union employees or must account for the influence of unions in their labor market.
Public attitudes towards unions
James K. Harter, Ph.D., Gallup's chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, got the event started with a review of recent Gallup data on labor unions. He stated that Americans are less likely to belong to labor unions than they were 50 years ago. In the 1940s and 1950s, about one in six Americans told Gallup pollsters they belonged to a union; today the number is about one in ten. Unions still enjoy public support, although Americans' likelihood to say they approve of them has also declined somewhat in recent decades. Currently, 58% of Americans say they approve of unions, while 33% disapprove. A slight majority, 52%, say they've tended to sympathize with unions in labor disputes over the last two or three years, while 34% say they've sympathized with the companies.
From a manager's perspective, the crucial question is how the presence of a union colors his or her relationships with employees. Gallup's data suggest that union employees are, on average, less engaged than non-union employees. As the graphic indicates, the percentage of actively disengaged employees is considerably higher among unionized than non-unionized employees in the same company. (See graphics "Union Employees Less Engaged" and "The Three Types of Employees.")

In some cases, the sizeable differences may be because union employees tend to have different roles within the company than other employees. For example, at a power utility, the electricians may be unionized but not the administrative staff. However, the roundtable participants agreed that union membership itself can contribute to an "us versus them" mentality that can also diminish employees' sense of rapport with their companies. One participant, who said her company's approach was to partner with unions, said that "There are more adversarial relationships in some areas, and those are reflected in our employee engagement scores."
In discussing Gallup's data with roundtable participants, Harter stressed two other points. The first, gleaned from a Gallup Poll of the U.S. working population conducted in October 2005, is that unionized employees are more likely to say they will stay with their companies throughout their careers, but they're slightly less likely to recommend their companies to family and friends as a place to work. In other words, the sense of security their union affiliation gives them may encourage unionized employees to stick around -- but that feeling doesn't translate into a greater emotional attachment to their jobs.
The second point is that the relationship between engagement and productivity is equal in union and non-union environments. Gallup's research with companies suggests that it may be harder to engage employees in a union environment, but engagement has just as profound a relationship to productivity in union and non-union environments.

[Ben Simonton]

"Can Managers Engage Union Employees?"

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I worked for the electric utility serving New York City, first as the plant manager of their largest generating station and then as the head of their powerhouse overhaul group, a 1300 person unionized group. During my tenure at each, employees went from disengaged to highly engaged with productivity gains north of 300% per person attended by huge amounts of creativity and innovation, and morale out of sight high.

The Gallup author asked a few questions.

"If management takes a more active role in engaging its unionized workers, does that reduce the need for organized labor?" No. They still need representation in compensation/benefit and work-related matters.

"Will unions view systematic efforts by management to keep employees happy and fulfilled as an attempt to undermine their own support?" Unions do get mad and attempt to stop management from making changes to improve productivity. They get more aggressive if they see managers becoming the heroes of the union members. They usually levy lawsuits against managers who are creating the conditions that cause employees to decide to become engaged. But if management perseveres, employees will eventually tell their union hierarchy to back off and cancel any lawsuits against the "good guy" managers. This happened to me in both cases after about 15 months.

"If so, how can companies defuse the situation by working with unions to support employee engagement?" I tried to work with union hierarchy but they viewed my actions as a threat to their power. After they were enjoined to cease fighting me by their members, relations became reasonably cooperative. But since the rest of the company (about 18,000 people) was not acting similarly, the union never really changed.

Best regards, Ben
http://www.bensimonton.com/articles.html

[Lucie tremblay]

Hi Ben,
Your answer is very useful to me for the approach with unions.
However, I care a lot about day to day acts managers can do to rise the engagement.
I developed 4 years ago tools that were proven very useful to most managers (23,000 employees), but it seems that they are not as useful for blue collars managers that they were to professionals.
My questions are:
Is there specific behavior to be adopted with blue collars?
What behavior must be adopted with them that are not needed with professionals?
Or the contrary, what behavior works well with professionals and don't with blue collars?

regards,
Lucie

[Ben Simonton]

Good questions, Lucie. I wrote a book on how to do it.

But in brief, stop using the normal top-down command and control strategies that naturally disengage employees. Start showing them the utmost respect by listening to them.

I managed people for over 30 years using the traditional top-down command and control approach for my first 12 years. I was aware that my best people were far more productive than the majority of my employees and searched for a way to change. I learned of the Copernican theory which contends that employees are far more important than their bosses and that any company will only be as good as what the employees produce. The boss is only there to support employees, not vice versa as the top-down approach would have us believe.

Over the next several years, I changed my approach eventually arriving at the exact opposite to top-down. Employee performance rose steadily over this period eventually proving that Covey was correct about a huge increase in productivity.

Out of that experience and learning the elements of a superior approach to managing people, I designed a set of 10 questions in order to reveal where a manager stands in the spectrum from bottom to top.

This is a simple test of 10 questions. Rank yourself (or a manager) on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best or almost always, 1 being the worst or almost never. Add up the points for each question.

If you score close to 100, I would expect that your employees will be over 3 times more productive than if your score was 30 or less. In addition, employees will unleash their full potential creativity and innovation, love to come to work and have very high morale. :)
How you treat your employees dictates how they will treat their work.

DOES THE MANAGER

1-provide regular and frequent opportunities for employees to voice complaints, suggestions and questions, provide reasonable and timely responses, and give employees what they say they need to do a better job? (At least weekly?)

2-elicit answers/responses from the team and get them to use their brainpower to solve problems?

3-listen to employees with 100% attention without distraction, without trying to figure out a response and with the use of follow-up questions to obtain missing details and suggested fixes?

4-refrain from giving orders since by their nature they are demeaning and disrespectful and destroy innovation and commitment?

5-treat members better in terms of humility, respect, timely and high quality responses, forthrightness, trust, admission of error, etc than they are expected to treat customers, each other and their bosses?

6-publicly recognize employees for their contributions and high performance and never take credit him/herself?

7-openly provide all company info to employees to the extent they need/desire?

8-use values and high standards of them in order to explain why certain actions are better than others?

9-use smiles and good humor with subordinates, not frowns or a blank face?

10-generate in employees a strong sense of ownership?

Best regards, Ben

[Lucie tremblay]

Love those 10 rules !
Can you give me the title of that book you wrote specifically about this ?

[Ben Simonton]

Lucie,

The book is "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed", available thru my website as an ebook or hard copy. It is a bit heavy meaning it has everything you need to know about managing people, at least everything I ever needed in 30+ years of managing people, and the reasons why they are correct. That list even includes a procedure to eliminate stress, how to handle unions, etcetera, etcetera. More than most people can handle or want.

Best regards, Ben

http://www.bensimonton.com

Best regards, Ben

[Lucie tremblay]

Wow David!
This is very useful information. My company is over 80% unionized. What we observed during those past 15 years is that engagement is easier to obtain with professionals such as R&D researchers, engineers., etc even though there are unionized. We also obtain good results with unionized white collars. Even with blue collars, once in a while we reach top engagement -- during crises times such as blackouts. But what we do not obtain is engagement during normal periods. And those periods are the most frequent ones...

Any hint ?

best regards,
Lucie

[JB Aloy]

Hi Lucie,
I am afraid engagement scores among blue collars will remain lower than those of your engineers! This is a usual trend in employee research. The key question is: how significant is the gap between the different categories of staff in your organization? External benchmarks by job level and/or function are an efficient way to check whether or not this gap is alarming. Please let me know if you would like to have a chat offline (en français!).

[David Bowles]

Hello Lucie, I think you have some great information from this group already. My experience working with many power companies here in the US is that as you go "down" the organization there is a temptation to listen to people less, to involve people less. This is based on a very mistaken attitude that these people have less to offer.

Your blue collar, union people have as many good ideas to contribute as anyone else. Treating them as well as those who are "professionals" would be a good start. In their own field they have enormous knowledge and skill. Some also take a quite a bit of risk to provide reliable power to their communities. Its interesting that you say these people respond well, engage more in a crisis. I think that type of passion is released in "normal" times when peoples' ideas are used, they are treated with respect and as people who are as valuable as anyone else, at any level in the organization. Sometimes this is created by introducing self directed work teams, who take over all the HR and other functions and run themselves. I found that this can have a huge effect on morale and engagement.

There have been several companies in your industry which have totally changed their relationship with employees via a change in their internal culture; one in particular (a former client) is Arizona Public Service, and they won the prestigious Edison Award for what they did. This is from their website:

""APS previously won the Edison Award in 1992 for a corporate-culture restructuring process that transformed the company from a traditional, rate-driven utility to a competitive, strategically guided, customer-driven utility that encourages innovation and achievement among its employees""

You might want to look into them more. They have many thousands of blue collar workers.

I would be happy to talk more, aussi en français!

David
www.moraleatwork.com

[Ben Simonton]

Lucie,

I agree with David and disagree with JB.

Blue collars have more passion and can become more engaged than the engineers because of it - BUT ONLY IF management meets their basic needs to be heard and be respected. They have at least as many ideas as the engineers and probably more. At least that is what they showed to me in effecting two turnarounds of management disasters in the electric utility arena.

Best regards, Ben

[David Bowles]

Ben I am not surprised you had this kind of experience. The typical utility lineman is the backbone of this country, doing a dangerous job day in and out, in all kinds of weather. They have enormous skill and a lot of insights on the job. As my example of APS showed, this can all be harnessed for the good of all.

Its only our misguided conditioning which makes us think that these types of people have less to offer in the workplace than anyone else.

best

David
www.moraleatwork.com