Speaker 1: Hello, thank you for joining us today for the webinar on Best Practices in Employee Engagement. My name is Jessica Jaworzynski, and I'm a Senior Consultant at FMP Consulting.

Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Hannah Pillian, and I'm a Consultant at FMP Consulting as well, and we look forward to telling you a little bit about the Best Practices in Employee Engagement.

Speaker 1: So, to begin with today, we're going to start out by just defining what engagement is and why you should care about it, what the benefits are for individuals and for organizations. We'll then talk a little bit about four stages in the engagement initiative life cycle for organizations, and then the remainder of the presentation, we'll really be going through some key best practices that we've learned for each stage of that engagement initiative life cycle to include measurement, analysis, action planning, and implementation. So, to start out with, if you're at all familiar with the literature on engagement, you probably noticed that definitions vary pretty widely, and we've included some of the core definitions that we thought really resonated on this slide. One by Kahn in 1990, who defined engagement as the harnessing of organization members' selves to their work roles, and in engagement, people are really employing and expressing themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances, and that's very much in line with some ways other researchers have operationalized engagement, kind of looking at the affective, the behavioral, and the cognitive components of engagement. So, we thought that did a nice job of kind of encompassing what is entailed with engagement. Cross et al., in 2006, also provided a very simple definition that we thought resonated, that's passion for work. And finally, Schauffelli et al., 2002, had kind of a three-facet approach to engagement, defining it as vigor, so that's kind of having energy for your work, dedication, having commitment, kind of persisting, even in the face of obstacles, and finally, absorption, which is similar to kind of Maslow's idea of self-actualization, this is where people are really engrossed in their work and, you know, may even kind of lose themselves while really getting into their work.

Speaker 2: So, I'm going to briefly touch on the benefits of engagement. There's a wealth of benefits to having highly engaged employees. There's individual benefits, such as individual performance, and because of that higher individual performance, they get faster promotions and higher pay and advancement because of that. Highly engaged employees are also happier, and research has found that they're also safer. Highly engaged employees have a decreased chance of experiencing a work accident. The organization also benefits, there's lower turnover, lower absenteeism, and because the employees are more productive, that bubbles up to better performance and a higher profitable company. So, the rest of the time, we're going to start talking about the engagement life cycle. So, to start increasing employee engagement at any company, companies should implement this life cycle that we have on the screen, starting with measurement, then analysis, action planning, and implementation. Notice that we said that companies should focus on employee engagement. We're not just talking about HR departments. Engagement is not an HR issue, it should be a company-wide issue. So, the rest of the presentation, we'll go through the definitions and the best practices. So, to begin any engagement effort, you first want to get a sense of the factors that are influencing engagement by measuring and collecting data on your employees. So, we have three best practices, the first of which is designing thoughtful surveys. You'll want to consider the length and other best practices in survey research, so make sure there's no double-barreled questions. Focus on just the things that you can change, and then keep the survey concise. And when you're writing a survey, consider questions that are drivers for engagement. Research has found that empowerment is important, autonomy, and leadership, especially FMP has found that the immediate supervisor is a strong driver of engagement. The next best practice we're going to discuss is implementation. So, consider the time of the year the survey is put out, and also come up with a strong communication plan so that you get a high response rate, which will ensure a representative sample. Finally, you'll want to dive deeper in qualitative data. As IOs, we tend to be very comfortable in the quantitative data through the survey. We'll also want to come up with, find ways to collect qualitative data through focus groups or interviews. This way, you can really dive in and understand the heart of the issue, and maybe some of the things that are driving it to better answer the question.

Speaker 1: Once you've gone through the measurement process and you have some survey data that you're working with, the next step will really be to analyze that data and really make the most you can of it to determine what your organization's strengths, challenges, and really the areas you want to focus your action planning effort. We have a few best practices that we'd like to share in the analysis realm. The first is to utilize relative weights analysis to identify key drivers of engagement in your organization. Relative weights analysis provides some advantages over traditional regression in that it transforms your independent variables to be orthogonal or uncorrelated. Often in research with surveys, we do find that there are highly correlated variables in our survey research. Using the relative weights analysis really helps to untangle some of those factors and identify the unique contribution of each of the predictors to engagement. That can really help you determine where you're going to get the most bang for your buck, where you want to focus your action planning efforts on the areas that are going to be most likely to impact your employees. The second best practice is to analyze group differences. A couple of different factors to consider here are one to look at leading and lagging units. You can do an assessment to look at which organizational units are coming out on top. For those folks, you really want to reach out to them and try to leverage their best practices. See what they're doing in these different areas that are working really well and that employees are appreciating. Those can then be transferred over to other organizational units that maybe are facing some challenges in those areas. Similarly, those are the lagging units. You really want to identify those because those are the folks you might want to really target for the action planning efforts and might need some additional assistance in implementing some of the changes that you're looking to make across the organization. You can also look at demographic trends when you're analyzing group differences. In particular, looking at differences in, say, position type. Oftentimes, we see in our research that certain types of positions are perceiving things differently in the organization. Really being able to pinpoint where those challenges are and target your implementation to those groups can be really powerful. A third best practice is to examine effect sizes rather than significance when you're trying to determine the importance of changes that you're looking at. Often, if we're looking at organizational wide data, we're often lucky enough to be dealing with pretty large data sets, which is a great problem to have. One of the challenges with that type of data is that even relatively small changes are likely to get flagged as statistically significant. As an example, one of the organizations I've worked with had a very large sample. We were finding that year over year, we were trying to look at changes and determine which ones were significant. Some changes that were incredibly small, about a change of a .05 on a 1 to 5 scale, was coming up as significant. Is that practically significant? It's probably not. An effect size can really help you determine which areas are showing some meaningful change or meaningful differences versus one that might be flagged as significant just because of the sample size.

Speaker 2: The next step is action planning. Action planning involves translating the data into a specific plan that will address the key findings and leveraging best practices across the organization. One best practice is to keep it simple. When you're giving an action plan to management or leaders across the organization, you want to make sure it's simple rather than giving them data overload. One thing we suggest is focusing on one or two action areas and then coming up with just a few things to work on throughout the year to address those areas, and then following up several times throughout the year to make sure that you're keeping the commitment level high. The second best practice is to involve employees. The employees are the ones who took the time to take the survey, so the worst thing you can do would be to let it sit on a drive somewhere. You want to come up with, take those findings from the survey and really put them into place in the organization and involve employees in that action planning. Gallup actually found that when employees believe that the action planning has had a positive impact, it increases their engagement scores. You can see on the slide, we have the chart there from the Gallup findings. The final thing is considering a two-year implementation cycle. A two-year implementation cycle will allow for more time throughout to actually deliver results and deliver changes rather than just implementing plans yearly.

Speaker 1: The final stage of the engagement initiative life cycle process is going to be actually implementing the different actions that you planned for in the last stage. We have a few tips here that we'd like to share that we think can help increase the success of implementation of those different actions. The first one is to make sure that you garner leadership buy-in for the different activities and efforts that you want to undertake as part of this initiative. Leadership buy-in is really important so that employees can see that even the top levels of the organization are committed to this, that they think engagement is a priority, and they're looking to make changes in these areas. One of the best ways to make sure that you can gain that leadership buy-in is to link your engagement initiative and specific actions to different business outcomes. At the highest level, this can be making the case for engagement with some of the points that Hannah made at the beginning of the presentation in terms of all the factors that we know engagement can impact, things like job satisfaction, performance, absenteeism, turnover, things that we know all leaders can and should care about. Making that connection is a good one, but potentially even more powerful is making sure that you link your specific actions and activities that you want to engage in with the business outcomes and priorities that are specific to your organization. For example, if your organization has a strategic plan that has certain priorities or goals laid out, to the extent that you can make linkages from those goals and priorities to the different actions that you want to do as part of this initiative, that can be a really compelling case to leaders about why you can and should go forward with some of these activities. A second best practice will be to provide resources to facilitate local implementation. As part of the action planning and implementation process, you're likely to identify some organization-wide activities that you want to roll out. We'll use the example of career development in this slide and say you want to develop a mentoring program, maybe an individual development plan program. Those are great things to have at the organizational level to ensure consistency and structure throughout the organization. Despite that, you also want to make sure that there are tools and resources to really be able to carry out those types of activities at the local level, so within the individual business units that employees are really kind of living their daily work life. By and large, the employee's immediate supervisor, their immediate colleagues, and that immediate business unit is kind of where they're living day in and day out and really going to get a lot of their information and other kind of cultural influences that they're working within. So making sure, in the case of career development and these IDPs, that supervisors have talking points and templates and other tips or checklists that are really going to support them in implementing at the local level can be really powerful and make sure that those changes really are cascaded throughout the entire organization. A third best practice in this area is to make sure to promote ownership and accountability, and this really ranges from employees all the way up to top leadership. As Hannah already talked about in the last slide, involving employees is very important and can be very powerful. We know that empowerment in and of itself is one of the key drivers of engagement, so to the extent that you can really involve employees in actually implementing the changes, having perhaps a working group or other task forces that are dedicated to making the tools, rolling them out, communicating them across the organization is a great way to help ensure ownership across the organization. And similarly for accountability, making sure that across levels, particularly at those top levels, if engagement really is a priority for your organization, that leaders are held accountable for that, that maybe in their performance plan even, they have an objective related to engagement and improving it or about some of these specific activities that you all want to carry out, that can really help to make sure that those actions actually do end up happening, because we know there are a lot of priorities that everyone's juggling. Engagement might not always come to the top, and this can be a mechanism to make sure that it does stay top of mind for folks. The final best practice related to implementation is to make sure to communicate results and setbacks throughout the process. So often we work with organizations whose employees say, I'm surveyed all the time, but I don't know what happens with the results. I don't think anything happens with the results, and they're really frustrated with it. So making sure that you're communicating both the results and what you're planning to do with them to employees is really, really critical. In particular, if you have a specific action that you're going to be rolling out, say this mentoring program in this case, make sure you link it back to the fact that this was related to survey data and that you heard in the survey that it was an issue, and that was really the impetus for developing this and rolling it out. That helps employees know that their voice was heard and it's being taken seriously. And we have a few screenshots up on the slide here that just show some best practices that we've seen organizations employ related to communicating results. Some dashboards have been used by some organizations we've worked with to really communicate not only survey results to show what the results are and how they've changed over the years, but also a dashboard to show the different actions that the organization is committed to making, as well as progress that's being made on them. And this can be a really powerful tool, both in the communication as well as to the point above accountability, to the extent that you're putting out there publicly what your goals are and what you're going to do. There's going to be a little accountability there to follow through with it for your employees. So all this will then bring us back to measurement. You've gone through the whole cycle, and it's time to survey or do a focus group again. Maybe you're doing a pulse survey somewhere along the way. A couple of points just to consider here. One, definitely recognize that it takes time to see changes in survey results. It will take months, if not more likely years, to see significant changes in some of these areas. So change tends to happen more incrementally unless you have a really radical shift in your organization and its leadership or other culture. You should only expect to see incremental changes in those survey results as well. So be patient, be persistent, and recognize that it's going to take a little bit of time to really see some of those changes come into play in your survey results. Kind of the flip side of that is that even though it will take some time to have a significant impact and really increase those scores, even small changes are likely to have a little positive impact on scores initially. We've worked with several organizations where we've seen even just the process of going through the action planning process, we maybe weren't even in the stage yet where we were implementing any of the changes when we've gone to do the second survey or pulse survey, and the scores have ticked up a little bit. I think that employees can really recognize and perceive when leadership is showing interest and seeming to be invested in those changes, and even that in and of itself can have a positive impact on engagement and some of the scores on your survey. So hopefully you can recognize some quick wins in the beginning just by the reach-out, but do recognize, again, that it's going to take some time to see some of the longer-term changes. That concludes our presentation. I know we covered a lot of information, and we probably could have spent 20 minutes on every single one of these topics, but we have our contact information up here. We're always happy to chat more about engagement or answer any questions if you have any. So please don't hesitate to reach out to us, and thank you again for joining us. Thank you.