Speaker 1: Employee engagement is one of the most important factors to drive profitability inside an organization. There are lots of benefits to employee engagement, and today in this video we're going to talk about three ways to improve employee engagement. The focus on the video is to talk about why employee engagement is important and how to assess it. Then we're going to talk through how to meet people where they are, how to read out the assessment on an organizational level. And third, when you get feedback for what employees want, how do you invest tactically in their success? We're excited about this because employee engagement is incredibly important. And first, when I'm talking about how to measure employee engagement, I just want to lay down a differentiation between what employee engagement is versus employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is when people are happy with their job. At a base level, it means that they're not planning to leave. But employee engagement is one step further than that. It means that not only are people not planning to leave, but that they're enjoying, recommending, and passionate about the job that they have. Employees that are engaged in their organizations are higher on the satisfaction curve, and they deliver results. Organizations that have engaged employees are 21% more profitable than organizations that don't. And understanding the difference in that profitability and why the drivers are there is part of what we're going to cover today. In addition, according to a study on workplace engagement in the United States, disengaged employees cost organizations about $450 billion a year. Where does that money go? One is hiring and retraining. So they leave. If employees aren't engaged, they disappear. They take with them institutional knowledge, and they take with them a sunk budget for training. In addition, they suck emotional energy and time out of the organization. So disengaged employees have to be followed up with more frequently. And finally, they deliver poorer results. They don't do as well as other people do. Now just to let you know, our goal is not 100% employee engagement. It's not reasonable or feasible to get to a place where every employee is thrilled with the role. Sometimes you hire people and they have a life change or a priority shift, and there needs to be necessary healthy attrition where people go and find in a different place what the right fit is for them. But our goal is to drive with the core set of employees that you have better employee engagement. And again, there are three steps to do that. So the first, beyond understanding what employee engagement is, is to measure where your employees are. We've seen different measurement techniques that are used inside organizations that we partner with. And our view is that there is a sweet spot. Some organizations send out weekly reviews where you'll get an email every week, and it's just a quick or a long, depending on the organization, review of how people are doing. Over time, that results in a reduction of participation, and also in very big bifurcation in how people respond. Essentially, they don't respond unless they are incredibly happy or incredibly unhappy. So the results become skewed and not an accurate picture of how employees are actually engaged. Then we see other organizations on the other side of the scale that look at it either never, or only on an annual basis. And that's amazing, you get usually very high participation, but that cannot anticipate challenges as they're coming up, and it doesn't result in large-scale organizational change. We've seen the most effective employee engagement measurement programs to be those that are either on a quarterly or a monthly basis, where the employee engagement surveys and responses are absolutely anonymous through a web portal, not through an email response. And finally, where there is a reminder that's sent out, and a real readout of what happens. Which brings me to point number two. Once people have participated in the employee engagement assessment process, it's absolutely critical to give them a feedback loop. Let me tell you a story from an organization that I was with. I worked for Bain & Company, and in our Atlanta office we had a monthly all-hands. In that all-hands, one of the things that happened was that the employee survey responses were read out. And we had two parts of that. One was the data-driven portion, where they explained on average where the numbers were. They tracked them over a month-on-month basis, and also on an annual-on-annual basis. So in March of one year versus March of the last year. Some of our work was quite cyclical, so it would make sense that you would see different trends from one month to another than you would year over year. They also had a submission feedback portion of the form. And one thing that I found very powerful, when I reflect on this after the fact, is that every month they read out comments that were of a, I would call it, appropriate nature. So every once in a while there would be things related to sexual harassment, or other issues. Those weren't dealt with on the large scale. But one that sticks in my memory is a specific request for a change in break room food. It was to move from the current cereals to Lucky Charms. And the person who had submitted this had already done their own data gathering about the percentages of people in the office that would prefer Lucky Charms over some of the others. It was a very funny commentary. And what happened was powerful, because the leadership said, thank you for the insight. Thank you for gathering data on it. We're going to make a change, and we're going to track it. You'll see the change in the next two weeks, once we've done our next order. And we're gonna track the usage of the Lucky Charms once they've been introduced. And if they remain popular, as the data suggests they will, then we'll keep them in the rotation of cereals. It seemed like a very small issue, something that wasn't material. But what it did was ingrain in us a sense that our voices were being heard. It responded to the questions, concerns, and other issues. And it wasn't just Lucky Charms, it was other issues like that. That led to initiatives inside our organization, such as creating a women's group where we met on a bi-monthly basis every two months. We also really saw changes in the way that our culture was transformed, in the way that minorities were heard and treated inside our organization. And it was a really exciting part of the development of the organization overall. So that leads me to number three. Once you have heard and provided feedback en masse to the fact that people have been heard, what do you do about it? Especially when you identify growth opportunities. Step number three is that you need to invest in people. So you need to respond by agreeing to do some of the things that really make sense for the organization. But you also need to really develop tactical plans to make change. And those tactical plans can usually be referenced in terms of training or organizational development, so culture development. When we think about training and investment in success, there needs to be budget, there needs to be planning, and there needs to be purpose. And the purpose of training needs to be transformation inside the organization. If you're able to invest in a training for your people, we offer one at Management Consulted that could be completely transformative. The focus is on driving employee engagement by giving them clarity of communication, reducing friction inside your organization, and helping them focus on the right things. We run you through eight hours of training, and then we have a follow-on meeting afterwards, as well as a learning management platform that helps ingrain this in the way that your organizations work. We'd love to hear from you if you're interested in the training. You can find us at managementconsulted.com, or you can reach out to us by email. We're excited to see your employees improve engagement in the weeks and months that follow. Thanks again for watching.