'Employee engagement' - Leading law firm - 23 July 2007
Q4: 'I am getting pressure from my management team, consultants, professional bodies and the media to increase 'employee engagement' at my firm. From what I can see most of the thinking behind the slogan is motherhood and apple pie stuff about treating people better. We are probably no better or worse in this space than our competitors and see little merit in putting significant resources into what may just be the latest management fad. Have MPF members found this to be a good use of resources or does the emperor have no clothes?'
RESPONSES
23 July - Managing Partner, Top 10 property consultancy
I think employee engagement is rather more than just treating people a little better. The essence of employee engagement is that your staff want to be part of your organisation rather than any other, pretty much regardless of financial terms. Engaged employees are proud of their firm and will defend it and promote it in equal measure. In other words a firm whose employees are fully engaged should experience lower staff turnover and greater recruitment success from personal recommendation (hopefully cutting down the agency fees).
Employee engagement is essentially what is measured by Best Companies Ltd for the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to work for awards. This is by far and away the most important award to my firm, and one which brings great pride to the whole workforce. Best Companies Ltd will tell you that there is a positive correlation between corporate success (ie profit) and employee engagement.
23 July - Managing Partner, top 150 law firm
I think this is one of these questions the answer to which is obvious if you invert it and consider the effect of your people being less engaged in or by your business than their peers in your competitors.
In fact employees are seriously engaged in our businesses whatever we think and they are as much players as we are in setting the terms of that engagement - the trick from the management side is finding ways which are accelerants of both our business and their career objectives - these terms will vary from firm to firm but it is, certainly for my firm, a pretty important agenda item.
20 July - Finance Director, Actuarial firm
We are undergoing the same pressures currently and this trend is especially prominent with firms and employees alike looking to other employee benefits to supplement Pension or private health care. Add to this the recent age discrimination legislation and you get a topical period in terms of people development and support.
Let us not forget that people are by far our greatest asset and to not treat them well in the current employee-led market would not be beneficial for any firm. Our industry (like many others) is in a very real war for talent and we should be cogniscent that this is how firms win the long term commitment and loyalty of their employees. Rather than being a fad, I see this as a seasonality and in a few years the market will swing the other way and their will be a surplus of people with a deficit of roles. Many firms will then be tempted to "turn off the tap" and go back to offering the minimum, but this theory is flawed.
Constant development and positive support of your workforce is needed to create loyalty and commitment and it doesn't have to cost the earth. Recognition of effort and contribution is free if you want it to be.
20 July - HR Director, Actuarial firm
Although this may appear to be the latest in a long history of 'hr speak' there is a lot of good sense and research lying behind it. At its heart, it refers to how your people, especially your key talented people, think and feel about your organisation. Many organisations now invest significantly in understanding what people want from their work and employer, and amending policy and practice to ensure that they stay an employer of choice for the most talented people in their sector. This is key for retention and recruitment, as it extends to knowing and influencing what your employees (and partners!) say about you when not at work. The balance of power is considered to be shifting in the employment marketplace due to 'talent shortages' and firms who ignore the need to work with their people in this way are likely to lose out in the medium term. Motherhood and apple pie won't pay the bills; employee engagement is so much more.
23 July - Training and learning consultant
Employee engagement is the latest description for a set of attitudes and behaviours previously termed 'commitment', involvement' or 'attachment'. There is a widespread belief that employee engagement has declined in the past decade, reflected in staff survey scores. Engaged employees have a positive attitude towards the firm and its values. This (it is argued) results in better job performance.
Assuming we accept the cause-and-effect relationship between employee engagement and employee performance, the question becomes: 'how can you make people feel more engaged?' The research says that these factors are important:
- how employees feel about their job
- clarity about what is expected of them
- opportunities for career advancement
- regular feedback from bosses
- quality of relationships with peers, bosses and subordinates
- perceptions of the ethos and values of the firm
- effective internal communications
The firm's leadership may feel it can influence some of these levers without initiating a major new programme. The counselling model that operates in some PSF's - when it works well - can have a very positive effect on employee perceptions of their work, opportunities for development, and so on. Even performance management systems - again when they work well - can tick some of the important engagement boxes. And keeping people informed about what is going on in the firm can also make them feel more involved and valued.
A starting point must be to establish whether engagement - or the lack of it - really is undermining the firm's performance and, if it is, what changes (using the 80:20 rule) will make the biggest difference.
23 July - Communications Director, Top 10 accountancy firm
Employee engagement is certainly no fad, at worst it is a terminology revamp, a new economy phrase which essentially denotes the age old issue of human relationships within a 'community'. The term 'Internal Communications' is also a bit flawed these days as internal brings with it a vision of walls which divide our internal and external worlds, which is just untrue and at best a nice conceptual model. Your 'community' in this sense is your firm and the ability to which you engage with your community will, to a large extent, determine the success of your community. You have also been doing it for years, without effective engagement you simply would have no firm to write an email from! I think the shift though (hence the amount of noise) are that people and business now realise that the mantra we have been saying all these years about 'unlocking people's potential, who are our greatest asset blah blah blah' have stumbled upon a recognised and in many senses and agreed upon 'way' to do something about it and really start unlocking. It's like realising that shoes really do make a journey more comfortable, especially when one walks on uneven surfaces!
Engagement, especially for professional service firms, is about 'how' you manage relationships, conversations and experiences with your people for a variety of reasons which have a corresponding variety of consequences which are all certainly valid. Your management team will tell you this is important because of retention, managing knowledge, servicing clients and sustainable growth, consultants will probably tell you about how it impacts your strategic/operational efficiency/effectiveness and professional bodies and the media will be concerned with making sure you are doing what the next guy is doing. It does sometimes feel like the mob is out on any firm which does not invest in this area, reminiscent of a Monty Python farce, "...hang him, yeah, hang him..."!
Seriously though, I urge a couple of things, firstly that we help ourselves to help ourselves by re-understanding what 'engagement' actually means as in many senses it has become railroaded. A great place to start is Best Companies, whilst many people know them for the Sunday Times Best Companies List, they have constructed a complex (yet simple) way of looking at engagement including the 8 key drivers based on the data from something like 500,000 people, I can certainly help make the necessary introductions here as I too re-educated myself after working in this field for 10 years. Secondly, that we think about engagement through the simple lens of conversations and experiences. Our lives are a series of them, both good and bad, our working lives are no different and consist of a series of conversations and experiences also good or bad, rich and poor. Engagement (and the approaches/tools that we are developing in this space) serve as a way to actually pinpoint and improve the 'conversations and experiences' that occur within our organisations/communities. Back to my earlier example you will probably find successful communities where you find rich conversation and experiences.
To get very practical, this looks and smells like everything from 'how' leadership interact (attitudes, behaviours and leadership) with people, to how people are updated, included and briefed by the people around them (effectiveness of managers/supervisors), to how people are included (involved through experiential conversation) in key decision making processes, to how they are empowered to own and improve client relationships etc etc.
You are right though, at the grassroots level this is completely apple pie stuff and the problem is that many organisations are still messing around with Mr Kipling. The winners in this space however are starting to serve up some thoughtful, hand made Fortnum and Mason style pies which certainly require more resources, love and attention and are delivering very real business performance related outcomes. But the proof, I guess, is in the pudding!
23 July - Business development consultant
My view is that you will achieve more 'employee engagement' from doing what you have said that you will do, properly and by the deadline, rather than any new gimmick/fad/initiative.
In other words, you probably have the systems in place but what matters from the employees' point-of-view, is that they are being implemented consistently, enthusiastically and professionally over the long-term, with full management support.
A checklist for example might be:
- Are your Appraisals being done promptly, professionally and by the correct people? It is tempting for Partners to put off appraisals in favour of chargeable work or an 'Urgent client meeting'. Good people can be neglected - 'They know they are good, so they do not need an appraisal'. Difficult appraisals can be put off because they raise all sorts of problems.
- Are people being given feedback regularly on their work which is constructive?
- Are people's Personal Development Plans being monitored?
Ensure what you have in place is being implemented effectively rather than opting for another initiative.
Download the responses