There has been a lot of chatter around the topic of customer engagement, where organisations need to interact with their clients in the modern age of collaboration and social media.

The theory suggests that an advocate for your business is your most valuable asset. A social advocate, with a positive tale to tell about your processes and products, will help boost confidence, trust and sales.

Although a popular theory for dealing with external clients, the engagement approach has not taken such a hold for internal staff. This deficiency is both surprising and disappointing.

Maybe the wider belief is that an employee is either engaged or not engaged, and that any approach to increase commitment is a waste of time? If that is the case, your business needs to think again.

Like training, engagement is not simply a nice-to-have that offers intangible benefits that can be cut when times are tough; engagement is a business essential.

There are three, fairly simple and cost effective, software-based measures that can help you engage with your workforce. First, no one likes being paid late for work completed – use a flexible payroll system to ensure workers receive their cash on time.

Second, bad eggs cause wide resentment – integrate payroll technology with time and attendance tools to help monitor attendance in a transparent and fair manner. Third, good communication creates value – HR software can be used to push finance and performance reports to managers, for example.

Taking such an integrated approach to employee engagement will help you to keep workers informed and happy. Potential benefits include improved productivity, loyalty and performance.

There is also a strong governance angle. Following the MacLeod Review, the government has launched new guidance on employee engagement (see further reading, below). The guidance aims to help employers engage their employees and improve business performance.

As you implement software in line with the broader guidelines, think about the next stage of employee engagement including how you can use development and incentive schemes to motivate staff. HR analytics tools also become vital as you move onto the next stage of engagement. Such tools help you to effectively measure and report on employee engagement in relation to key company metrics.

The result? Your own staff become your firm’s strongest advocates – and what could be better than that?

=====

Further reading:

http://www.pinsent-masons.ru/default.aspx?page=2689#Employers

Employee engagement needn’t be a chore is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Did we win because we were more engaged, or did our winning make us more engaged? I think that this lies at the heart of a lot of the frustration that HR professionals currently feel.  They see Rolls Royce companies such as Diageo, Astra Zeneca and, oh, Rolls Royce being held up as shining lights that have ‘got’ this engagement thing. They see the ‘compelling’ evidence that those companies that were in the top engagement quartile were 12% more profitable and 18% more productive and had earnings per share 2.6 the level of those below the 50th percentile. So why is the Board not falling over themselves to adopt an engagement strategy?  It boils down, in my mind , to whether you are seeing the cause or the effect?  Believe me, in a lot of the teams I played in no matter how engaged we were, we would still have been rubbish.

So let’s get back to first principles. Peter Druker, whose centenary it is this year, said that a business is “defined by the want the customer satisfies when he or she buys a product or a service.  To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business”.   When customers stop wanting horse drawn buggies or gas lamps or video players, no matter how good we are at it and how engaged our staff are we will be out of business.  To achieve the function of a business we assemble people, land and capital and we do this in the best possible way to deliver to those customers.

Having said all of this, let me be clear,  engagement is important, but not as an abstract concept.  Here HR professionals have to work with their colleagues in other functional areas such as sales and marketing and production.  If your organisation wants to be more innovative because this will better serve your customers with the products and services that they need then we can use engagement measures as part of the executive dashboard.  There is a narrative that the executive team will understand and which can be tested.  Let us say that our customers want new products at lower prices but with higher quality.  We can measure all of these things.  How many new products we release, whether they are variations or whether they are standalone new products.  What price points we are able to achieve and what are the levels of quality.  And so on.

Now measure engagement.  Don’t over do the measurements at first.  Why not start with the question that Dr Jim Hartner of Gallup and Dr Frank Schmidt of the University of Iowa found to have the most effective correlation to performance, “At work, do you have an opportunity to do what you do best everyday?”  Then drill into the data. Is there a correlation between areas of high engagement and the outputs that the organisation wishes to achieve?  If there is, then get to understand that specific area better. Is there a causation? What is driving that difference?  Is it better and more appropriate leadership? Or do the people there have a better understanding of what they are supposed to be doing, or have better information or understand how they fit into the overall scheme of things?

Then, put a value on it. Marcus Buckingham in his white paper  ‘The Strengths Engagement Track: A Benchmark Study of Sixty-Five High Performing Teams‘ gives the fascinating example of a US Retail giant with 3,000 stores that plotted store profit against a geographic economic potential measure and was able to highlight one store trading at a profit of $1,500,000 and one trading at a loss of $300,000 with the same economic potential, the same products and the same marketing.  What would this mean to the executive?  Well $1,800,000.

Now that should get HR some air time!

Employee engagement, business intelligence and Sunday morning football. is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

The Sunday Times reported the employees at the companies that appear on the Best Companies to Work For list:

“Employee engagement remained steady at 71%. Workers are still as committed and motivated as they were and some even more so. Although people are worried about job security they are not blaming their company for it. There will be winners and losers and, five years from now, the top 100 lists will be dominated by companies that have not just maintained but improved their employee engagement in difficult times.”

This tells me these companies have mastered the art of communicating necessary messages to employees while also inspiring and motivating employees.

Modern Survey is reporting the same results – employee engagement remaining relatively high because employees now feel fortunate to have their jobs instead of feeling entitled to their jobs.

“At least for the time being, these results suggest that the majority of employees are motivated to do their part to help the organisations they work for survive the current economic crisis. Those organisations that neglect their employees by failing to provide recognition or developmental opportunities risk losing people as the economy improves and other opportunities present themselves.”

It’s this final point that is most critical to understand. Even if you are showing increased or stable employee engagement levels during this recession, you must not become complacent in your employee appreciation tactics. Your people are your greatest competitive advantage. To position yourself strongly for success today and in the upturn, ensure your employees clearly understand how much you value their efforts and appreciate their contributions.

What’s the average engagement level in your organisation?

Provided by HR Zone

What’s Your Engagement Level at Work? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment