Are Companies Utilizing Engagement Analytics for Success?

In the fast-paced landscape of today’s workplaces, understanding and nurturing employee engagement is paramount for organisational success. At the heart of this endeavour lies Engagement Analytics, a powerful tool that delves into the intricate dynamics between employees and their work environment.

Measuring Expectations, Fostering Fulfilment

Engagement Analytics serves as a compass, guiding organisations through the labyrinth of employee expectations and fulfilment. It meticulously gauges one’s employment expectations and evaluates the extent to which they are met within the organisational framework.

Imagine having a panoramic view of your workforce’s sentiments, aspirations, and contentment levels. The Organisational View for Engagement encapsulates this essence effectively.

From frontline employees to C-suite executives, Engagement Analytics paves the way for tailored engagement strategies that resonate with each individual. By leveraging data-driven insights, organizations can craft initiatives that address specific pain points, foster a culture of inclusion, and nurture a sense of belonging among their workforce.

How many departmental heads and team leaders would like to have the type of employee engagement expectation data shown in the attached graph?   Good staff are expensive to replace – finding ways to keep them is crucial for productivity, keeping  costs down and generally enhancing cultures to  create attractive working environments. Expectations are divided into 8 groups, and participants are invited to score their degree of satisfaction within each group. This gives the team leader the opportunity to have a progressive coaching discussion and has the added impact of showing employees that managers are looking after their interests. The result – open, collaborative cultures with real employee expectations being met as far as humanly possible.

Visualise your Group Data

This is a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across Employee Engagement Expectations. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:

• Senior and emerging leadership competency
• Culture of your organisation
• Collaboration and Team competencies
• Team Dynamics
• Emotional Intelligence competencies
• Remote Working competencies

How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?

You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies

If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244

Is that meeting really necessary?

Several years ago I worked with an organisation who called their UK sales reps into a meeting every Monday morning to report on the previous week.  There were at least 30 and each one had to contribute.  They were allowed to take their laptops into the meeting so the practice was for each rep to continue working whilst waiting for their turn to speak.  Effectively no-one except the Sales Director was actually listening to each presentation.  Add up the cost of all these salaries, the travel costs and the cost of lost time potentially speaking with customers and this was an extremely expensive exercise.

Of course, things have changed now – the pandemic has probably been responsible for the explosion in on-line meetings which of course are less time consuming and require less travel.  Commendable for all sorts of reasons.  So why is it I still hear of people switching off the camera, carrying on with emails, eating their breakfast and, in one case, going to take a bath while the meeting is in progress?

Regular meetings usually lose their flavour after a while and become a chore.  I’ve even heard people say ‘Crikey we’ve got XYZ meeting coming up – what are we going to talk about?’  What a complete waste of everyone’s time!

Making Meetings Valuable

The best way to evaluate your proposed meeting is to use the Alignment model as follows –

Purpose

What is this meeting for? What do you want people to DO as a result?  If it is just information dumping then send them a report, a spec, product release notes or something else – don’t waste their time in a meeting with all the associated costs.

Identity/Role

Who needs to be there and what role are they playing – facilitator, action taker, expert, learner, explorer.  If people don’t have a role to play don’t invite them – they will thank you for it!  Equally if you get invited to a meeting where you have no perceived role then have the courage to ask if its necessary for you to be there and what role you will be expected to play.

Values/Beliefs

Is this meeting important and, if so, what is important about it and to whom?  What do you believe about the outcomes?  Are they positive beliefs or negative?  If negative can you reframe them into something positive and look for the possibilities so that you don’t arrive at the meeting as a ‘naysayer’?

Capability

If the stated outcomes for the meeting are agreed upon do you and the organisation have the capability to carry them through?  If not what’s missing and how are you going to fill the gap?  Do you have the resources to do so?

Behaviour

If you achieve this outcome what behavioural changes would you expect to see in the organisation or team?  Are these acceptable and do they add value to the organisation?

Environment

How would achieving this outcome impacted not only your immediate environment,  but that of the team, the organisation and even possibly the community?

Taking these few simple steps before setting up a meeting will help you to –

• Stay focused
• Maintain employee engagement
• Cut costs
• Achieve outcomes
• Free up time

Happy meeting!

> > DOWNLOAD A FREE PDF OF THE Q1 MEETINGS ALIGNMENT MODEL < <

Pat Hutchinson, Quadrant 1 International Ltd  pat@quadrant1.com

PS – When you try this approach, please do write to me and let me know of your successes!  I look forward to hearing from you.

Is there a difference between ‘well done’ and ‘thank you’?

Appreciation Expectations

This article on employee expectations looks at ‘appreciation expectations’ at work and how they impact on employee engagement.

Most employees have appreciation expectations and want their contributions to be valued and recognised. However, some employees may not need external appreciation, relying more on their own assessment of their work, but definitely want recognition from their peers. So how does a manager discover each person’s expectations and meet them in the right way?

8 Areas of Employee Expectations

The organisational view

Your organisation may well be able to attract top talent with a competitive salary but if their real retention and engagement factors are not met – they may soon be leaving for an environment where they can be met.

Research by Monster.co.uk found that many of us don’t feel appreciated at work and employees even have put a value to it – they think compensation of £134 a month would cover the amount for not being thanked properly for their work.

The individual’s expectations

Asking the right questions, analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors, and measuring the person’s level of fulfilment of each expectation ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent.

Appreciation Expectations

Employees who don’t feel appreciated, recognised or listened to are more likely to be unhappy at work than those that get a thank you and notice taken of their efforts once in a while.

Here we look at the different elements that make up an individual’s expectations around appreciation, based on the research of Dr Dan Harrison.

Wants Appreciation

• The desire to have an employer who expresses appreciation for one’s work
• We all want to get some appreciation at work and those that receive it feel better and more secure. The trouble is that many employers and management staff don’t do it enough. Taking time to thank a member of staff for their great work can raise morale and put a smile on people’s faces.
• An employee who isn’t appreciated is going to care a little less about their job each day and bosses need to make sure that this basic social nicety is given more focus. If employee expectations in this area don’t match what the company provides then something will need to change.

Wants Recognition

• The desire for positive acknowledgement (from others) related to one’s abilities and strengths
• If an employee does a good job they want some kind of recognition even if it’s just sending them an email to thank them for all their hard work. Of course, there are some tireless employees who don’t want to be thanked and get embarrassed at being singled out for praise but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be shown some form of appreciation.
• It’s not just a simple thank you that employees may want. Recognition could mean the prospect of promotion or a wage increase, the chance to undertake some valuable training or not having those low grade jobs pushed onto them all the time.

Wants Warmth/Empathy

• The tendency to express positive feelings and affinity toward others
• However busy the office is, there’s always time for some warmth, particularly as it helps create a better, kinder environment that improves productivity. During stressful times understanding and empathy can often go out the window but if your employee values this kind of interaction and expects it then there needs to be more effort made on these occasions.

Wants Opinions Valued

• The desire to have an employer who listens and gives importance to one’s views
• Most career minded employees will expect to have their opinions valued. There may be those who don’t put it high up on their list of priorities but most of us like to think we have something important to say from time to time. A low score for expectations in this area could also be a sign that the person in charge is not someone who likes to listen to other opinions.

Is Collaborative

• The tendency to collaborate with others when making decisions
• It’s all very well expecting to be appreciated but if you prefer to work alone and have less focus on effective collaboration then this could point to an imbalance between what is expected and what is actually the case.
• Creating opportunities for better collaboration in an office environment can improve social cohesion and also allow everyone to work more effectively as a team.

Using Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions to understand appreciation expectations

Using the individual Harrison Assessments Engagement and Employment Expectations report (click here to access a sample report) and data provided by Organisational Analytics, managers can measure an number of key employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as being able to look at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.

Employee Engagement White Paper

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

If you would like to know more please contact me at pat@quadrant1.com

What Makes HR Look Good in the Board Room – if indeed they even get there!

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

What Makes HR Look Good in the Board Room – if indeed they even get there!

Its easy to see the results of the Sales Director, the Operations Director and to review the numbers of the Finance Director.  These things are tangible and measurable and tend to receive the majority of the Board Room focus because of this very nature.

Most organisations will tell you that their people are the most important resource they have and that looking after them and developing them is paramount.  So why is it that the person who is Head of HR is often not represented on the Board and if they are, they often have to shout loudly to be heard?

The answer may be contained in just one word: ‘evidence’.  People are not machines; they cannot be counted as a stock number and additionally, unlike stock, they have a thing called choice!

There are no norms – all people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist

Fernando Pessoa – Late 19^th Century Portuguese Poet

Hence HR people are often left with unquantifiable results.  Being experts in their own field they can see what strategic decisions have to be made in relation to developing a productive, engaged workforce but with no statistical evidence this can be hard to justify.

Dan Harrison’s 30+ years of research into what makes people successful in the workplace, in particular roles and working in particular teams now gives us the very analytics needed to:

• Identify the success behaviours required to perform in a particular role
• Produce profiles against which to recruit successful candidates
• Assess for leadership, BCs, values-based behaviours, remote working EI and much more
• Conduct progressive engagement surveys upon which to make strategic engagement decisions as well as individual ones

Armed with such analytics, the HR professional stands a much better chance of making effective business cases in the Board Room!

If you would like to know more click here, or please contact me at pat@quadrant1.com

www.quadrant1.com

Anonymous Engagement Surveys – why they don’t work!

I was discussing Employee Engagement Expectations with a customer recently and he happened to mention that they had just completed an anonymous engagement survey. He was disgruntled because, although the survey suggested pockets of people who were likely to leave the organisation due to lack of recognition, as just one example, he didn’t know who or where they were and couldn’t therefore take action.  In other words –

‘Someone somewhere in the organization is unhappy about something but we don’t know the details and can’t therefore have a progressive conversation’

So why do organisations involve themselves in the anonymity of such surveys?  Frankly its due to a perception (not always reality) of a lack of trust.

In other words they believe that employees will be more open if they don’t have to put their name to something.  Doesn’t this reflect on the very organisers of the survey who unconsciously believe the organisation can’t be trusted?

Engagement tools are really useful for retaining talented staff!  But they have to be used properly.  Dan Harrison believes that employee engagement is a two-way process – it’s as much the organisation’s responsibility to keep staff engaged as it is for them to be engaged.  A survey should be the foundation for a conversation on an employee’s expectations.  For example, if an employee wants recognition, in  what format does he/she expect this, who from and how often?  If an employee is looking for development – in what areas, when and what format?  OK so it won’t always be possible to fulfil expectations but at least the employee receives the message that the organisation is interested in them and will consider them when opportunities arise.

Such an approach requires trust so pre-framing the exercise is crucial.  Employees must understand that the tool is to be used for improving engagement and not for anything else.

If you would like to know how to assess groups of employees, individuals or even the whole organisation for engagement expectations quickly and effectively, and to see the results instantly on an easy-to-read visual dashboard so that you know with whom to have progressive conversations please get in touch at pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244 or find more information here. You can also read further about engagement analytics in this blog.

In the meantime ‘Stay Engaged!’

Pat Hutchinson

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