Engagement – the Key to Performance

Performance drives business more than in any other time in history.
How do we get to a measure of company performance that is reasonable and
that will be a good predictor of the performance on the bottom line?

If you compared two companies to one another you may be tempted to
look at similarity of strategy, structures, products, services, revenues
and costs to determine which one will have a better performance. Some
people are suggesting that three measures of engagement is a much better
measuring system. The three proposed measures are

1. Employee Engagement

2. Leadership Engagement

3. Customer Engagement

The idea of engagement is becoming a far more relevant measure and
predictor of performance than any other single factor that has been
found to drive performance.

Employee Engagement

Surveys have found that typically only 25% of employees in a firm are
engaged, 25% are disengaged and 50% are partially engaged.

That means that 25% of the employees currently can stay home and work
on their own stuff and be as productive as they are at work. Some
estimate that in most organisations at least 10% of employees in any
organisation are already “resigned” – but just waiting to exit.

Engaged employees seem to have less employee turnover, higher
productivity and better overall happiness and performance. This is
exactly the reverse for disengaged employees.

Some of the most prominent factors to influence employee engagement
include:

• The relationship with your immediate supervisor

• The belief in senior leadership

• Pride in working for, and connection with purpose of the
  company

In addition other factors that increase engagement include

• Level of management (senior vs more junior)

• Size of organisation you are working for

• Level of education

• Earnings level

• Equity of earnings

• Below age of 30 and over 50

Employees that are typically less engaged include

• Middle aged employees from 40-49

• The highest educated staff

• Lowest levels of employees

• Employees in an organisation less than 1 year

• Client facing and clerical employees

• Those working in highly repetitive industries

Employees expect their managers to be caring and to create a
workplace environment in which they can perform. If they can participate
in decision-making and achieve clear and substantive results they tend
to continue to put in energy. When they have little work, little access
to managers and they are left to their own devices – employees generally
tend to move from being a contributor to an enthusiastic, involved and
later an “esteemed employee” that is well on their path to becoming
disengaged.

Another phenomena are that companies that do not take care – tend to
lose engaged employees as they expect more from the organisation. This
has been likened to the Gartner hype cycle that basically proposed that
every new idea goes through some key stages. The Gartner cycle for seems
to valid for employees that goes through a learning curve, a peak of
inflated expectations, going through a trough of disillusionment leading
to a slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg

Some labour analysts predict that organisations of the future will
see labour turnover rates as high as 65% as “normal” while organisations
that have low turnover rates and high engagement will be the high profit
companies.

Customer engagement

With the advent of social media we are fast learning that it is not
just okay to put our message out there – but that it is important to
engage with our customer. Increasingly companies are taking back their
social media from outsource agencies and senior people are starting to
play a role in ensuring that the company’s messages are communicated
clearly and to a wide audience.

Customer engagement typically gets measured through the extent to
which customers engage in:

• Satisfaction.

• Loyalty

• Retention.

• Advocacy.

• Awareness

• Filtering.

• Complaint-behaviour.

• Marketing intelligence.

The new types of initiatives to drive consumer engagement
includes

• Collaborative filtering – getting people to like, rate,
  categorise, prefer or otherwise identify with a product

• Community development – forming users into communicates that
  collaborate, communicates and that self-expands

• Community participation – engaging with the customer as they
  participate in the communities

• Direct user engagement – giving users tool to communicate and
  engage with each other.

• User generated content – let users participate in forums and
  events with the organisation and associate with the brand

• Customer self service – giving greater control and insight in the
  production and information for consumption and participation with the
  customer

• Product co-development – creating spaces and forums in which the
  customer engages in developing the product and refining its
  delivery.

Leadership Engagement

The idea that managers have such a large role to play in the
perceptions of the employee of the workplace have led to the concept of
leadership and management engagement.

The idea is that you as the leader and manager need to focus on how
you are getting others engaged in the business.

If you are on top of the information that is being sent to you –
being engaged with your employees on solving the issues and challenges
presented and lead clearly from within the team – you tend to have
higher engagement scores. If you stand outside of the team, only swoop
in when there is an issue and never spend time actively engaging with
your employees – then you are not doing so well on engagement.

The idea of leadership engagement to customers is also revolutionary
to some organisations. Customers want to feel that they are close to the
“personalities” that drive the organisation and great leaders realise
that they have to engage with customers and employees and that the
engagement metrics will be highly dependent on their input.

Distractions

Everything can distract you. Life itself seems to be one distraction
after the other. You need to look beyond this to the big picture and
also be present wherever you are. If you are busy working when you are
home and busy worrying about home when you are at work – you are not
present in either circumstance. By refocusing your effort you can
achieve positive results in both by focusing when you are present on the
situation in front of you right now and doing something about it.

Presence Economics

The message is clear. To be successful in the new world – you have to
be present, aware and engaged in that which is in front of you. For
those engaged in any type of spiritual development will recognise this
as being mindful, conscious, attuned or in the moment. If you are an
absentee landlord – the harvest will not come.

Increasingly these ideas are being translated into actual scoring
mechanisms that organisations are using to predict if the organisation
is

Maybe score yourself to see

1. How engaged am I with my work?

2. How engaged am I with my customers?

3. How engaged am I with the people below me?

4. How engaged am I with my life outside of the work place?

If you are present and engaged – you will prosper and if you are not
– you need to rethink carefully where you want to be and what you really
want to do as it is inevitable that the position that you are in
currently in, needs to change to fulfil your potential.