Building Employee Engagement Through a Period of Change or Growth

Employee engagement has been top of mind for business leaders for years and has only grown in importance after a year of most workers operating remotely. The topic made headlines with the WeWork CEO’s controversial comments recently at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival, stating that more engaged employees want to come back to the office. “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home,” Sandeep Mathrani said. The debate about his comments shows how strongly many feel about the concept of engagement.

Aside from the engagement and work-from-home discussion, many changes in the workplace have made the issue even more important:

• There’s a wave of turnover coming: 59% of middle-income employees expect to make a job change this year.
• 76% of US employees are currently reporting burnout.
• 54% of organizations report customer experience operations are managed in silos. Functional and data silos cost organizations cost workweeks per year per team.

With a tight labor market and the huge cost of replacing an experienced employee, employee engagement is considered critical by most business leaders.

The immediate and hard costs are the easiest to measure: lower turnover and absenteeism, and higher productivity. The real opportunity in increasing employee engagement is customer experience, competitive advantage, profitability, and company valuation.

But once you have identified the issue as important, what comes next?

The employee engagement survey business is a $1 billion a year marketplace. So employees have been asked… a lot…. about how engaged they are. The important question is what comes next? A Conference Board survey found that among 80 of the most advanced users of engagement surveys, only half believe their executives know how to build a culture of engagement. Surveying employees is not a bad thing, but it can’t be the only thing.

An organizational culture that builds employee engagement requires:

• A clear mission and vision for the company
• Strong and transparent internal communications 
• Cross-function collaboration (both collaboration tools and attitude)
• Flexibility
• Opportunities for advancement and recognition
• Understanding your employees – develop personas

These activities become even more critical if you are going through a period of change or growth. Post-acquisition culture issues can derail the best-laid plans.

Change management and internal communications

We recently expanded our offerings in change management and internal communications and can help companies manage projects such as:

• Merger and acquisition planning and integration 
• Digital transformation
• New market entry
• Product Launch
• Internal communication
• Change to the customer experience and customer journey
• Tying branding and training to a vision that motivates employees
  
  

People were always the secret sauce -  we can help with messaging, improve internal communications, develop and execute an effective roll-out plan, and support the training and integration of successful and lasting change and employee engagement.