For years, companies have had a love affair with the concept of employee engagement. But experts say there’s another, far more powerful, and potentially free way to tap into how your employees are feeling – and it all starts with listening.
Anyone who has done an employee engagement survey knows the drill. You’re emailed a link with instructions to take the survey seriously, and an assurance that it’s really all about making sure YOU, the employee, are happy. You put it on your to-do list, because you know what would actually make you happy? Not having to spend time doing a survey, that’s what.
You receive another – slightly more shrill – email, informing you that you really should do this very important survey that the company has paid good money for. You grudgingly fly through the survey, ticking it off your list and getting the company and manager off your back.
Kim Seeling Smith, Founder and CEO of consulting and training firm Ignite Global, says she no longer runs employee engagement surveys for her clients.
“The reason that I no longer do that is because there’s a real scepticism about how transparent the survey actually is,” Seeling Smith explains.
“Employees are less likely to be honest and there’s a lot of emphasis on completion rates. Managers in some organisations are using some not-so-great methodologies to increase participation rates. And, it takes a lot of time to get the results back.
She says many companies have realised the concept of employee engagement is fatally flawed.
“The accuracy levels vary, and it has not done what organisations had intended to use it to do, which was increase productivity, performance, and to decrease employee turnover. We can see by the stagnation in engagement and employee productivity rates rates that It has largely failed at that. ” she says.
At a time when the demand for engineers is higher than ever thanks to booming infrastructure development, it’s even more important for employers to retain staff.
The Australian Government’s Department of Small Jobs and Business found that overall, employers found it more difficult recruiting engineering professionals in 2017-18 compared with previous years. The proportion of vacancies filled fell from 69% to 59%, and the average number of applicants per job dropped from 39.9 to 28.9.
“We have been hiring and managing staff in the same way for the last 250 years,” Seeling Smith says.
“The people practises that we use to hire and manage staff were developed for a very different marketplace. They were developed for a marketplace where there were more people than there were jobs to fill.
“That social contract is broken. There’s more new jobs than there are candidates to fill them, so it’s a whole different paradigm, and we have to look at how we hire and how we manage people in that new paradigm.”
Enter employee experience, or EX.
What is EX?
Before EX, there was customer experience (CX).
“During the past 10 years, a lot of organisations have been mapping the customer journey, and they’ve had tremendously successful results from looking at how they offer their products and services from the perspective of the customer,” Seeling Smith explains.
However, mapping the customer journey is easy in comparison; you can map out a physical or digital journey and monitor clicks, time on site and customer feedback. The sheer volume of ways for employers to interact with their employees vastly eclipses the type and number of touch points on the CX journey.
Although Seeling Smith says there’s no one, clear definition for EX, she sees it as a lens through which to view every experience and interaction an employee or potential recruit has with an organisation.
“It’s just a different way of looking at your own practices and processes. As a result of that, some of our research says that you can actually enhance employee experience without spending any additional money,” Seeling Smith says.
“You don’t actually have to map the employee journey like you map the customer journey. What you do have to do is you have to listen – and you have to listen all the time.
“You have to develop mechanisms to really listen to and understand what your employees are saying about their experience. Then, you apply that lens of looking at what you’re already doing through the employee’s eyes. If you do, you’ll immediately identify some quick wins, some low-hanging fruit that can be fixed immediately.”
At KPMG, the HR department turned this EX lens to looking at how they communicated new policies with staff. Instead of talking about the polices benefited KPMG, they explained how they benefitted the employee.
“It didn’t cost anything, it was just a matter of taking a different approach to what they’re already writing – they already have to write a policy rollout. Just looking at how they’re rewriting it has changed the way that employees feel about internal policies and the uptake on different initiatives that they offer,” Seeling Smith says.
Importantly, EX is not an initiative or a program to be rolled out and invested in – it’s a holistic view of life at work, requiring constant feedback, action and monitoring.
How can we implement EX?
In the 2018 Employee Experience Report that Seeling Smith authored, a survey of about 600 HR professionals and business managers in Australia found while 88% were aware of employee experience, 65% do not have regular dialogue about it.
Seeling Smith says a key way to start the EX process is to set up monthly meetings between managers and employees.
“The research says that if you have monthly, formal one-to-one catch-ups with your staff, they will talk about what they need,” she says.
The report found the two most important contributors to a positive EX are the job itself, and leaders/managers.
“About 50% of employees don’t actually understand what’s expected of them in their role and how to achieve success” Seeling Smith explains.
“It’s absolutely crazy. But that’s what the stats tell us. They leave because they may think that the role is one thing and they get into the role and it’s something else.
“Outside that, the vast majority of people join organisations to do great work, but they leave managers. They leave because they don’t feel supported by the manager. They don’t feel the manager has their best interest in mind. They don’t feel heard. They don’t feel recognised.
“If you do one thing, increase your listening strategies; increase the different ways in which you listen to their feedback. Some of that is having conversations, and some of that is looking at what they’re actually doing. Are they taking excessive sick days? They’re telling you something. What is your employee turnover? Is your employee turnover greater in the first 90 days? That’s telling you that there’s something missing in the experience that they’re having during the interview process.”
Top tips for EX
Seeling Smith says there are three key ways engineering organisations can achieve good EX:
1 Make sure your employees have a strong understanding of what they’re expected to achieve in their roles and how their achievements make a difference. People, especially today’s younger generation, want to achieve results in a company whose values align with their own and who have a compelling purpose.
Look at your company purpose, especially in the engineering field, and explain how, working as a graduate engineer, you are going to help people live better lives.
2 Throw out antiquated task-based job descriptions and write job descriptions that have five or fewer outcomes, with measurable results that provide certainty and clarity around what people are expected to achieve and how success is measured.
3 Increase managers’ capability so they have the right conversations with staff and develop a strong foundation of trust and respect.
Finally, Seeling Smith says employers should focus on what she calls the “meat and potatoes” of a job, rather than perks.
“Financial well-being has a direct relationship to employee experience. Psychological security has a direct relationship to employee experience. But if you look at the other levers that you can move and the companies that have the best employee experience, it has little to do with having a pool table in the lobby, or having unlimited number of sick days. It has more to do with how you go about doing what you do as a business and how you interact with the employees,” she says.
“What you do have to do is you have to listen... and you have to listen all the time.”