The Execution of Strategy – Employee Engagement

In my earlier articles, I discussed about the challenges of strategy execution. I touched on two elements that are important to ensure a successful execution of a strategy. The first was about aligning employees to the strategy itself by keeping score. The second was about the role leaders need to play.  There is however a third and it lays the foundation for the two elements discussed.

If you, like me, follow the English Premier League broadcasts on TV, you will often hear the commentators of the game using the term “switched off” to describe the lapse of concentration of the players on the pitch. This normally leads to a goal for the opposing team and if it happens often to a handful of players, it will certainly be detrimental to the outcome that needs to be achieved.

Similarly, if employees “switch off” and are disengaged to begin with, any plans to execute a strategy will never get off the ground. Gallup, which is one of the oldest polling firms in the world, recently released the results of its State of the American Workplace survey. The survey highlights the findings from Gallup’s ongoing study of the American workplace from 2010 through 2012 and provides insights into what leaders can do to improve employee engagement and subsequently performance in their companies.

It was rather disturbing to note that the survey indicates that 70% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged”. This group of employees are noted to be emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive. Gallup estimates that these disengaged employees cost the United States between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity. The employees in this category are more likely to steal from their companies, negatively influence their co-workers, miss workdays and drive customers away.

While not exactly rocket science, organizations in their haste to meet short term goals often forget that basic tenet – that it is the people within the organization that is going to make a good company great. Therefore, a disengaged group of employees is definitely counter-productive when leaders and other employees are trying to execute a strategy.

Now, what then can organisations do to increase employee engagement? Gallup does provide a few insights but I would like to elaborate on just one - “Selecting or hiring the right manager”. It is widely regarded that while people often join companies with a set of expectations and a desire to contribute, it is often their managers that they leave, and not the company. While employees may often attribute their departure to having to deal with “managers from hell”, employees also do leave decent ones. Most managers manage their employees based solely on performance of their employees on the job. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that but great managers, according to Gallup engage their teams on multiple levels.

While managing by performance has to be a fundamental starting point in managing teams, great managers take it a step further and take time to care about their people as individuals. This includes building trusting relationships with their staff, individually motivating and coaching employees to strive harder, understanding their strengths and placing them in the right areas to flourish. In the long term, managers who go the extra mile to ensure that their teams are engaged will realise that great performance will follow as engaged employees will use their strengths in their jobs to contribute to the success of their organisations.

There are many reasons for a strategy to fail in its execution phase. However, if you take care of the fundamentals of aligning employees to the strategy itself by keeping score, ensure that leaders play their role accordingly and strive towards having an engaged workforce, the chances are higher that the strategy will be executed as planned and the results will be there for all to see. 

This article was first published in MyStar Jobs on the 23rd of November 2013. It is the final of a 3-part article on strategy execution.

Sekar Shanmugam is the MD of ProfitAbility South East Asia. ProfitAbility based near Oxford in the UK designs and delivers fully blended and customised business simulation programmes to some of the world’s leading organisations, such as Siemens, Nestlé, Roche, Volkswagen and GKN.