Why are talent engagement strategies spinning their wheels?

Are talent engagement strategies bogged down in the mud and spinning their wheels? The findings of Deloitte’s: Global Human Capital Trends 2015 would suggest that indeed there is a growing disconnect between the demands for business success and the leadership, talent and human resources capability to deliver.

The three areas with the largest ‘Capability Gap’ between Importance and Readiness identified by the Josh Bershin’s team are:

1. Leadership: -36 Capability Gap (Importance: 78 Readiness: 42)
2. Culture & Engagement: -31 Capability Gap (Importance: 78 Readiness: 47
3. HR & People Analytics: -31 Capability Gap (Importance: 66 Readiness: 35)

In each of these key areas the Capability Gap has increased since 2014. Learning & Development is ranked 3rd in importance with a Capability Gap of -28 up a massive 19 points from -9 in 2014.

Leadership, Culture & Engagement and Learning & Development were rated as the top 3 priority challenges for organisations in virtually every global region and industry sector.

All this heavily underlines the fact that that despite vast financial and human capital invested, organisations and their professional advisors are not successfully finding a way through the talent strategy maze.

A journey, which is taking HR and business leaders into increasingly complex and unknown territory as ‘overwhelmed employee’ issues, millennial demographics, cognitive computing and big HR analytics are rapidly shifting the business terrain around the world – the wheels it seems are spinning in the mud.

Seduced by Data

While the drum beat for the Big Data revolution continues unabated, I would argue that in the engagement arena there are risks in leaders becoming overly seduced by the transformative potential of their own data to drive enhanced strategy and operational decision making.

That the use of the ubiquitous engagement or employee survey has taken such a strong hold, is no great surprise. Championed by the providers of such instruments, engagement analytics gives HR leaders, keen to be able to demonstrate to their C-suite colleagues a firm grasp of how the human energy of the organisation is driving/constraining the achievement of KPI’s, a neat package of objective data to support objective decision making.

The analytical output of the engagement survey naturally lends itself to broad-brush talent strategies and initiatives: better attraction, development and retention, organisational reengineering, employer branding, strategy eating culture breakfasts, etc etc. All designed to achieve the driving of trends in the right direction.

However, if knowing how engaged or otherwise your people are doesn’t translate into effective steps to address the issues, one has to wonder why any organisation would spend the time and money to do engagement surveys. It is interesting that engagement experts Gallup – authors of the Q12 engagement inventory only achieve a below average 2.9 Glassdoor rating.

The irony is that the way many engagement analysis initiatives are rolled out is to actually promote higher levels of disengagement. This is very easy to achieve, when employees are invited to tick the boxes and rate the scales on a set of questions the output of which is felt to have little connection to the immediate day to day reality of workloads, rewards, work-life balance, workplace environment/culture, supervisor/co-worker/client relationships and the wider mess of conditions that drive engagement.

This begs the question: Why are we obsessed with collecting and analysing data on a emotional state, when the very act of collection runs the risk of creating a negative emotional reaction?

Engagement is Personal

Perhaps there are inherent flaws in a data-driven approach to defining engagement initiatives? Could this be because engagement is essentially personal? Engagement arises from a complex myriad of cultural, emotional, psychological and physical conditions distinct for each of us – many of which actually may have nothing to do with our professional lives. For example, it would not be unusual for someone going through the traumas of a serious illness, a divorce or death of a loved one, to not be overly engaged with their work for a period.

Also engagement in reality needs to be thought of at a more granular level in terms of job function, design and work processes:

• The team leader who loves giving performance reviews might struggle mustering up any enthusiasm for the month end financial reporting chore.
• The network engineer who finds large scale system implementations particularly exciting may find responding to end-user problems an annoying frustration.
• Nothing might push an account manager’s buttons more than strategising win-win solutions with his major account clients but the goal of generating new business in an unfamiliar sector could be giving him an ulcer.

Engagement therefore, is not a simple state that can be crudely airbrushed onto employees as a homogeneous block. The desire to raise engagement does not necessarily lend itself to broad organisational ‘initiatives’. It should not be forgotten that engagement is essentially a state that individuals, consciously or sub-consciously choose for themselves.

Engagement is Emotional

When managed successfully engagement levels are heightened primarily by effective relationships with supervisors, co-workers and customers. It comes as a result of the individual’s values, aspirations, personality and talents being aligned with the work that they are being asked to do, the relationships with those involved with work, and the values, culture and aspirations of the wider organisation.

The good news is that finding the key to engagement development does not have to be such a stretch. As a core foundation to engagement, people need to feel:

• their efforts and ideas are valued
• they are being treated fairly
• they are respected
• they are in control of their own work
• competent to achieve what is expected of them
• accountable for their work and the decisions they take
• they belong as a member of the organisation/team/community
• the organisation/team/community is committed to their wellbeing
• their personal values resonate with those of the organisation and their immediate co-workers

There is also a critically important relationship between engagement and energy. The engaged employee will not achieve sustainable performance improvement unless they have adequate mental, physical and emotional energy for the demands of their work.

If the demands for performance are depleting energy reserves and the individual is not able to recharge their batteries, the risks of debilitating exhaustion and burn out increased dramatically.

What are the Alternatives?

1. stop obsessing about what is driving performance, instead focus on the performance delivered through business-relevant KPI’s.
2. review KPI’s to ensure they include engagement indicators.
3. stop using scarce internal resources to create engagement data, as an alternative develop a strategy to use external data sources, such as Glassdoor, to monitor your employer brand and the temperature of how employees are feeling.
4. Create, engagement development processes that both encourages the right leadership behaviours and provides a rich source of data and ideas to refine talent strategies.

Leadership Happens One Conversation at a TIme

This all points to the importance of developing culture, driven by senior leadership vision and behaviour and supported by relevant management and HR processes that nurture positive engagement throughout the organisation.This does not necessarily have to start with survey taking.

If leaders need questionnaire data to know how their people are feeling, it would suggest they may be missing the major relationship building opportunity of just simply talking to their people to ask them how they are doing.

For example, imagine instituting a simple and effective process of monthly 30 minute one-on-one meeting between all supervisors with each of their reports. Supervisors would be given a standard template of simple but powerful coaching questions, for example:

• How are you doing?
• What is your biggest challenge at the moment?
• What can you do to overcome it?
• What do you need to be more successful?
• How can I help you?
• What one thing could I do better that would make it easier for you to be successful?

The output could be recorded and rolled up to HR to form a rich seam of data and ideas to improve engagement, employer branding and other organisational challenges. It would also help HR track that everyone in the organisation was onboard with the process and to offer remedial assistance to any supervisors, including C-level leaders to motivate them to

What Do You Think?

I would love to hear of other innovative approaches. I would love to hear of examples of the counter argument, where data-driven approaches have delivered significant engagement and performance improvement.

What is your experience with the challenges in outlined by the Deloitte report? What solutions is your business experimenting with to get some meaningful traction under the wheels of talent engagement?

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Posted to the Transform Engagement Linkedin Group.

Our vision is to help individuals, the organisations they work for, and the communities they support, achieve more energised, productive, creative and satisfying relationships with their work and their working environments. 

Join Transform Engagement HERE  for more posts, practical ideas and discussion to deepen our understanding of the drivers of engagement and to explore innovative ways to create more engaged and engaging organisations.   

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