The Era Beyond Annual Employee Engagement Surveys

Business leaders have echoed these words for over 5 decades now and acknowledged that employees are their greatest resource. But never before have had they had the means to truly tap into the power of employee sentiment to fuel business momentum.

Disrupt & Reinvent

The step after acknowledging that people are the most critical resource would be to then unleash and direct the value that the resource promises.  The prevailing context of the disruptive digital era adds another dynamic to the type of value that human resources can bring to the table and the way it can be accessed and leveraged. The “employee experience” therefore should be such that it compels, inspires and engages employees enough for them to provide a constructive narrative and commit to the growth of the company.

So, what does this mean for the chief engagement officers? It means that with the coming of disruptive and nimble ways of working, the way we look at employee engagement surveys must also undergo a paradigm shift to meet the needs of the changing workforce and provide for agility and alacrity in listening to and responding to the employee sentiment and input.

The need today, therefore, as against “annual employee engagement surveys” is to gauge the pulse of employees on an ongoing basis, continuously analyzing and acting on the employees’ voice, to deliver a world class employee experience.

To catch up with this change, more and more organizations today, are considering moving towards a continuous listening strategy, with an interest in conducting agile employee engagement surveys.

Given the new scenario, technology and digitization allow this transition to agile listening without hassles. We now have the tool that can translate the voice of employees into actionable insights to create a more engaged, productive and satisfied workforce.

What Is Continuous Listening?

Continuous listening strategy is nothing but an infrastructure through which employees can provide feedback, opinions, information, and insights on an ongoing basis (IBM Kenexa 2015). Capturing the voice of the employees is just the first step to a continuous listening strategy. For the employees to feel heard, it is imperative that their feedback and opinions get translated into action. And to arrive at the action, organizations need insights that can guide it. By linking multiple data points across multiple employee engagement surveys and other sources, employees can be engaged for business results.

Why Are We Moving Towards A Continuous Listening Approach?

The collective voice of employees is a powerful source of competitive advantage which can enable organizations to take informed and holistic business decisions. That’s the power of the employees’ voice!

By enlarging the listening methods and their frequency beyond a year, organizations can meaningfully intensify the benefits of an engaged workforce to drive business.

When employees feel heard, they are empowered to act. In this sense, engagement is the gift that gives back—boosting employee effectiveness and therefore the company’s profitability.

Organization Of The Future Is Here

At InspireOne | IBM, we have consulted with many clients and written extensively on how to make this transition, from annual employee engagement surveys to ongoing listening post, successful. While most of our work is unique to the clients’ context, there are also a handful of general principles that we have synthesized from our approach that can be used by organizations embarking on such a transition, irrespective. They are:

#1 Listen

employees are more willing than ever before to share their opinions at work. Serving as the eyes and ears of the organization can get useful insights on customer issues, product reception, and opportunities for scaling up, from employees.

A good starting point would be to focus on this reservoir of untapped insights. Establish a clear baseline of the current level of employee engagement through a census survey and listen to what matters to your organization.

#2 Analyse

From an information overload of data, it is important that you focus only on those that matter to your organization’s strategy. To enable that, examine the employee engagement surveys scores to derive meaningful insights on the current state of engagement. Distil the results, surface the key issues and highlight the ongoing trending views.Act: Listening alone is not enough. Employees want and

#3 Act

Listening alone is not enough. Employees want and expect you to follow up on their input with meaningful actions. And measurement without action adds no value to your listening strategy. Once you are empowered with the best insights and directions, motivate change through sustained action planning and implementation.

It takes commitment and effort from great leaders to listen to their employees, acts on their voice and guides them through a change process that is sustainable and long-term. What leaders must remember is that sustained change can be achievable through sustained listening and action.

So, have you embarked upon the journey to building a continuous listening strategy?

How InspireOne | IBM Can Help

Today’s organizations need to attract, retain and develop top-performing talent, create engaging social and collaborative cultures, and connect the right people to get work done. InspireOne | IBM solutions combine market-leading talent management and social collaboration tools with the power of workforce science and advanced analytics. We help organizations build impassioned and engaged workforces, and deepen client relationships that can lead to measurable business outcomes.

Want to create an environment of engaged employees in for your organization?

Here’s how to do it!

The Evolution of Leadership Assessments

A constant intrigue that most of us live with is one about ourselves! The desire to gather insights about ourselves and draw inferences from those insights to understand or explain our behaviors is a deep-rooted desire. We frequently find ourselves responding to various types of surveys – formal or informal – to make sense for ourselves.

Formal personality / psychometric tools pertaining to how we communicate, lead, manage emotions etc., have been one of the key mediums to satiate this quest.

 

Leadership Assessments – The 20th Century Evolution

 

Leadership Assessments have also evolved significantly over the years. In the early 20th century, assessments were viewed as tools that could be used to assess a person’s personality or cognitive ability. These gave an overall sense of a person’s profile. The interpretation or application of these in various work situations was not the focus or the capability of the tools at that time. These were highly specialized tools that could only be interpreted by a specialized few – humans! And thus were largely exclusive.

By the early 21stcentury however, leadership assessments have aligned with rising wave of data analytics, machine thinking, and ability to factor in several data points towards creating a comprehensive output. They have also become much more focused on providing meaningful and synthesized data for identified objectives. Be it for talent development, recruitment, potential identification, innate preferences et all, leadership assessments today are able to provide insights for all these specific scenarios.

Case Example

 

An example, reflective of the above-mentioned capability of assessments today, can be seen in our work with a large global bank. The organization was embarking on a major change initiative caused by certain regulatory requirements. Additionally, this change was initiated during a largely negative internal environment caused by some unfortunate publicity about the bank in the public domain. Change is almost always met with resistance by the people, and in a pre-existing negative environment like this, the change was met with significant resistance from the organization leaders.

This bank was able to lay down the process and structural changes required to comply with these regulatory requirements very clearly. However, the focus on its people, the intangible as an aspect of change, was not as clear.

Thus, the focus of our intervention was clearly the people aspect of change – how to make them amenable to adapt to and drive the change. The Emotional intelligence (EI) route was chosen to first help the leaders in the organization navigate this change themselves, and then drive and inspire the change in the rest of the organization. Using the InspireOne TMI EI tool – the Personal Emotional Quotient Metre (PEQMTM) – we were able to first identify their EI profiles, and then through one-on-one feedback sessions explain the implication of that profile to adapting, managing and driving change. Often, simply understanding the manifestation on one’s profile in the workplace situation can be leveraged while responding to situations.

In addition to this, the organization could get a holistic picture of their leader’s current needs through the group report. Using the individual and the group reports (Data points) the organization was able to shift its focus entirely onto the derailers and enablers of the change: the people.

This is only one example of how leadership assessments can be used to target very specific needs in the organizations. Our previous blog also explored the work we did with a large conglomerate in which assessment tools were used to identify potential functional and business leaders. The assessments conducted were able to provide the organization with data points to clearly chart out development plans for each leader either as a functional leader or a business leader depending on their innate orientations.

Leadership assessments today are much more scalable and can be easily customised to address the unique challenges we face today in this VUCA world. However, this is not the end of the road. Leadership assessments like any other field will continue to grow. Let’s look at some of the advancements in this field today itself.

IBM Watson is an artificial intelligence (AI) based assessment tool that can even assess a person’s personality based on his/her tweets. A leader has easy access to technology that can monitor his/her heart rate, providing information that can be used to better manage stress. Leaders have ready access to surveys that can be used immediately after meetings to assess his/her performance etc.

With AI-based tools and gamification entering the field of assessment, organizations have a lot to look forward to in the coming years.

Source : InspireOne

Win Your Customer Through Consultative Selling

As a Regional Manager-Sales, North , Sandeep leads a team of Key Account Managers at a consumer durable & electronics major. Besides being responsible for his region’s performance, he also handles few key clients directly. One among them is a multi brand retail major in the country – Citylife Retail. The client has been facing a major slowdown in the brick and mortar model business from online sellers. With the foray of new brands and sellers based on digital technology model, the competition is fierce. Although Citylife Retail is a huge brand in North, it is losing its market share to perceivably newer brands and sellers for their novelty factors. Sandeep is known to be an expert in consultative selling by virtue of his training and experience he has supported many clients to win in the marketplace. In the recent past he has supported his clients to transform through new media solutions. His current challenge is to transform Citylife Retail.  

How does Sandeep understand Citylife’s problems?

Sandeep meets the director- sales &marketing of Citylife – Swati Pal – to understand the issues, challenges and reasons for the dip in sales numbers. Over several meetings with Swati he learns more about the brand proposition and gains insights about the needs of Citylife’s customers. The meetings help Sandeep to infer that apart from other factors, digital boom has been instrumental in creating tough business environment for Citylife. The philosophy of consultative selling is found on understanding a customer’s needs and position the solution to those identified needs.

In today’s VUCA environment when the complexity in the ecosystem of business is ever growing, enterprises look for trusted and worthy advisors to guide them to better results. It can be inferred with reasonable certainty that this business environment is only going to become more complex in the future. The most significant reason for the same has been the internet. Digital has facilitated the decision-makers (customers) to research, analyze and assess the various offerings of the sellers online. By the time the customers start talking to a potential seller, they are already on the decision-making journey and this makes ‘consultative selling’ even more relevant.

What does Sandeep infer? 

Citylife’s current customer demographic profile was skewed towards the older loyalist and they were not able to attract new customers owing to lack of novelty in brand experience. Also, they had no online platform for the millennials who comprised the chunk of new buyers. Sandeep also learns that at the shop floor level there was an urgent need to engage the sales staff and for the back-end corporate team it was pertinent to understand new consumer trends and experiences. In consultative selling, the focus is on comprehending customer’s needs and educating the customer simultaneously. To render this, the sales professional often requires strong sapiential authority which is essentially possession of a high-level knowledge and insight that can be used to influence the customer. Today, what customers are looking from sales professionals is not merely defining their needs, but also educating and partnering with them for innovative ideas and solutions that will help their business to perform in dynamic environment.  

Sandeep concluded that if Citylife had to be relevant in the face of new market dynamics and customer expectations it first needed to change the internal customers. With experience, he knew that any successful change begins with an organizational culture change. Also, Citylife had to find a new way to reach the new customers who had a discerning preference for online shopping. Consultative Selling focuses not only on defining customer needs but also redefining how the customer perceives those needs. He communicated to them that it will take effort on their part to change and inspire them to take both strategic and tactical actions, thereby driving organizational change in the process.

What was advised by Sandeep ? 

Considering the fact that Citylife was already an established player in the traditional brick and mortar business model, Sandeep did not want to turn their apple cart. Hence he came up with a hybrid approach for Swati. Besides organization culture change and other solutions the first proposition included ‘consultative selling’ approach as a key to address the loyal customer base. At the same time his second proposition was the launch of an online portal with competitive pricing. Both were necessary to be relevant in the minds of existing loyalist while building a high perception brand value to attract the new consumers.  

With multiple online media, there is plethora of information on the web, and most customers and /or decision makers know how to find and construe it. This leads to tough competition giving multiple options to the customer to choose from. Almost invariably this leads to a situation where several competing players offer comparable approaches to solving the same problem of the customer. Customers are pampered with multiple options which allows them to compare different sellers against similar parameters thereby funneling it all down to price wars and discounting. The opportunity with consultative selling is to vivify the differentiated offerings in the minds of the customers.  Consultative selling is an opportunity to share tacit knowledge and build greater perceived value. The seller with higher perceived ‘value’ wins in the market place through consultative approach.  

‘Value’ is defined as the perception of something of worth. Since it is based on perception ‘value’, it is determined differently by every individual. Buyers examine ‘value’ as what they get, versus what ‘price’ they pay. Hence Sandeep made Citylife understand that they will need to ‘create’ value as well as ‘communicate’ value to affect tangible business impact for themselves. This was a clear case of consultative selling to create sustainable brand value.

Why did Sandeep advise what he did?

The rise of the internet and social media has contributed to the acceleration of change in the sales approach and methodology. The belief is that in the future, this trend of internet usage and social media will continue to proliferate. Therefore, Citylife’s sales efforts will need to adapt ‘go-to-market’ strategies and new methods to support and fit the immensely increased knowledge power of consumers to see greater success. Social media has made everything transparent and brands who have a strong “digital presence” are more empowered to deliver value via new modes of digital media for a better customer experience.  

Sandeep knows that the path of change was difficult; however, it is deemed to be a mandate for impacting business results in future. As a consultative seller, Sandeep has had a record of transforming the businesses of many of his clients to the path of success through collaboration. His solutions approach is multi-dimensional and much broader in its scope and nature. Even his customers are often pleasantly surprised at his creative abilities in providing solutions to impact business performance. His past collaborations with his clients have had a high success rate. This time too his solution to transform Citylife through his multipronged advice looks promising.   

However, only time will testify about Citylife’s success and if Sandeep would succeed once again through ‘Consultative Selling’.

What is your prediction– will Sandeep create another successful business transformation?

Know more about InspireOne Sales Development Solutions

Five Ways to Engage Your Millennial Employees

Any workforce today has a mix of Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. While Baby Boomers continue to form the largest section of the employee population, by 2020 they are going to be overtaken by the Millennials. Already the Millennials account for the second largest proportion of the workforce, ahead of Gen X.
The rise of Millennials in any organization has a strong impact on the organization, especially its culture. For instance, managements across organizations have implemented a certain style of employee engagement strategy for years. However, now that needs to change. Millennials have been raised in an environment which is markedly different from that of their predecessors. It is prudent, therefore, for organizations to take a close look at their strategy to engage millennials.

We have listed down five key areas that organizations should consider while revamping their employee engagement policies for the millennials.

• Flexibility: Millennials enjoy flexibility in the way they work. For example, according to a recent study conducted by Millennial Branding, 89% of Millennials prefer to choose when and where they work rather than being placed in a 9-to-5 position.However, this fondness for flexibility is not just limited to logistical elements like work timing. Millennials also like having the autonomy to do their work in their own way, which might very often deviate from the tried and tested methods of the past.

• Clear Career Path:The new generation is very career focused. However, they also want work life balance.Being cognizant of where their career is heading helps them in planning their life ahead. This in turn, helps them to constantly maintain that balance between their profession, and their interests outside of work. Hence, if an organization wants to engage and retain any millennial talent, it is imperative that s/he is taken through a well chalked out career plan. This eases his/her anxiety pertaining to his/her career, thus enabling greater focus on delivering their best for the organization.

• Role: Stemming from the clarity of their career paths, another critical area to engage millennials is to offer them roles which challenge them. A typical 9 to 5 job is not something that excites the new generation. Studies show that professional growth & development is one of the strongest motivators for millennials. They need to be offered roles which allow that to them. Their role should judiciously utilize their capabilities, and challenge them to push themselves further to innovate. In fact, according to a recent study by Deloitte, nearly 70% of Millennials prefer working for organizations that actively reward employees for innovative ideas.

• Continuous Feedback:The millennials are a generation of here and now. They are used to getting things immediately (almost!). The ever so reducing delivery time offered by e-commerce companies (same day delivery!) is a testament to this drive for instant gratification. When it comes to the professional front, it is no different. Millennials expect instant feedback. The gap between annual, bi-annual appraisals is too huge to keep them engaged. It is important that their managers share their feedback with the millennials regularly. Importantly, this feedback shouldn’t be limited to the positives and negatives of what they are doing, but also include specific inputs on what are the areas/skills that they need to improve to get ahead in their career.

• Socialization: There was a time when employees wanted to keep their professional & personal lives separate. However, for the millennials these two worlds are closer than ever before. Be it adding colleagues on ‘personal’ social media sites like Facebook & Instagram (as opposed to a more professional networking site like LinkedIn), or spending post work evenings bonding with colleagues at a pub, the millennials are more open to bridge that gulf between what’s personal & professional. Socializing comes more naturally to them, than their predecessors. This is also reflected in the fact that millennials enjoy working in teams, juxtapose their predecessors who preferred contributing individually. Any engagement strategy for millennials ought to look at this motivation for them as well.
In conclusion, millennials are the immediate future for organizations and it is critical that they engage them well. One of the first steps in this initiative is to understand the specifics of what drives the millennials in their organization. An employee engagement survey would benefit greatly in achieving this. Based on the findings of the survey, organizations can then lay down a strategy to engage their millennials, which would help organizations grow in the long run.

InpireOne’s employee engagement survey, in partnership with IBM Smarter Workforce, empowers organizations to drive business performance through in-depth insights on the pulse of the organization.

Is the Sales Team enabled for Dynamic Business World?

It is an annual sales conference and sales leaders, at various levels, from length and breadth of the country have arrived. The atmosphere is staid and all the participants look serious. Sergio, the business head plans to do 360-degree assessment of past year and chart out a robust future direction to meet the business environment challenges. He has met the HR and Sales head few weeks back to map engagement levels and sales performance of the sales leaders and their team. So, what is the verdict?

The sales team is engaged but their performance enablement scores are low

The sales team is engaged but their performance enablement scores are low as per the recent Organization Employee Engagement Surveys. Performance Engagement Index (PEI) showed low levels of customer service and product quality. The sales team’s capability to close a business opportunity right in the moment was poor due to low involvement and varied collaboration efforts. Further even Sr. sales Leadership team’s PEI was found abysmal. A correlation was established between the sales team and their sales leader’s low PEI.

Empower sales leaders to empower sales team

As the top level results were shared, Sergio knew that if the senior sales leadership challenges could be understood and addressed then the entire sales team could be aligned and business be led on to the growth trajectory.

Sergio wanted to find out if the organization structure was empowering the sales leaders.

The EES results showed low PEI for Sr. Leadership team because they were not empowered sufficiently to lead their teams. They were operating at a managerial role rather than assuming a more leadership role. Instead of focusing on the bigger picture and accordingly taking decisions, they were occupied with executing activities. What could have been the reason(s)? Was there a training gap? Or was it the old organizational structure which no longer supported the dynamic business environment?

As per IBM’s research on Leadership and engagement in tomorrow’s organization the old leadership behaviors, once rewarded are no longer relevant. To improve the organization’s bottom – line business results, specific new leadership behaviors are required. One needs to learn from the high performing leaders and understand how to be effective in the dynamic business environment.

What skills and behaviors will the sales leaders need to meet the Business results in the dynamic environment?

In today’s modern Business world, having a culture that is customer-centric ( SCCC Link) is essential. To ensure the right service skills in the business, the business needs to be structured in a way that enables great service experiences, and the right systems and processes support it.

To Sergio it was clear that Sales Leadership was not able to leverage an engaged Salesforce due to their inability to share the right signals (TMI 5 box Model) – alignment between aspiration to be customer-focused and ability to deliver it. The ‘Big Picture’ of the organization was not percolated well amongst the sales teams, if at all done.

The service culture can only flourish if leaders display the right service behaviors – and so signal the genuine intent. It is estimated that about 40% of the success of an organization is due to the capabilities of its leaders.

Becoming inspiring Sales Leaders to inspire Performance

Sales leaders needed to move away from operational role to a leadership role. Sergio knew this would involve setting up processes and structures which will finally drive the various PEI factors, and in turn drive business results. An organization’s success depends upon motivated sales team who achieve their goals driven by inspiring sales leadership at all levels.

Creating inspiring Sales leaders

Sergio with the help of his HR leader reviewed the sales leaders and put in place programs  to develop the necessary skills and behaviors. To evaluate the sales leaders three metrics of – team engagement / motivation, customer satisfaction and financial business performance –  were put in place. Finally, through sales leader’s own walk–the-talk attitude, the entire sales team was transformed. This lead to monumental and encouraging business results.

Next year during the Annual Sales conference, the year was declared the best business growth year of the decade with the highest sales employee engagement rate ever.

Create your organization’s success story through inspiring sales leadership

All businesses depend upon their leaders. This is especially true for the sales team, who rely upon their sales leader to be the harbinger for finding the vision, valuing their contribution and providing them the right support. To perform in the modern business world means to strengthen your sales team through inspiring sales leadership. Sergio created a success story for his organization through sales leadership. Are you ready to create yours?

Assessments Outcome - InspireOne

When including assessments into the recruitment process, most clients we speak to are keen to know the outcomes and often focus on reduced time to hire and lesser turnover.

As a consequence of introducing assessments, other improvements such as consistency in the process and a better idea of which sourcing channel is identifying better candidates are also very much possible.

We like to think of these as Tier 1 metrics or the ‘non-negotiables’. Unfortunately, most organizations do not build up on those improvements to realize possible improvements in business outcomes. We define these as Tier 2 metrics and they largely vary based on the job role.

For instance, for sales roles, what is the improvement in sales productivity as a result of introducing new organization assessment solutions? Or for quality & product development roles, has selecting the right employee translated into better brand quality?

In order to realize this, it’s important to view assessments as a long term (5 to 10 year) investment decision. That in turn enables organizations to view immediate and long term benefits that result from the out-years and are correlated with business performance.

The best starting point for implementing such a strategy is to first identify the most critical job role in any organization or industry. This could be a Store Manager or Assistant Store Manager in Retail, a Branch Manager for Financial Services firms, a Developer for Software or IT organizations or a Warehouse Manager for eCommerce companies.

So how long term & strategic is your assessment approach?

What Is The ‘Right’ Frequency For Conducting An Employee Engagement Survey?

When considering an employee engagement survey initiative, one of the first questions that comes to mind is ‘How frequently should my organization conduct the survey?’. This is a basic but critical question, and organizations must have a clear answer to it before formalizing their employee engagement survey.

The thing with engagement surveys is that, every organization has to set its own right frequency. In case the surveys are launched in quick succession, say every 6 months, then that could lead to several issues. Firstly, surveys that are too frequent do not allow an organization adequate time to create and execute on their action plans based on the findings of the previous survey. The second challenge of too frequent surveys stems from this first point. Given that organizations have little time to implement any of the changes, employees tend to perceive the initiative as a ‘tick in the box’, and start believing that nothing really comes out of them. Thus, employee engagement surveys lose their credibility among employees. Finally, frequent engagement surveys lead to ‘survey fatigue’. Employees simply get tired of answering surveys every few months. This becomes further frustrating if the high frequency of these surveys is not complemented by an equally fast implementation of changes and constant communication. Thus, having engagement surveys too frequently may not be beneficial.

Now let’s look at the other side. What happens if we have a huge time gaps between our employee engagement surveys? In this scenario, an organization runs the risk of not identifying critical issues that the employees, and the organization at large, is grappling with. This can pose a serious threat to the health and performance of the organization and oftentimes could result in a challenge turning into crisis.

For instance, imagine the future state of a fast growing consumer goods company, that is growing at 30% year on year but unable to identify telltale signs of fatigue in the workforce due to an overexerted work environment?

Imagine the savings of both performance and health of Carnegie Steel Company back in 1892 if the working conditions of the steelworkers’ union were highlighted as a red flag had the company conducted a workforce survey! It could have prevented the Homestead strike or massacre altogether!

So what is the ideal frequency to run engagement surveys? The answer would depend on various factors such as company size, nature of work, company context, business & industry performance, among others. However, drawing from our experience across industries, we recommend that organizations should ideally conduct employee engagement surveys once a year. An annual employee engagement survey will help the organization to align the survey with the overall business cycle and signal to its workforce as an important annual initiative. Since most organizations plan or realign their business strategy annually, findings from the survey can become inputs for this annual strategy and thereby form a major input to the overall workforce strategy. Furthermore, organizations can utilize the 12 months to frame & execute on action plans across all levels of its workforce. Short term plans that are implemented during the course of the year build credibility for the survey as employees see changes and continuous progress, based on their feedback.

Regardless of the frequency, conducting an employee engagement survey is likely to be beneficial to an organization and its workforce. However, studies suggest that an annual survey has greater impact on employee engagement. For example, a study conducted among 105 companies revealed that 64 percent of the companies that surveyed every year noticed improvement to engagement scores, compared to 56 percent of organizations that surveyed biennially.

So when you decide to do an employee engagement employee survey, it’s best to think through the ultimate goals that you wish to achieve, and when & how you should launch the survey to meet these goals.