COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented situation all over the world. Tens of millions of employees had to work from home, salaries have been cut, massive lay offs started in almost every industry. Gloomy picture of the global economy. Challenging time for HR professionals and internal communicators. It is very hard to keep the level employee engagement when so many other things are at stake. Seasoned PR professional and employee engagement guru Crispin Manners answered IdeaBank’s questions.
I believe the Covid 19 pandemic is likely to be a genuinely defining time for employee engagement and how employees view their current employer. People will remember how other people, brands, governments and employers behaved. And there will be tighter emotional bonds with those who were considerate and helpful.
So my first advice to employers is to be kind. Kindness can come in many forms. It can be the tone in which you explain the need to furlough an employee or the genuine recognition that an employee who has to home-school simply cannot perform the way he or she would at work. But being kind, like all leaders actions, has to meet the needs of SCARF (explained in this blog) – a neuroscience framework that should be part of every leader’s toolkit. Because if you are seen to be kind to one employee and not to another, you will have a negative impact at a time when you hope what you are doing creates only positive reactions.
One positive outcome from the crisis is that people have been reconnecting with friends and family and with colleagues. These connections are becoming deeper seated bonds. And employers should take steps to facilitate and encourage these connections by introducing new ways to connect that forge tight bonds with the organisation as well as with individuals. At the heart of this should be the organisation’s Purpose. With the fear of illness or death from an unseen adversary, the current crisis is making people think about what they want out of life. This includes whether their current job makes them feel if they are making a difference. It’s therefore an ideal time to revisit the company Purpose and check if it is both relevant and compelling to employees and customers alike. As these statistics show, clarity of Purpose pays off:
Finally, I think the pandemic is a time when leadership skills will be put to the toughest of tests. Employees will look to leaders to lead – not to manage. They’ll want leaders to provide certainty about what will happen next and the transparency on what matters most in this massively changed world, so that employees feel that what they do makes a positive contribution.
I firmly believe that kind leaders who think about how to adapt to a life alongside Covid, and then after Covid, will find their organisation emerges stronger from the crisis. I will very happily run a free 30-minute brainstorm with any leader who wants to identify options for creating a purpose-driven organisation that performs strongly after Covid.
Worldcom’s Confidence Index 2019 identified that employee related topics took six out of the top eight places in the Index. These topics included, in priority order: upskilling and reskilling, retaining talent, the influence of employment benefits on success, economic migration, improving productivity through employee engagement and attracting talent.
The reason so many employee topics are keeping CEOs awake at night, is that there is a battle for talent underway where organisations are trying to work out how to keep people loyal. Communication lies at the heart of all these issues and most clients come to us to help them improve communication at every level in the organisation. By using a very powerful engagement platform called Engagement Multiplier we have identified that many organisations need help with three things in particular:
I helped to launch The Employee Engagement Alliance because I believe that every workplace should be truly inspiring. I believe that happy employees are very productive employees and I want the Alliance to inspire organisations to operate in a way that enables employees to bring their true self to work. As a result, the Alliance focuses on creating a global community of people and companies who share that Purpose. We aim to help our community deliver the inspiration, knowledge and tools to produce an employee experience that engages and energizes.
I also believe that companies that behave in the right way should be recognised for the difference they make to their people. That’s why I’m also actively involved in the Employee Engagement Awards. The Awards is the only organisation that recognises best practice in delivering a great employee experience on a global basis. The Alliance and the Awards are helping organisations transform the way they behave. The results are achieved address all of the issues uncovered by the Confidence Index. Retention is higher, attraction is easier and high engagement is measured not just in engagement scores but in employee innovation, increased productivity and happier and healthier workforce.
Because employee engagement covers everything to do with people at work, it is a sector that attracts people from many different backgrounds. As I mentioned above, communications lie at the heart of successful engagement, so many practitioners have a communications background. However, neuroscientists, HR professionals, coaches and technology providers are also strongly represented.
As you can imagine, there are many different attitudes to engagement. There is a very enlightened breed of CEO that understands that business success depends on a happy, heathy and productive workforce that is purpose driven. These CEOs have made engagement one of the strategic pillars of their business. And they are reaping the rewards for doing so.
Some CEOs think it is unnecessary for people to be happy at work (although the neuroscience available today says otherwise) but accept the growing proof that engagement pay-off in terms of business value. As a result, they are beginning to invest in the processes to drive engagement. Their approach is more task based rather than Purpose-driven. They therefore achieve a lower return on investment than the first group. There are other CEOs who are still clinging to a command and control style of leadership. Many of these organisations continue to be profitable and this is seen as proof that there is no need to change. However, the reality is that the returns could be significantly higher if their people were energised and engaged.
There are lots of facets of engagement that need to be considered. These include topics such as wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, mental wellbeing, reward and recognition, benefits, leadership skills, employee innovation and effective communication. All have their part to play. However, I believe every effective engagement programme must include the following:
One of our clients was a private equity backed technology company of about 150 people that was sold to a huge global organisation employing about 100,000 people. It would have been very easy for the people in this tiny division to feel overwhelmed and to lose sight of their Purpose. As a result we worked with the leadership team to run a series of Purpose workshops to identify how the company’s purpose dovetailed with the purpose of the new owners. We brought this to life in a simple narrative that showed the two organisations shared a common Purpose in terms of the value they were trying to deliver to their customers. We then gave every team clarity and certainty about that they had to do by capturing this in team ‘Navigators’. To ensure people felt involved we used Engagement Multiplier to capture feedback and act on it on a 90 day cycle. The average participation was over 80% and the Engagement score progressively improved with every round of feedback. As a result, employee churn was very low, and the company performed very well in a difficult market. We also identified and implemented a number of employee ideas that improved processes and enhance the customer experience.
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Founder of Onva Conculting. He has over 30 years running both public and private businesses and leading Boards of membership organisations. Crispin is also Chairman, and one of the founders, of the Employee Engagement Alliance, a membership organisation with a mission to champion professional development in employee engagement. He is a Fellow and past Chairman of the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and on the global board of the Worldcom PR Group. His book Grow, Build, Sell, Live gained wide recognition in the global PR agency manager community.
