In 2017 your employees, as usual, completed HR-conducted surveys.
Satisfaction surveys, exit surveys, kiosk surveys, etc. Your HR compared the data to 2016, or to previous benchmarks. You held focus groups and hosted luncheons, recognized employees-of-the-month, and conducted end-of-the-year interviews. In 2017 these engagement initiatives did what they had always done before: kept your company’s engagement level flat.
Time for A Shakeup
Why not implement a fresh initiative that will increase engagement? Start by asking yourself a simple question. “What comes first in my company — sales numbers or engagement numbers?”
Here is some eye-popping engagement data (per Gallup):
- Organizations that score in the top 25% for engagement have 21% more profit and 22% more product than organizations that score in the BOTTOM 25% for engagement.
There’s a lot more data on this but we only need to consider the following:
- When salespeople give just 10% more effort, customers spend 22.7% more money.
If fixing engagement wasn’t the priority in your company, it needs to be going forward.
The 2018 Stay Interview Action Plan
Getting everyone involved in engagement, from CFO’s to managers leads to higher engagement, to employees giving extra effort every single day. Here are 5 straightforward steps to make it happen:
- Involve Your CFO. Show your CFO the correlation between engagement and the bottom line. Make sure they see it’s not a mere HR-metric. Grab your calendar and firm up some dates for your CFO to meet with your executive team to start sharing this vital information. The executive team needs to hear that engagement has a profound effect on your company’s bottom line. Several meetings over the next few months are needed to emphasize, and reemphasize, that message.
- Teach your #1 team what drives engagement. Show your best sales team the Gallup data on the correlation of strong relationships between supervisors and employees, relationships based on trust, and higher engagement levels.
- Evaluate current plans.Executives need to look at management action plans and ask themselves whether the plans will foster stronger relationships based on trust between managers and employees. Stay Interviews areengagement-fixing tools for building stronger relationships.
- Schedule quarterly surveys.Managers, like employees, need to be held accountable. More and more companies are surveying 25% of their employees on a quarterly basis. This way managers are evaluated every 90 days rather than 6 months or a year.
- Set goals.Your company has sales goals, service goals, and cost-cutting goals. What about engagement goals? Set definite goals and hold your managers accountable for meeting them.
Your company’s goal in 2018 should be to increase engagement. Implement your Stay Interview action plan and watch engagement levels soar.
