The Performance Improvement Blog

10 Ways to Measure the Impact of Employee Engagement Interventions

There might be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are hundreds of ways to enhance   employee engagement. These are listed in a new book edited by David Zinger for The Employee Engagement Network. The book is titled The Top Tens of Employee Engagement and can be downloaded at the Network' site. I have the honor of being author of the chapter on measuring the impact of employee engagement interventions. In that chapter I describe ten ways of measuring impact. You can:

1. Interview a small sample of participants. 
2. Survey participants before and after the intervention. 
3. Survey bosses of participants. 
4.  Survey employees supervised by participants. 
5. Observe employees in their natural habitat. 
6. Analyze unobtrusive indicators of engagement. 
7. Interview customers of employees. 
8. Interview top management of organization. 
9.  Ask employees to keep a log. 
10. Combine two or more of items 1 through 9 above. 

As you can see by this list, several different methods can be used to determine if training programs, communication programs, new workplace policies, social activities, or any other employee intervention has a significant impact on engagement. The tendency of organizations is to send out a survey to measure impact; that is, if they do anything at all. Management should be clear about the results they want and the indicators that will show that those results have been achieved, before deciding on the measurement method that will be most useful.

How to Use Feedback From Employee Surveys to Change Organizations

Guest blogger for this post is James D. Stilwell.

You name it, somebody is trying to measure it: employee satisfaction, employee engagement,   organizational pulse, leadership, attitudes toward a recent change, etc. The problem is that organizations are collecting a great deal of data but not applying it in ways that result in substantive change. An important reason for this is that organizations frequently miss critical steps in the learning process. The typical scenario involves a few leaders identifying a problem and then deciding that gathering data would be a good thing to do by using an old survey instrument or hiring a consultant to create a new questionnaire, sending it to all of the employees, looking at some resulting data, often in the form of charts and graphs, and then either continuing with business as usual or making changes that they deem warranted by the survey results.  Further complicating the process is that, In all likelihood, analysis of the data was influenced by a leader’s own expectations and  understanding of the problem  that generated the survey in the first place. Other than a momentary snapshot of attitudes, the organization has likely learned little and probably has succeeded in alienating employees.

Missing from the process are some crucial steps. First of all, it works best if senior leadership communicates a compelling need for the survey in advance of sending questionnaires to all or a sample of employees.  As a part of this communication, leaders should clearly define the entire data gathering and feedback process emphasizing the role of employees.  Secondly, the findings from the survey would benefit from validation by key stakeholders – namely those who have provided the survey responses. The data from a survey can always be interpreted in many different ways given organizational circumstances, response rates, respondent demographics, the wording of questions and design of the survey. Thirdly, discussing the findings with groups throughout the organization and at all levels for their interpretation and recommendations leads to a deeper understanding, greater alignment, and vastly better solutions. A fourth important step in the process is for leaders  to  communicate back to the entire organization what it is that will be done as a result of the insights gained through the survey and all of the group discussions. This communication should clearly define what leaders know now that they didn't know before? What will be changed that will improve the work environment and increase organizational success? Who will be responsible and when will it happen? How will follow-up happen to ensure the success of the changes? 

Without these crucial steps, an employee survey is a waste of time and resources. In fact, it is better to never have surveyed at all. Expectations for change are heightened when employees are asked questions about their organizations. The first few times that they fill out a survey they might be sincere in their feedback, but if they begin to believe that management is not paying attention and not listening, they will provide inauthentic responses to questions  or cease participating altogether.

Seeing the Gorilla in Program Evaluation

Organizations often evaluate their own programs, as well they should. But, in doing so they should be aware that they are probably failing to observe some very important factors. It’s the nature of human beings. We suffer from selective attention. This finding is supported by the research of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris who study our ability to see unexpected events.  In their new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, they report on 10 years of showing videos to people all over the world who failed (including this blogger) to see something unexpected while trying to complete an observation task. Test yourself on their latest video:

The same phenomenon happens when managers of programs and services (e.g., training, customer service, process improvement) examine the effectiveness of their own interventions. They measure pre-determined attitudes and behaviors. When they do this they are likely to miss unexpected events. For example, in evaluating a diversity program for a client, I found that several managers who had participated in the program later retained employees who they had been intending to fire. A greater understanding and sensitivity to the individual needs of these employees, that they developed in the diversity training, made the difference. This finding was not expected. A study of the usually expected outcomes of diversity programs, such as hiring and promoting more women and minorities, would not have discovered this other very important behavior change. This is not to say that managers should never evaluate their own programs. It's just that when they do they need to be open to the unexpected.

Frances Hesselbein and Leadership

Business has much to learn about management from well-run not-for-profit organizations. Business also has much to learn about leadership from these nonprofits. Some of our greatest organizational leaders come from the nonprofit sector. Arati Menon Carroll, writing for The Economic Times, tells this story:

Many years ago, a journalist asked the late Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, who he thought was the greatest leader in the country. Drucker had, after all, consulted with some   of the most eulogised CEOs from GE’s Jack Welch to Procter & Gamble’s AG Lafley. Drucker’s instant reply: Frances Hesselbein, the CEO of the American Girl Scouts movement. The disappointed journalist argued: But surely that’s only in the nonprofit world. Drucker retorted, “Frances Hesselbein could manage any company in America.”

Hesselbein was CEO of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. from 1976-1990. In 1998 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor. Now she serves as President and CEO of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly   the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management). One of my favorite quotes from Hesselbein is:

The leader for today and the future will be focused on how to BE – how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values, principles, and courage.

Now, more than ever, we need leaders in all sectors (for-profit, not-for-profit, and government) to head these eloquent words. We don’t need leaders who put company share price ahead of the lives and livelihood of Gulf Coast residents. We don’t need leaders who put their end-of-year bonus ahead of the financial futures of millions of homeowners. We don’t need leaders who build enormous profits for their companies on the backs of minimum-wage, no-benefits, two-job, single parents. We need leaders who value the dignity and worth of all human life and make decisions accordingly.

More Management Lessons From Nonprofits

In my last post I wrote about Nancy Lublin’s new book, Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business, and her notion that for-profit companies have much to learn from well-managed nonprofits. Lublin says more about this in   an article for The Huffington Post. She says in that post that businesses should learn three major financial lessons from nonprofits:

1. Strive for diversified revenue. The best run nonprofits have multiple sources of income so that the loss of one of these streams does not prevent the organization from achieving its mission. A common cause of business failure is an over reliance on one source of revenue.

2. Transparency is vital. Nonprofits must make their finances public. This creates trust in the organization and makes it much less likely that money can be used in unscrupulous ways. Businesses do not have to be as open as a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation, but more transparency might have prevented the scandalous behavior of companies whose demise was do to legal problems, such as Enron, WorldCom, and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

3. Live in fear of overhead. Well run non-profits do not waste anything; they keep operating expenses at a minimum and apply most of every dollar to programs and services. Businesses often let the trappings of success consume resources with little left to attract and keep customers.

Of course, the nonprofit sector has its own notorious examples of financial mismanagement, for example the United Way of America's 1992 scandal that led to the resignation and criminal conviction of its CEO. Sometimes nonprofits, like businesses, lose sight of their mission and then complacency and greed take over. But that doesn't mean that organizations from any sector can't learn from the best of them.

What Businesses Can Learn From Nonprofits

“If only not-for-profit organizations were run like for-profit companies …”, so goes the common refrain. From my experience, it’s the other way around. For-profit companies have much to learn from the nonprofit sector.  This is the topic that Nancy Lublin, nonprofit leader and social marketing consultant to   corporations, addresses in an article she wrote for Fast Company Magazine that is adapted from her new book, Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business. She writes:

Everyone loves to talk about how not-for-profits need to behave more like businesses. But after watching giant for-profit companies pull out the begging bowl, I know there are also plenty of lessons my sector can offer.

BP, GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, AIG – the list goes on and on. All are companies that could have benefited from following the practices of well-run nonprofits. Business tends to rely on money to solve problems and achieve goals. Nonprofits have to do it without money. They don’t have any. As Lublin says, they have “zilch”.  The best nonprofits develop ways to attract and use donor and grant money to achieve their goals. They do this, in part, by communicating a compelling message, by telling the captivating history of their organizations, and by making the “ask” very specific, e.g., your donation of this amount will change things for this person in this way. They also “say thanks” by telling customers and donors over and over in different ways that the nonprofit cares about them. And they hire people who have passion for the cause, not necessarily people who are long on experience, instilling in them a commitment to an ideal. These are all things that would make businesses more successful.

Alice Korngold, writing about Lublin’s book for a Fast Company blog, puts it this way:

Think about how the employees of BP feel: Ashamed? Angry? Defensive? On the other hand, if BP had had a plan that was respectful of the environment and oriented to risk-management, conservation, preservation, and transparency, this would have been a company that its employees and investors could be proud of.

Instead, many companies, like BP, employ managers who are driven by the size of their budgets. The company culture encourages this misdirection of purpose, i.e., they are rewarded and recognized for having funds to do their projects. The question Lublin says managers should be asking themselves is how can we achieve our goals without spending money? What would we have to do get employee, customer, and partner support for achieving our goals? How would we have to act as a company to develop the employee and customer passion and commitment to purpose that is typical of the best nonprofits?