Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Roots of Your Employee Experience

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2. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Cassie Whitlock Director of HR BambooHR Jack Altman CEO and Co-Founder Lattice
3. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience What is employee engagement?
4. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Bottom-up Employee Engagement A strategy that listens to and values the feedback of every employee at the company.
5. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience 1/3 of US employees are engaged in their jobs
6. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience • 21% increased profitability • 59% decreased turnover Engaged employees are incredibly valuable ACCORDING TO GALLUP, HIGHLY ENGAGED BUSINESS UNITS ACHIEVE
7. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience $605,000,000,000 cost of actively disengaged U.S. employees in terms of lost productivity.
8. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Top Down vs. Bottom Up
9. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Top-Down Engagement Strategies 1. The organization recognizes a problem with engagement 2. HR asks for the budget to implement office perks like game rooms or nap pods, or start an Employee of the Month award. 3. These solutions don’t align with the causes of the employee disengagement, so the problems persist.
10. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Top-Down Strategy Drawbacks 1. Poor Compensation Support: recognition becomes mockery 2. Limited Visibility/Popularity Contest 3. Limited Managerial Support
11. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience
12. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Bottom-Up Engagement Strategies 1. Plan out the full employee journey instead of reacting 2. Show how work concerns connect with personal progress 3. Align priorities to develop intrinsic motivation
13. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Bottom-Up Engagement Strategies 1. Provide employees with accountability for their work 2. Communicate high expectations 3. Provide the right level of authority to fulfill expectations 4. Empower and connect your employees 5. Prove that anyone can have a great idea and use it
15. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Begin withAlignment
16. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Are you both growing? Are you growing in the same direction?
18. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Unintended Referral Results • Women and minorities receive fewer referrals than white men • White women were 12 percent less likely to receive a referral • Men of color were 26 percent less likely to receive a referral • Women of color were 35 percent less likely to receive a referral
19. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience • Identify Values/Build Employer Brand: Advertise your values on your website and demonstrate them throughout the candidate and employee experience • Start Early: Start as soon as the new hire accepts the offer with e-signatures • A Great First Day: leave time for team introductions (a team lunch works well) • Ongoing Support/Information Resources: Continue to offer proactive training to promote and clarify responsibilities, benefits, and your organization’s culture Employee engagement starts before they do.
20. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience How to build a bottom-up engagement strategy
21. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Collect engagement data.
22. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Surveys Deeper list of questions on the state of work Cadence: Quarterly
23. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience eNPS Measure the likelihood of an employee recommending working at your org to a friend Cadence: Quarterly
25. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience 1:1s Managers meet with their team to clear roadblocks, provide feedback and coaching. Cadence: Weekly
26. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Reviews Reflect on individual performance and get formal feedback from peers and managers. Cadence: Quarterly/Bi-Annual
27. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience You have the data. What do you do with it?
28. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience 1. Inform every team 2. Highlight key issues 3. Explain how they’ll get solved Be transparent about survey results.
29. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Accountability Offer employees choices that are appropriate, healthy, safe, and aligned with your values Cadence: Following Feedback
31. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Make sharing feedback second nature for your employees. Build a feedback culture
32. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Provides benefit for both the company and the employee Feedback is a powerful tool Company Feedback helps to course correct employee’s actions that are not productive or aligned with the company’s mission. Employee Understand what you’re doing wrong and how you can make a greater impact on the company and your career.
33. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Make feedback a habit Employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost 3x as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not hold regular meetings with them
34. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Key takeaways from today 1. Employee engagement starts from the bottom up 2. Measuring engagement data is the starting point for adapting your engagement strategy 3. Focus on the alignment between employee and organization throughout the employee life cycle–from the candidate experience to the latest 1:1 4. Transparency and accountability help create a culture of feedback 5. Consistency with your engagement strategy leads to the results of engagement: satisfied employees and a more effective organization
35. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience Follow BambooHR and Lattice on social media: bamboohr.com/blog | lattice.com Thank you!
36. bamboohr.com lattice.com Employee Engagement Strategy: Getting to the Root of Your Employee Experience BambooHR Receive a free job posting on our ATS and full HRIS for one week. We will contact everyone within the next few days to set this up. Performance Management for Growing Companies Lattice Get started with a free trial at lattice.com Questions?

Notas del editor

Engagement is important.
How do you increase engagement? You can categorize most theories into two camps: those who try to increase engagement from the top down, and those who try to increase engagement from the bottom up.
What is the difference between these two strategies?
Top-down strategies rely on organization-wide efforts developed in the leadership suite, while bottom-up strategies measure engagement on every level and incorporate feedback.
CASSIE:

You may have seen the top-down process play out:
Your organization recognizes an engagement problem

HR asks for the budget to implement a program, something like an employee of the month program or office perks like game rooms or nap pods.

But then these solutions don’t align with the causes of the employee disengagement, and the problems persist.
CASSIE: For example, if employees are finding it hard to focus on work because they’re wondering how they’re going to pay the mortgage with their compensation, a $20 gift card to the candle store looks less like appreciation and more like mockery.

Or if employees feel like the work they do is invisible because no one nominates them for employee of the month, or because the award always goes to the employee in customer support with the most votes (and customer support has the most employees)

Or if employees return from a heartfelt presentation on values to have their managers crack the whip and get them back to their soulless grind.

Lasting employee engagement isn’t bought or ordered. Lasting engagement grows from the bottom up through the consistent actions that make up your organization’s real culture. To shape engagement in your organization, you need to start at the bottom and grow your way to the top.
CASSIE:

Consider the sequoia tree. It’s the largest single-stem tree in the world, with its trunk shooting up hundreds of feet in the air. The tallest sequoia tree is taller than the Empire State Building. Their root systems are shallow by comparison. But these shallow roots have a secret: they grow connections with the root systems of the other trees in the forest, drawing strength from each other’s success.
Bottom-up engagement acts in much the same way.
Understanding ideas and facilitating feedback throughout your organization helps grow connections between your people, letting you make sure that everyone is on board with your organization’s mission, vision and values.
BambooHR has two values that sum up an effective way to look at employee engagement.
CASSIE: The first is Grow from Good to Great. This perspective makes it clear that the goal for our employees isn’t to have them show up, do the same thing they did yesterday, and go home. When your organization works to plan out the full employee journey instead of just reacting enough to keep people in the seats, it makes a difference. When employees can see how their life’s concerns - not just in the workplace, but in their personal growth and their relationships - how everything in their lives aligns with their experience at work, then they have an intrinsic motivation to better both themselves and your organization.
CASSIE:

And the other value pairs with it: Lead from Where You Are. When employees have the conditions where they can take accountability for their work, where the organization communicates high expectations and provides the right levels of authority and resources to fulfill them, it empowers employees and connects them: both to each other and to the organization. It helps remove the idea that great ideas are reserved for the top levels: recent college grads can contribute in their space just as much as the C-suite can.
Like a root system, these deep connections in ideas and shared values aren’t always apparent at first glance. But they’re the first step to growing the results of engagement.
CASSIE: Without them, your engagement programs will be a lot like trying to make your forest as tall as your competition by sending HR out to pull on the trees.

JACK: (Lattice Commentary)

CASSIE: So today, we’re going to discuss how bottom-up engagement practices work with top-level strategy to empower your employees and deliver the results you’re looking for.
CASSIE:

As we mentioned earlier, one of the keys to employee engagement is alignment.

How employees meet the organization’s needs is just as important as how the organization meets their employees’ needs.

If there’s a mismatch, then the relationship doesn’t work out, whether the employer lets the employee go or the employee leaves in search of more fulfilling work.
There is no single point in your employees’ experience that will permanently engage them with your organization.

Engagement is a continuous process, where your organization engages and re-engages your employees as these needs change over time.

When you check alignment, you need to assess two things:
CASSIE:

One, if both parties are growing, and
Two, if they’re growing in the same direction.
When both of these statements are true, then the employer and the employee are in alignment.
Here’s the thing: you can’t check the direction of an employee relationship with a single point. But this is often what ends up happening during the hiring process.

Hopefully, you don’t hire new employees without a reason. Often, there’s some real pain that you need to solve: either replacing an employee that left, or expanding the capacity of a department or team to match an increase in scope. Hiring managers want to solve these problems as quickly as possible, as they’re the ones dealing with this pain. It can be tempting to speed up the hiring process by hiring someone right now whose characteristics seem to match on the surface instead of spending the time to assess how a candidate will grow over time.
CASSIE:

For example, many hiring managers try to simplify things by looking for an employee duplicate. They try to get the candidate that’s a match for the one that just left, or the one that copies the best employee in the department. Duplicating an employee seems like a way to expand that’s familiar and safe. The thinking goes that if the applicant’s resume matches closely enough, then that candidate will follow the same path as the ideal worker they’re looking to replicate.

Sometimes this process even extends to focusing on other surface-level characteristics that aren’t related to the job at all, excused with the label “culture fit”. These characteristics can be as innocuous as “likes Lord of the Rings” or as troublesome as racial or gender discrimination.

This looking for a “culture fit” can be intentional with specific questions during the hiring process.

(list terrible and discriminatory culture fit questions)
CASSIE:

Or sometimes, copycat recruiting can be unintentional. A study of 53,000 professionals from PayScale explored employee referrals, and it found that white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. If a large percentage of your hires come from referrals, then this copycat effect can start to compound. Research “women in silicon valley” if you want to learn more about large effect this process can have.

We could give a whole presentation on these short-sighted recruiting techniques (and BambooHR’s head of talent acquisition, JD Conway, gave a great one just recently.) But one thing these flawed recruiting practices have in common is that they involve reacting to personnel needs for a quick “culture fit” hire instead of deliberately hiring candidates who have diverse characteristics to add to your culture:

Diversity in background
Diversity in previous experience
Diversity in skills

Hiring “culture fits” can leave your organization with less diversity, higher turnover, and greater recruiting costs as recruiters struggle to find an exact duplicate and increase time-to-hire, or when these new hires realize that their role doesn’t align with their long-term goals and leave, starting the recruiting process all over again.

So how do you solve this problem? There’s only so much information you can glean from a resume.
CASSIE:

Luckily, your organization isn’t the only one that is thinking of alignment. Your candidates also want to know about the reality of working for you before they sign on.
Providing this information leads to engagement, whether you’re attracting new candidates, onboarding new hires, or re-boarding current employees who have disengaged from your organization. The first step to building engagement is to define what you want your employees to engage with. You need to define your ideal culture through practical application of your values.
This begins with an introduction to your values on your website, then a quick demonstration of your values in action as candidates come in for interviews. Over time, employees and former employees will report on their experience with your organization, whether through personal recommendations or online reviews. Taken together, your official communication and these available reviews make up your employer brand, and this narrative builds over time.
The candidates you bring on now will pay attention to how you onboard them. They’ll evaluate whether the promises on your website play out in their actual experience with your company. Here are some steps to condier in your onboarding process:
Starting Early: Signing forms is the most basic part of onboarding. This process can and should start as soon as the new hire accepts the offer through esignatures, so that the first day can focus on connecting the new hire to their new position.
A Great First Day: There’s a lot to cover on the first day, but make sure to leave time for introductions to the new hire’s new team. At bambooHR, we have the practice of treating the new hire to lunch with their team members, where there’s time for a more informal breaking of the ice than having everyone wave from their desks during orientation.
Ongoing Support/Information Resources: This doesn’t mean that you ditch the paperwork and the training. But as you focus on the new employee experience over the first 90 days, there are several ways to make sure that they’ve internalized lessons about your culture, training for their position, and how to understand and use their benefits. One example: at Bamboo, we have experts from our retirement program come in every month and present for anyone who is interested in attending. These provide proactive options for learning alongside our readily available wiki and conversations, so a new hire doesn’t have to go until the next open enrollment to find out that they’ve missed out on a benefit that could have made a difference in their lives.
CASSIE:

Again, engagement is an ongoing process. Whether your employees are completing their first week or their fifth year with your organization, it’s important to keep on promoting and clarifying your culture. In practice, this means that you need to both identify where employees need support aligning with your culture, and areas where your culture strategy can improve to match the needs of your organization and your employees.
Getting this alignment down is the key to building a bottom-up engagement strategy. And both sides of this culture alignment need to start with a common reference point: data from your organization.
JACK:
JACK:
Jack:
Jack:
CASSIE comment:

It’s important to realize that eNPS is a high-level tool. It will illustrate high-level systemic problems in departments or your organization as a whole. But after you identify sections that need help, you need more detailed tools to respond to these issues with each individual employee. eNPS is for the forest, but you need more specialized tools for the trees.
Jack:
Jack:
Jack:
Jack:
CASSIE:

The other half of feedback is accountability. As we mentioned earlier, authority is an important part of empowering your employees. But setting up an understanding of the limits of that authority is also very important. As you offer your employees choices, you need to make sure that:
Choices are appropriate
Choices are healthy
Choices are safe

These three conditions mean that legal requirements shouldn’t be left to majority rule.
It’s also important to emphasize that you won’t be able to implement everyone’s feedback, especially as your organization grows. Most of this involves figuring out how to tell most of the people who offer suggestions that you heard them, but that you didn’t choose to implement their feedback. Offering transparency doesn’t mean you have to offer blanket acceptance of employee ideas.
Again, it helps when everyone has a solid understanding of the organization’s values. This framework helps the organization keep on course toward their goals, even when the organization is too large for everyone to provide top-level feedback. It also helps keep everyone’s focus on the overall mission in situations where different departments may feel like they have to compete for their priorities.

With strong values, it becomes less about who is right and more about what is right.
CASSIE:

For example, at BambooHR, we wanted our employees to participate in redesigning our bland break rooms.

But we couldn’t just go accepting everyone’s suggestions.

We set parameters and constraints
We made it clear that there would be one winner

The project went smoothly because we’ve established effective feedback patterns in our culture, including effective patterns for employees when our answer is no.
Jack
Jack:
Jack:

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