I would like to share with you an interview of mine taken from a nice chat with Alessandra Zennaro from Smartweek.it, about the Engagement Radar research project, carried out in collaboration with DSeA of the University of Padua.
introduction to the research project
“Recent studies have shown that a deep and true focus on people can become the distinguishing element in driving companies to success. This is possible mainly through the development of high levels of employee engagement, a multidimensional concept that takes into account motivation, loyalty, commitment and influence of employees.
Motivation at 110%, loyalty to the company brand, a desire to promote it inside and outside the organization and pride in being part of the company: these are the characteristics that lead an employee to be “engaged” and increase his or her performance levels to the benefit of the entire organization.
Deeply convinced of this, Peoplerise, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies reach their “next level” in the areas of employee engagement, performance improvement and development of collaboration-based organizational models; Culture Amp, a software company based in Melbourne, Australia, that provides survey platforms such as Murmur, a sophisticated in-house tool for measuring engagement and personnel surveys, and Fondazione CUOA, the first Business School in the Northeast that has been training the new managerial and entrepreneurial class for over 50 years, have launched the Engagement Radar project with the aim of studying the levels of employee engagement in Italian companies, through a questionnaire that can be filled out online and is intended for employees working in any industry sector and organizational environment.
But let’s leave the word to one of the promoters of this project, Peoplerise consultant Alessandro Rossi.
1. Alessandro, what are the goals of the Engagement Radar project?
Ciao! A first objective is certainly linked to the “study” of this topic: to verify the levels of engagement in Italy and the factors that influence it. A second objective is to create attention and interest in the topic of engagement. Our organizations are often tied to a model of “command and control” that struggles to find points of connection with the development of employee engagement, which then translates into better results for the company itself. Bringing this topic to the forefront of discussions with numbers in hand can be a good way to start a dialogue on this matter.
2. What drives you to strongly promote engagement in the workplace?
Driving is a “big word”: we can only work alongside entrepreneurs and managers who want to create collaborative organizations by paying close attention to the development of engagement and build together with them. The conviction is summarized in our “payoff”: “People will always be essential”. The company is not a machine without a soul, it is a collection of people who on the basis of their ability to collaborate can produce exceptional results. In the early 1900’s Ford asked himself “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?“. Well, times have changed: global competition, accelerated change, complexity, can only be addressed with head, heart and hands together!
3. In your experience as a consultant, how do you help companies to reinforce this positive cognitive and emotional state in employees?
I believe there are a number of necessary elements to succeed on this issue:
1- A CEO and a top team that are truly convinced of the importance of engagement. If this is not there, the first point is to build the working foundation together.
2- The importance of co-designing initiatives with the involved people. If we think about our personal and professional lives, the principle is very simple: when we are involved in a project or a decision from the very beginning, having the opportunity to make a contribution, that decision also becomes a little bit ours, and therefore we will be more pro-active in carrying it forward.
3- The constant view on the customer: talking about engagement in a company without looking at the customer risks becoming an exercise with less effect on real change.
4- The constant search to connect individual development to organizational development: a person finds energy when his/her interests are in line with what the company asks him/her to do.
4. In your opinion, what are the essential elements that make an employee truly “engaged”?
The engagement radar has an open-ended question at the end of the questionnaire: “what do you think, in one word, is the key to success in making your organization highly engaged?” Out of the 800 or so comments, the most popular were those beginning with the prefix “CO”: co-involvement, co-llaboration, co-division, co-mmunication, co-creation. Doing things really together, leaving responsibility and freedom to act, is the key to an individual’s engagement. In doing so, “unengaged” people leave organizations because they simply don’t find meaning. When you instead live in organizations that through control and hierarchy de-empower individuals, then it’s easier to trigger criticism and complaints about “what they are doing up there“.
5. How can you measure the level of employee engagement?
The questionnaire as a tool continues to lead the way; Murmur, which we use for engagement radar, is definitely one of the most advanced and structured ones, so much that it is a true measurement platform rather than a simple questionnaire. But also “SurveyMonkey” is a semi-free tool that allows you to start “homemade” questionnaires at zero or almost no cost. In the future, we may see evolutions related to how we measure engagement through an approach more like customer-side engagement measurement: loyalty cards and the actual economic transactions the customer makes. Employee-side, this is a scenario that still hasn’t found a credible answer.
In terms of questions, we have moved to engagement indices of at least 3 questions: by filling out the Engagement Radar you will find the contents of the classic engagement measurement questionnaire available.
6. Based on your experience, how much does having “engaged” employees affect the achievement of expected business results?
It’s fundamental. And it’s also a matter of common sense to understand it. What’s special about it is that it’s “predictive”: a bit like the work of a farmer, whoever works well on the land today will see the fruits tomorrow. However, approaching engagement with a purely scientific and rational approach is an element of potential risk: it is much easier to measure the efficiency of economies of scale than the inefficiency of dis-engagement. Yet which one of the two has the more important impacts?”
