What does the research tell us?

Numerous research studies point to the fact that organisations with true employee engagement enjoy:

Increased customer satisfaction scores
Reductions in errors and poor quality outputs
Reductions in employee turnover and absenteeism rates

Decreased safety incidence and lost days
Above all, increases in profitability and overall productivity are highly evident.
Contrast this with the impact of disengagement and its true costs should cause sleepless nights for business leaders:

Few will recommend their company, services or products. Hence, where organisations might expect and hope their workforce to be advocates, disengaged employees can be quite the opposite.
They experience lower than average satisfaction levels with their organisations and can have a knock-on affect on the business and its customers in a variety of ways. To a great extent, they would do the business a much better favour by staying at home. This is because when they are present, they ‘undo’ the good work of others. In so doing, they also erode the brand values of the business in the eyes of the customer, playing into the hands of competitors.
It also follows that whilst they are ‘present and correct’ at work, they are in reality ‘psychologically absent’ and they cause disruption in work schedules and accomplishments, predictably adding more work for others and their supervisors/managers.
Training and morale-related issues also emerge whilst few ideas are generated to grow, develop and improve the business, its offering and services. Last but not least, they can significantly impact payroll costs.

In short, they become hostages or saboteurs – in subtle and obvious ways – having a ripple effect across the team, the business and its customers.

There is no doubt that we can all think of individuals who are highly engaged or highly disengaged. However, typically a much larger percentage, possibly 50% to 60%, does not fall in to either category. These people are likely to be productive, but they would be happy to move to another organisation if the right opportunity turned up.

The Value of Employee Engagement

Know me -Focus me -Care about me

Why wake up and smell the coffee?

Is employee disengagement really a problem for businesses in the UK? More importantly, how does it impact your business? Or are you just accepting it as ‘the cost of doing business like many others do currently? If you want to hear more about the commercial facts, read on.

A BBC review of the continuing cost of absenteeism highlighted that 40 million days are lost each year in the UK due to workplace absenteeism. Meanwhile research conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personal Development indicates that the average cost of sickness absence is £588 per employee per year.

According to the CBI, the direct cost of absenteeism to the UK economy is £11.5 bn, which is paid out in wages to absent employees and on additional overtime and temporary staff cover. The UK average recorded in the latest survey from the CBI is 7.2 days per employee per year, with the public sector suffering more than the rest in that their employees are almost twice as likely to be off sick.

Some interesting statistics indicate that a reported 93% of employees cite colds and flu as their reason for being away from work. However, in reality at least half of all workplace absence has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with health.

Instead, people decide to stay away from work for a whole host of work, personal or domestic reasons, for example, bullying in the workplace, responsibility for children or elderly relatives, job de-motivation, low pay or a hangover. Meanwhile, AON Consulting’s recent survey of 2, 000 employees indicated that many would work extra hours if they could take a half-day off on Fridays.

A related issue is that hung-over workers cost business an estimated £2.8 billion in lost working days a year and work outputs can be badly affected by throbbing heads.

Many of us are aware of the issues faced by British Airways, an organisation that carries the burden of a direct estimated cost to the business of nearly £60 million. This is a significant chunk of the £300million, which the business is seeking to save in employee costs over the next two years.

What are the solutions?

As stated earlier, engaged employees choose to come to work because they want to, working to deliver the desired business outcomes. They also put forward more business improvement ideas, demonstrate higher levels of energy and enthusiasm and have better attendance records. They contribute positively to the environment and atmosphere of the team and their office.

There is no doubt that a lot of research has been carried out and a number of organisations such as Tesco, British Airways, Royal Mail and Direct Line have tried to do what they can to address it. However, predictably solutions are often short-lived in many cases.

Prevention must be a key message – removing the reasons why staff may be disengaged or absent in the first place, not just reacting to the problem after it has grown arms and legs. At Quo, we place a great deal of emphasis on defining the problems and determining the solutions in holistic ways, rather than jumping on the latest bandwagon. Having said that, there is no doubt that businesses can do a lot more to change how they treat staff and design the work environment.

What is critically important is that the diagnosis and solution development actively engages people in the business, from the top to bottom, working collaboratively to understand and address the issues.

Quo has worked with a wide range of organisations to address these issues and their associated symptoms. If you are one of the organisations looking to significantly enhance engagement and radically cut absence levels, there are a number of approaches, which can be taken.

Diagnosis is key

Conduct a diagnostic designed to understand the underlying causes, enablers and restrictors. We strongly recommend that businesses understand the specific environmental and people issues, which prevail and to measure this on on-going basis using surveys and other mechanisms. This can/should be complemented by cost tracking of absenteeism.
Quo has invested in the development and implementation of a dynamic tool, which measures the degree of engagement that currently exists in an organisation. This tool can also be used to measure the impact of any people interventions, which are undertaken to improve engagement.
Quo’s survey assesses the principal sources of employee motivation and provides the organisation with a clear understanding of the existing strength and health of the psychological contract with its employees. Moreover, our capability goes beyond giving a client an assessment. As a creative change consultancy, we are well placed to address the issues identified.
Having said that, good intentions expressed in communications, at workshops and meetings are seldom followed through. There is little point in starting here or anywhere else if there is no real commitment to see it through. If employees are asked to comment, they will regress even further if they see no actions coming from the enquiry.

Explore options and plan activity

Working with key people across, up and down the business, setting clear goals to enhance engagement and/or reduce absence levels. Identifying the priority factors and the urgency of those factors, for example, being clear about what constitutes a tolerable absenteeism range. It is also critical that you understand your legal position and the parameters within which you must work; for example, genuinely sick people need to be dealt with fairly in the eyes of the law and their colleagues.
It may be of interest to consider the possibility of implementing ‘re-vitalisation’ programmes, which can enhance the morale of those who have survived the labour-cost cutting redundancy programmes of the 00’s. In these circumstances, the increased pressure on business and their departments to improve performance has resulted in people experiencing hardship of one kind or another. The knock-on effect being that they challenge and resent the on-going stress, additional workload and lack of meaningful salary/bonus increases. Revitalisation programmes can serve as a watershed, but they must be complemented by other, deeper interventions. As a result of a similar intervention, managers have reported the ability to deal more proactively with underperformance issues and cleared backlogs in their departments in shorter timeframes than originally envisaged. The impact of these revitalization interventions is that managers often report that they have higher levels of motivation and achievement themselves and that their people have responded positively too.
Set specified timescales and develop the plan to deliver this. We strongly recommend piloting your approach, testing its effectiveness and learning from the experience prior to wider roll out.

Equip leaders and managers

Quo has found that things sometimes need to be addressed much earlier in the engagement cycle. Specifically this relates to the recruitment process and whilst it is commonly accepted that employees should be assessed against role requirements, we believe a much more in-depth assessment process may be required to dig below the surface.
Quo has developed an assessment tool, which gives reliable indications of a person’s likelihood to stay engaged based on their personality profile. We are able to offer this having profiled the characteristics that are related to disengagement and have a significant bank of research data and norms to guide our conclusions on what to avoid when recruiting.
Too many leaders and managers pay little or no attention to the signs of disengagement. Many are too busy on tasks and priorities of a short-term nature. The problem is that this breeds an absence culture, which is perceived as acceptable and reinforced by employees and managers. Managing attendance culture requires the direct and continued involvement of all managers and supervisors, including senior management. Many also lack the legal understanding, practical tools and confidence.
Quo’s interventions have successfully reduced absenteeism from an average of 11 to seven days within a eight week period for one particular client, whilst also increasing income from a backwards trend to increase over budget by an average of 26% (sales/service related) within the same timeframe.
Quo has worked with leaders and managers to reinforce desired behaviours and attitudes, whilst ensuring the work still gets done and people feel they ‘want to’, rather than ‘have to’ come to work. We utilise a five-step method, which is systematic and focuses on how to shape and change behaviour, whilst understanding what motivates the individuals involved. This method is useful for many reasons, not least because it is a tool that can be applied across a multitude of situations that involve behaviour, for example customer service. It is borne out of the fact that by applying appropriate consequences managers and employees get better results because this is directly related to increased focus and motivational levels.
On client assignments, we have been able to report contributions of £20M cost savings and £16.5M increased profitability/debt reduction within the first year of implementation. This was also complemented by significant changes in “the way we do things around here”. In these instances, it proved to be just as important to engage leader/managers, as it was to engage staff members and supervisors.
We believe that there is a very strong connection between the way that an organisation values its customers and the way that it values the people they employ. One of our big issues with many of the training programmes is their continual obsession with monitoring staff and reporting back on unusual patterns of absenteeism. Training very rarely focuses on helping managers and leaders to truly engage, value and reinforce their people. Tired methods like these merely reinforce negative behavioural patterns, whilst also resulting in those who come to work everyday getting very little attention and reinforcement as effort is diverted to the troublesome children. This is important not least because it is highly relevant to business performance.
A key principle that appears to emerge over and over again is Know me, Focus me, Care about Me. This was best demonstrated with one of our telecommunications clients. Out of the total population of Top Talent targeted for retention and development, 95% were retained and continued to perform in the organisation as a result of our coaching and personal development programme. This was geared to leveraging their asset value and ensuring they felt valued by the organisation. Participants also reported a movement from a habitual tactical and task-related management operating style to a more strategic and partnership style of engaging deliverables, people, customers and the external marketplace.

Waking up to the commercial realities of employee engagementIntroduction