Your Employee Engagement Results are in! -Are you going to do anything real about it this year?

Company culture is being talked about in all shapes and forms. Organizations are working hard to measure employee engagement using dynamic sensors. Although some engagement tools are actually rather flashy, they also create what a few HR executives refer to as “Analysis Paralysis”. Why?, Because humans are creatures of habit.  

Last time I checked, the US workforce still struggles with high levels of disengagement and the needle has barely budged in 20 years. Yet, companies follow the same routine year-after-year expecting different results. Teams spin their wheels creating employee engagement action plans that go nowhere because they lack the deeply human skills and competencies to change the emotional experience. If they had them, the engagement needle would have jumped long ago.

So, the question this year is: Are you going to do anything different to build the missing skills and create an actively engaged, productive culture?

Creating action plans, without action

Any organization that runs a regular assessment to better understand the status of the culture is doing a good thing. When a certain department scores low, it’s crucial that the issues are addressed. Many organizations review the assessment results and then initiate a town hall, or “brown bag lunches” to share them. Ultimately, busy managers are forced to create action plans yet again. But this doesn’t solve the underlying challenge: Most managers were promoted into leadership roles, but never received training on the human side of business to become real people leaders. They therefore are unable to take actions that align with company values… competencies… and business objectives to create a productive culture. 

What is a “Best Place to Work” really?

I’m very proud of all my colleagues whose companies have qualified for “Best Places to Work” rankings. These lists are very prestigious and do actually help organizations attract bright talent to their workforce. Companies pay quite a bit of money to participate in these awards, which I’m sure is worth the investment. Sadly, however, there are many companies that win these awards, but still struggle with high attrition and even regularly missed business outcomes. 

The key challenge is making sure that every level of the organization is accurately scored to determine if it truly is a great place to work! We all know of companies that consistently win these accolades, but just ask their sales, engineering or other departments and the revolving door of attrition is exposed. If attrition isn’t exposed, missed KPI’s or deadlines are a clear indicator of a potential problem. In fact, the approach one company took that I recently met with, was to hire more people instead of actually taking action to fix the reason why so many people were leaving and goals were being missed. Personally, one might think it would be better to spend fewer resources to solve easily identifiable problems. 

Is the answer People Productivity? 

Well, it depends. If your organization is satisfied with the high turnover and the ineffective use of human capital, then it must still be spinning a nice profit. Human normalcy bias says leadership feels no pressure to change its employee engagement practices. After all, things appear to be working fine and some of the employee engagement tools look pretty cool too.

However, organizations that truly want to create a productive and thriving place to work, make sure they understand all the blind spots that are holding their people back and take action to create measurably higher returns on human capital. Companies like these invest in the growth and productivity of their people in order to become real winners that have a culture that supports enduring success and continuous innovation. There is a plenitude of great coaches out there, but the highest returns happen when every leader and team understands and practices behaviors that enhance human performance. 

So back to my original question. “Your Employee Engagement results are in. Are you going to do anything different to move the needle higher on human capital productivity at your organization during the next year?”

Dan Diachenko heads up global business relations for PeopleProductive, a technology company whose products help you turn culture into measurable business value, because what your people produce means everything. Dan has been intimately involved in designing solutions that transform soft skills into powerful competencies, so that leaders, teams and individuals are capable of removing the organizational drag that holds their company back. Helping to disrupt the stale employee engagement market by directly linking culture to productivity, Dan has been responsible for several key roles from mobile app design, QA and commercial strategy/relations. He also plays a role on PeopleProductive’s CulturalFusion M&A team, helping bring tools to market that turn two cultures into one.

As an extremely active member of the Boston Tech scene, he is also very passionate about supporting women’s growth in IT. Dan is an avid networker always helping to get people better connected.