Service Snapshot: Employee Engagement

A pragmatic approach which drives engagement to ensure a common goal is achieved rather than engagement for its own sake.

Challenge

Leaders understand the need for engaging with their employees but many struggle to achieve it. 69 per cent of employees are disaffected (Source:  Penna Sanders Sidney (2003) Itchy Feet – Research on employee loyalty).
Most organisations use surveys to measure employee attitudes and these typically reveal low levels of engagement with little progression over time:

A common concern with these surveys is that there is no common definition of what engagement actually means and many surveys do not identify exactly what the leadership team want people to be engaged with.  Is it, for example, strategy, zero errors, improving patient care or being innovative?  It will vary between organisations and indeed over time within individual organisations.  

Also, these surveys capture what people “think”, but this is only part of the picture because management needs to understand what people actually “do” and whether what they do demonstrates engagement.

Solution

Penumbra offers a fresh approach to engagement.

First of all we establish what engagement “looks like” for an organisation - for example, understanding of and commitment to achieving a set of business goals. 

Secondly, we then run a survey which lets us create a matrix analysis using Penumbra’s “zone” analysis.  This provides objective analysis of peoples’ attitudes.

Thirdly, we use a behavioural diagnostic tool which shows people precisely what they are currently doing in their jobs, and most importantly it shows them what they should be doing, in terms of focussed and specific behaviours, to improve their performance.

This identifies the behaviours that make a difference to organisational effectiveness and success – the actions that accelerate momentum and performance and the actions that sustain momentum and performance

It also identifies the specific things that people do that block momentum and performance. It also enables individuals and groups to identify the major causes of these actions and deal with them

It also enables us to define optimally effective behaviour for every job in an organisation. Unlike 20th century approaches which define competencies for groups of jobs, our tool produces specific behavioural competencies for each and every job in an organisation

Benefits

• A holistic approach which captures what people think as well as what they do.

• A common language is created for performance improvement.

• Works equally well in “empowered” organisational structures, such as in the Public Sector, and in more controlled environments in the Private Sector.

• Delivers analyses that “C” level managers understand and can act on.