Engage employees
With performance indicators and top employees established, Galipeau then had to attack the other part of her initial problem — engaging employees in the business.
“Once you have clearly stated to everyone where they stand, then you quickly become paranoid about that top group because they then understand that they’re the top group,” she says. “If you don’t do a very good job of driving, understanding and engaging them, you’ve done yourself a great disservice. They then realize, ‘Gee, I am very good, and I am very valuable, and I’m one of the top people. Do I feel that way? Am I rewarded that way? Am I treated that way? Do I want to be that way here?’
>“The second piece that came to us very quickly was, ‘How do we continue to develop them? How could we keep them? How could we make sure they were engaged? Beware advice from fools, but you certainly want the advice from the top group.”
Galipeau’s primary tool for finding out whether employees are engaged or not is through a staff survey. But even that requires some level of buy-in before it can be an effective tool.
“It’s not just good if the very top leadership accepts it or even, heaven forbid, the human resources department accepts it,” she says. “It has to be owned by everybody who needs to receive the feedback and act on it. A very credible, outside firm that specializes in that will be most well-received, and an employee-satisfaction survey produced and executed internally may not have the same impact.”
Doing it externally helps employees feel more comfortable being honest.
“Employees are worried about anonymity, and you want to make sure that’s protected, and the use of an external party will help you achieve that so you’re going to get credible, objective results that are measuring the right things and people will listen to,” she says.
If it’s your first one or you’ve done them in the past but never changed anything afterward, you also have to convince employees that you will take action based on their feedback.
“You have to explain to them why you’re doing it and what you’re hoping to learn,” she says. “You have to ask them to participate. Typically companies with low engagement scores have low participation — they have to see what’s in it for them to do it. If they’re disengaged, they may be so far gone that they don’t perceive there to be any possible benefit to them, and that’s not going to help you too much, so you tell them why you’re doing it, you tell them what you’re looking to learn, you ask for their participation, and you promise to share the results. I think that if you do that and they see the purpose and they know that there’s no risk to them and they see what’s in it for them, people will participate.”
Once you do the survey and get the results back, you have to then communicate with them what they said needs to be changed, which may be a blow to your ego.
“It can be quite reassuring to them to hear that you now see [the problems] and that you’re going to take steps,” Galipeau says. “Very often, leadership development is an outcome of that. That’s why people are a little hesitant to do it because it’s not so much that your dental plan gets criticized — everybody would always like better benefits, I agree with that — but there’s a lot of feedback on the leadership, so leadership development is often a key priority.”
But just doing the survey isn’t enough.
“Once you get that feedback, you have a mistaken impression that you’ve already began to improve,” she says. “Once you recognize you do something wrong, you think that that great epiphany will take care of some of the problems. That, of course, is not the case.”
Instead, have a process to go through the feedback and create a plan.
“One of the first things that we did was we sat down and said, ‘All right, which of these are consequences, and which of these things are things we initiate — which of these are outcomes and inputs, kind of the way we look at our business, and what are the key elements?’” Galipeau says. “You have to look at the key strengths — these we’re particularly good at because those are easy to get better at, and you don’t want to turn away from that, and organizations typically do that. Then there are the things that are the laggers — the things that are pulling you down. Again it’s the top and bottom approach. You have those things in the middle, but if you look at the top and bottom, there aren’t many things that you can’t impact.”
Start by choosing three major priorities and developing new strategies and programs on a 12-month time frame. This allows ample time to actually work on what you need to, but it will also give enough time for employees to become more engaged.
“Even at that time frame, you have to start to understand that once you start shining lights on this, people will expect more of you, and you have to make sure that you’re going with that,” she says. “Once you say you’re going to work on something, there’s certainly the tendency to say, ‘Well, let’s see.’ So engagement leads should only be undertaken by companies that really plan on changing anything. The status quo will only result in increasingly negative outcomes and lower participation. It will have precisely the opposite effect.
“A very tectonic shift in short time frames is unlikely, but a culture of engagement has to be done by biting these things off, having a plan of attack, and then measure, measure, measure. You have to measure because working on things gives you such a placebo effect of, ‘I’m moving these things forward.’”
After doing all of these things, Galipeau is already seeing a difference in Randstad.
“The organization is clearly performing better,” she says. “There’s no question we have very clear metrics on the results, and the results have improved fairly drastically, so I’d say we’ve seen certainly an improvement in performance and the distribution of performance. The success is much more evenly distributed than it has been in the past — that’s very healthy.”
How to reach: Randstad US, (770) 937-7000 or www.us.randstad.com
