When it comes to employee engagement, one size truly doesn’t fit all – or even a majority of – your employees. Each of your employees has different motivations and drivers that impact how engaged they are with their work, with their colleagues and with your health care organization. The challenge for leaders, of course, is deter mining what those drivers are and then finding ways to provide employees with what they need to stay connected to their work.
In more than thirty years of experience working in patient care, health care marketing, business development and administration I’ve had ample opportunity to learn about employee engagement from multiple perspectives – as an employee, a manager, a health care administrator and now as a professional consultant working with health care clients across the country.
A key point is that employee engagement is not a global solution. The drivers of engagement vary among employees. However, in collaboration with the Center for Talent Retention we have found that virtually every employee falls into one of four distinct segments:
The disengaged
The somewhat engaged
The engaged
The fully engaged
Where Do They Fit?
Managers can usually determine which category each person falls into by their behaviors, the results that they produce and the impact that they have on those around them.
For instance, the disengaged individual will be the low performer who only works when he has to, barely squeaks by and tends to have a negative impact on those around him. The somewhat engaged person is the master of distraction. She will work when someone is watching. The engaged individual is a solid performer. She does good work, but may not be as consistent as you’d like. This person is reliable but just doesn’t go beyond the expected. The fully engaged person, however, consistently goes above and beyond, takes ownership and continually finds new and better ways to do things.
The goal, of course, is to have as many people as possible in the fourth category – the fully engaged. But, few organizations have as many fully engaged employees as they would like to have.
Why Does It Matter?
Engagement matters as some simple math can demonstrate.
Suppose you have 1500 employees and their average salary is $31,000, with a benefit plan worth about 28 percent of the annual salary. We’ll say that 10 percent of your staff is fully engaged, 40 percent are engaged, 40 percent are somewhat engaged and 10 percent are disengaged.
Based on doing engagement workshops with a number of large, medium and small employers, I can say that these numbers are actually fairly representative of what many organizations are facing today – in fact, they may be slightly optimistic. But, even optimistically, in this scenario we would be faced with a potential productivity loss of more than $7 million over a year’s time. Let’s break it down:
LEVEL OF ENGAGEMENT % of Workforce
Productivity
+/- Impact
Fully engaged – they’re going above and beyond. They’re probably thinking of new ideas even when they’re not on the job. And, they may be taking on work assignments and projects that aren’t really even part of the expectations for their jobs. 10 120% +$1,190,400
Engaged – also performing at a high level, we’re definitely getting our money’s worth from this group. 40 100% Even
Somewhat disengaged – here’s a group that’s really bringing us down. And with so many of them, we take quite a hit. 40 75% -$5,952,000
Disengaged – the employees we’d like to pay to leave… 10 50% -$2,976,000
TOTAL ANNUAL IMPACT
-$7,737,600
Play with the numbers any way you’d like and you’ll still quickly see how the high costs of disengaged employees can add up. On the other hand, taking a more positive perspective, you can also quickly see how you can reduce these costs by motivating just a small percentage of your somewhat engaged employees to become engaged.
The good news is that you can move one out of every two somewhat engaged people to the engaged category if you can determine what they need and put an action plan in place to make it happen. It can be done. And it is certainly worth the effort.
Moving Across the Continuum
Much of my work involves working with organizations to help them move as many employees as possible up the continuum from disengaged to fully engaged. However, it is important to note that this process does not take place immediately or through leaps across categories. In fact, we do not attempt to move a disengaged employee to a fully engaged employee in one step.
Instead we work progressively to move employees from one level to another. To successfully engage employees we need to start from where they are. This involves engaging with them. By fully understanding what things are most important, critical or meaningful to them, you can begin to create a more optimal work environment. These things will vary for each employee but, again, they tend to fall into some very specific categories.
Another key point is that the greatest benefit to a health care organization may involve first considering how to move those in the engaged category into the fully engaged category. This is where the greatest impacts can be realized and also where there is greater opportunity to exert positive influence.
The key to success involves determining the factors that impact individual employee engagement and then seeking ways to increase or enhance those factors for these employees.
Identifying Engagement Drivers
The Center for Talent Retention has identified 50 drivers of employee engagement that fall into four categories:
Employees’ relationships with their managers
Their view of the organization
Their view of the work that they do
Their view of the work environment
How the drivers are distributed across and within categories is unique for each individual. One employee may say that the most important thing for him is his relationship with his manager. Another may say that the most important thing for her is feeling valued for the work that she does. For somebody else, the drivers may be related to benefits or flexibility in work scheduling.
Once the leader is aware of the drivers that are most important to each individual, the next steps are to consider how you are currently performing on those drivers and to create an action plan to bridge any gap between the current reality and the ideal. You must have an action plan in order to foster engagement. It won’t just happen by default.
The process is straightforward, but we find that leaders are often challenged to listen openly and non-defensively while employees share their perspectives. It is important to avoid becoming defensive and to resist the urge to interrupt or explain the reasons for deficiencies. Any of these reactions can cause the employee to shut down.
Engaging Employees During Challenging Times
While engaging employees is always important, during tough economic times it can become even more critical. In fact, a recent study by Watson Wyatt/WorldatWork points to the not-so- surprising conclusion that the actions that many companies have taken during the recession – hiring freezes, pay cuts, even layoffs – have had a negative impact on morale and engagement. More surprising, though, is that these actions have had a disproportionately negative impact on high-performing employees – exactly the employees we wish to keep engaged so that they stay.
While the process of identifying the drivers for employees is fairly straightforward, there are some challenges along the way. For instance, leaders are often challenged to listen openly and non-defensively while employees share their perspectives. Managers may be understandably sensitive to feedback about their management skills – they may also react negatively to feedback that may seem critical of the organization or its policies and decisions.
The key to successfully engaging with employees and helping them move across the engagement continuum is, of course, listening objectively and non-defensively to their feedback. Increasing engagement involves both art and science. The science includes learning to use tools that can help identify current levels of engagement and understand the financial impact on the organization. The art, on the other hand, is the skill, consistency and style the leader uses in actually implementing action plans that will cause their good people to engage, stay or stay longer.
Following are some specific steps that managers can take to initiate this process:
Identify employees who fall into each of the four categories.
Consider where the greatest opportunity for impact may be in your organization or department – will your effort be best spent moving disengaged employees to slightly engaged, or focusing on moving engaged employees into the fully engaged category?
Identify specific employees for focus.
Initiate one-on-one conversations with these employees to learn about what their individual engagement drivers are and, in the process, commit to listening openly and non-defensively to their feedback.
Work together to create a plan of action that will meet identified employee needs.
Continue conversations to monitor progress.
Provide positive feedback along the way.
Celebrate your successes.
Finally, don’t ignore those employees in the fully engaged category. This is a group that can tend to be overlooked and, if they are, they will slide down into lower categories and may even, in some cases, become disengaged.
Managing employee engagement is an ongoing activity that requires open dialogue and constant vigilance. It is not easy, but the payoffs can be significant.
About Kristin Baird
Kristin Baird is the president of Baird Consulting, Inc., a firm dedicated to helping health care organizations improve the patient experience. Baird has more than 30 years experience and earned a BS in Nursing from UW-Madison and an MS in Health Services Administration from Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee.
In 2009 Baird was appointed by the Secretary of Health to serve on an advisory council for the National Health Service Corps in Washington DC.
Baird is the author of Raising the Bar on Service Excellence, The Health Care Leader’s Guide for Putting Passion into Practice, Customer Service in Health Care; A Grassroots Approach to Creating a Culture of Service Excellence, (Jossey Bass and American Hospital Association Publishing - 2000), and Reclaiming the Passion; Stories That Celebrate the Essence of Nursing (Golden Lamp Press 2005).
Baird is also the creator of several web-based training programs including a new 6-session webinar series, Patient Experience Boot Camp that will begin in March 2010. She is the creator of Raising the Bar on Service Excellence–Step by Step, a five-part leadership development course designed to help health care leaders implement five essential competencies for building a service-centered culture. Baird has worked with hundreds of health care clients including hospitals, medical practices and long term care facilities to improve the customer experience.
© 2010 Kristin Baird
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Nurse, author and consultant Kristin Baird, “Healthcare’s Customer Service Guru,” is the author of Raising the Bar on Service Excellence - The Health Care Leader’s Guide to Putting Passion into Practice (2008, Golden Lamp Press), Reclaiming the Passion- Stories that Celebrate the Essence of Nursing (2004, Golden Lamp Press), Customer Service In Healthcare; A Grassroots Approach to Creating a Culture of Service Excellence (2000 Jossey Bass). Invite Baird to your next leadership development event. To learn more about the Baird Model for Service Excellence, Employee Engagement workshops or to sign up for her FREE Service Strategy newsletter, visit www.baird-consulting.com <http://www.baird-consulting.com/>