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[H1055]How To Engage Employees

by Bernhard Opitz, Ber

There is an urgent need for every company in this global economy to improve its processes continuously. The ongoing strive to be better than everybody else and become better than oneself the day before, is at the core of survival. And the key to the success of the program lies in sustaining the gains from every step!

Step 1. Get Everyone Engaged

To sustain the results for your continuous improvement process, you must first engage all employees involved in the business. This should also include those contractors and suppliers you do business with for an extended period of time. Here's why:

* By including the biggest number of people with insight in your business processes, you open the widest idea pool.
* When every person impacted feels as if they are a driving part of the change, they are more likely to accept changes and new ideas.

Step 2: Visualize

To sustain success, you must visualize the process and the progress achieved for every person in the company. The visualization needs to be physically present for all managers, team leaders and employees as well. Everybody needs to see the rules of the program and the baseline, target, and ongoing progress for the key performance indicators (KPI).

Step 3: Use Realistic Optimism

Your company's business process key performance indicators need to be determined in a way that directly indicates how successful your improvement efforts are. Here's how...

* Start with the baseline performance from the last one or two business periods.

* Targets for the KPIs should be set with "realistic optimism" from your baseline data. They must pose challenging goals while not being out of reach.

* Ongoing progress needs to be measured in a timely manner
* Representation of the KPIs should be given in graphics, not purely numerically.

When improvements are implemented, the KPIs will show the positive impact. They also will show the sustained achievement. Or if things fall back, it will give you early feedback so corrective actions can be started fast.

Step 4: Balance the Workload

As your company moves forward with the continuous improvement program, teams should be established for ongoing administration and support and for specific improvement projects. This means your employees will be responsible for additional tasks including completing the required training in the new processes and tools and collecting data for the control.

Your management team will need to acknowledge this additional workload. A certain amount of add-on work will be unavoidable to start the process. But it is urgent to introduce a way to free people for the work in the improvement process from the normal tasks of their jobs. Maintaining hours worked during a time of lower production or adding additional people to create dedicated improvement teams are ways to start a great program. The advancement of the improvement process will pay for the added labor costs fast.

Step 5: Celebrate Milestones and End Results

Build personnel engagement for the continuous improvement process by celebrating successes. Appreciation for progress made in all different layers of the improvement process must be shown in a timely way by management from the CEO to the direct supervisor and his or her peers of every team member.

Appreciation can be shown in many ways, from lunch or dinner invitations, gift certificates, or direct monetary rewards to the individually targeted public acknowledgement of the success or a special service provided to the employees. Rewards work best when every employee feels they are appropriate for the success achieved and when they fit the needs of the individual employee. One of the most effective appreciations for reaching a milestone was the personal effort of the team facilitator in washing every team member's car in front of the company building.

Your 3 Action Items for Success

To improve productivity and sustain improvements over the long haul your employees must drive the continuous improvement process and be at the core of sustaining it. In order to make effective strides forward your company must work to engage every employee in the process. So start performing these 3 action items for success today:

1. Visualize the steps it will take to achieve results so that every person involved sees it every day
2. Make organizational adjustments to allow people the time to participate in the effort
3. Develop milestones and celebration schedule to show your company's appreciation for every successful step forward in a balanced way.

Bottom line: Think positively about it, put your best support forward for it, and feel part of it!

When we think of employee communication most organizations focus on information tools. These include intranet sites, staff magazines, CEO blog, Town Hall meetings and so on. Whilst all these employee communication methods are to be applauded, they inform employees about what is going on. To truly engage employees in the process of change, for instance, a merger or acquisition, a re-organization, financial results or corporate social responsibility, employee communication methods need to be designed to actively engage employees.

Employee engagement should always result in some positive change of behaviour which will then lead to the achievement of organizational goals. Just distributing information by any of the above methods will not achieve the change in employee behaviour and organizational outcomes you are looking for.

Here are 5 tips that will ensure that your employee communication methods do achieve those outcomes.

1. The first tip is to establish whether the tools and methods you are currently using to communicate with employees are engagement strategies or information tools. So gather all the tools used and identify all the methods used, their frequency, intended audience, whether they are one way or two way communication vehicles and review the key messages.

2. The second tip is important because your ultimate aim in employee communication has to be to create the "Aha Moment". The "Aha Moment" is based on information that challenges the employee's belief about an aspect of the business. The information that suddenly helps employees say, "Now it makes sense", "Now I understand", "Now I can do something about it". Once you know what the "Aha Moment" is this will form your key message and the basis of your design of your employee communication strategy.

3. This third tip explains the best type of research to find out what the "Aha Moment" is, and the best type for this purpose is focus group research. Focus group research allows you to ask employees about your business and their thoughts on competitors, to identify the largest gap between what customers think and what staff think customers think, and to identify what would create a paradigm shift in employee's thinking. It also helps you identify how you will measure the impact of the change in employees thinking and to determine how significant it is to achieving the business objectives.

Focus groups are a good format as they allow you to explore issues further and sometimes you will discover issues or ideas you hadn't considered prior to the session. Focus groups generally are held for one and a half hours duration and in groups of 8 – 10 participants. As the facilitator, your role is to lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, bringing them back to the main issue if they have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that all the topics that you wanted to cover within the allocated timeframe are covered. A well facilitated focus group will identify the key messages for your employee communication strategies as they relate to a particular business issue.

4. The fourth tip is that once you have your focus group outcomes, you can then begin designing employee communication strategies that engage employees. You should have a clear understanding about what employees know and what the facts are, and the gap between the business facts and staff perceptions. This forms your key message to create the "Aha Moment".

5. The fifth tip is that you take the key information from the focus groups, identify a business issue that you feel sure your employee communication strategies can impact on. By using that information and work together with that area of the business you then implement an employee communication strategy that can be measured by business outcomes.

Once you have gathered all this information you then need to design employee communication strategies that engage employees around the one central message. Many of these employee communication strategies will actively involve employees in some aspect of change by designing communication methods that will require employees to participate. These engagement strategies are then supplemented by employee communication information tools.

Article Source : Pg. 14

About Author

Both Bernhard Opitz & Marcia Xenitelis are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Bernhard Opitz has sinced written about articles on various topics from Management. Vice President of Manufacturing for Nanosphere, Inc., Bernhard Opitz builds high-performing, rapid-response engineering organizations by driving technology innovation and productivity improvement initiatives. Let Bernhard Opitz teach you how to exponentia. Bernhard Opitz's top article generates over 720 views. to your Favourites.

Marcia Xenitelis has sinced written about articles on various topics from Management, Marketing and Communications. . Marcia Xenitelis's top article generates over 6600 views. to your Favourites.