"Companies have as many cultures as they have supervisors & managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every supervisor & manager accountable for the culture he or she builds"

                        Marcus Buckingham, co-author of First, Break All the Rules 

Organizations devote considerable resources to developing business plans. But alone those plans are of little value; they require employees who want to execute them. Far more plans fail due to lack of execution than due to a poor plan. Emotionally engaged employees are a pre-requisite to the execution of any business strategy.

To-date there have been over 100 employee engagement research studies - conducted by the Hay Group, DDI, The Conference Board, WorldatWork, BlessingWhite, AonHewitt, etc. Gallup has studied the topic for 20 years, within 2,500 business units in multiple industries, involving 80,000 managers & one million employees. Gallup found that departments in the top quartile in employee engagement as compared to the bottom quartile had:

• 21% higher productivity
• 41% fewer quality defects
• 37% less absenteeism
• 25 to 65% less turnover
• 48% fewer accidents 

Quantum Workplace Research found that companies with the highest levels of employee engagement have:

• 26% greater stock price growth
• and 18% higher revenue growth                                                                    

Employee engagement is the likelihood that an employee will perform to his/her capabilities. Our challenge is that 70% of the employees in the U.S. are either not engaged or actively disengaged. Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A, GE, Campbell Soup, Caterpillar, Nestle, Honeywell, Marriott, etc. are some of the organizations benefiting from programs designed to enhance employee engagement.

Your supervisors & managers are your key to employee engagement. Research has shown that the greatest impact on each of your employees' level of employee engagement is:

• his/her relationship with their immediate supervisor
• and whether their supervisor is meeting a few, core engagement & productivity needs

If only 30% of U.S. employees are engaged, 70% of our supervisors & managers have opportunities to improve their engagement coaching skills & maximize the contribution of their direct reports.

And those employee engagement needs are reasonable. Any supervisor or manager who’s willing can, for example:

• communicate what he/she expects
• periodically provide recognition & praise
• cause his/her direct reports to feel they are cared about personally

Most employees want to succeed in their jobs but they need a supervisor who supports & guides them. High-performance supervisors realize that employee performance is dependent on engagement & they generate peak performance by taking advantage of their daily engagement coaching opportunities. 

How many times a day do each of your supervisors interact with a direct report? Each of those employee touchpoints is an opportunity to:

• strengthen the relationship
• listen, learn & coach
• enhance the employee’s levels of engagement & performance

Fortunately, there are practical ways any organization can increase its level of employee engagement. For example, Disney:

• communicates to its managers the engagement coaching practices expected of them
• trains its managers in those practices
• measures their managers’ performance through Employee Engagement Surveys
• and holds their managers accountable through appraisals, merits, bonuses & promotions

When leadership teams recognize the economic benefits of employee engagement, they usually want to avoid ‘leaving money on the table’ by implementing similar practices. 2015 might be a great time to benefit from building the cultures within your organization

Pete Tosh of The Focus Group can be reached at [email protected] or 478-746-6891.