Build It

The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement

Glenn Elliott, Debra Corey

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119390077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The current way of treating people at work has failed. Globally, only 30% of employees are engaged in their jobs, and in this fast-paced world that's just not enough. The world's best companies understand this, and have been quietly treating people differently for nearly two decades.

Now you can learn their secrets and discover The Engagement Bridge™ model, proven to build bottom line value for companies through sustainable employee engagement.

Companies with the best cultures generate stock market returns of twice the general market and enjoy half the employee turnover of their peers. Their staff innovate more, deliver better customer service and, hands-down, beat the competition. These companies outperform and disrupt their markets. They break the rules of traditional HR, they rebel against the status quo.

Build it has found these rebels and the rulebreakers. From small startups to global powerhouses, this book shows that courage, commitment, and a people-centric mindset, rather than money and resources, are what you need to turn an average business into a category leader.

The book follows the clear and proven Engagement Bridge™ model, developed from working with thousands of leading companies worldwide on their own employee engagement journeys. The practical model highlights the areas that leaders need to examine in order to build a highly engaged company culture and provides a framework for success.

Build it is packed with tips, tools and real-life examples from employers including NASDAQ, Unilever, IBM, KPMG, 3M, and McDonald's to help you start doing this not tomorrow, but today. Readers will learn:

• How employee engagement helps companies perform
• The key factors that drive engagement, and how they work together
• What the world's most rebellious companies have done to break the rules of traditional HR and improve engagement
• How to implement The Engagement Bridge TM model to boost productivity, innovation, and better decision-making

Unique in this category, Build it is written from two sharply different perspectives. Glenn Elliott is a multi-award winning Entrepreneur of the Year, CEO and growth investor. He talks candidly about the mistakes and missteps he has made whilst building Reward Gateway into a $300m category leader in employee engagement technology.

Debra Corey brings 30 years experience in senior level HR roles at global companies such as Gap, Quintiles, Honeywell and Merlin Entertainments. She shares the practical tools and case studies that can kickstart your employee engagement plan, bringing her own pragmatic and engaging style to each situation.

1
Understanding Employee Engagement

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Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, we will:

• Establish the proven link between employee engagement and competitive advantage.
• Define employee engagement and understand how engaged employees add value.
• Discuss the changes that technology is bringing to our economy that make action urgent and critical.

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Key Points

• This is a practical book based on real company experiences for anyone who wants to improve their business, regardless of their role or job level.
• You will have to rebel against standard practice—the status quo has failed and rebelling is the only way to make a difference.
• Don't confuse employee engagement with employee happiness; they are fundamentally different.
• Don't get hung up on jargon—engagement, experience, organizational health; it's not important. Just get started on the journey.

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Introduction

A group of companies has twice the stock market performance of their peers. They innovate more, deliver better customer service and have half the employee turnover. They rebel against the status quo by treating people differently, and they've been rewarded with productivity and bottom‐line results that leave other companies behind. They are the companies with the most engaged workforces—measured and tracked by numerous surveys and indexes, with the data proving the connection to real business results.

These companies have found a way to build an engaging culture—a culture where hard‐working people thrive in jobs with challenge and excitement. A culture where people regularly put their companies and their customers ahead of their own needs. These companies have been outperforming their peers for nearly 20 years.

Of all the things we do in modern business, the link between employee engagement and business results is one of the most clearly proven. Gallup, Great Place to Work, Best Companies and Glassdoor all analyze employee engagement and correlate it to stock market performance. Whichever data you look at, the results are the same— companies with engaged employees beat their competition.

The Gallup index alone has 30 million data points going back nearly two decades: They interview 500 American adults every day, collecting data on employee engagement 350 days of the year.¹ The truth is, we proved the link between employee engagement and business performance years ago. Now it's time to act!

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Big Companies Can Correlate Performance Directly to Engagement

With 85,000 staff across nearly 1,000 stores, UK retailer Marks & Spencer has plenty of data to crunch.²

Stores in the top quartile for employee engagement are twice as likely to achieve the highest service rating and have 25% less staff absence compared to stores in the bottom quartile.

It turns out that engaged employees deliver better customer service and take less time off sick. Surprised? You shouldn't be.

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Yet, despite this robust evidence, the vast majority of companies are either doing nothing, or not enough, to engage their staff. The lack of progress causes consultants to invent new ways of saying the same thing: “Engagement is dead, long live employee experience,” “Forget engagement think about organizational health”—but actually it's all broadly the same thing.

The problem with employee engagement isn't what we're calling it. The problem is we're failing to make the necessary fundamental changes to our disengaging workplace practices.

The majority of our organizations are nothing without the collective output, ingenuity, choices and decisions of our staff. Company culture is simply the term that describes how you treat people and how you set the conditions in which they do their work. To fix company culture and allow people to choose engagement, we don't need fancy initiatives around the edges; we need to fundamentally change how we treat the people who work for us.

When the Harvard Business Review surveyed business leaders in 2014, 71% of them said employee engagement was critical to the success of their organizations, but only 24% of these same leaders said their workforces were highly engaged. This difference is what we call the engagement gap.

No matter how you gather, track or slice the data, the big picture is that almost three‐quarters of our employees simply don't care much about our companies, they don't care much about our customers, and they're not really working as well or as hard as they could be. We've written this book to help you change that. We've written this book to help you make the world a better place to work.

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The Business Case for Employee Engagement Has Been Made

Engagement is proven to deliver business results. Many leaders seem to know that, but companies still struggle to take meaningful and effective actions to make things better.

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Understanding Employee Engagement

Just about every vendor in HR describes themselves as an employee engagement platform or product these days—even the payroll companies! You could easily be forgiven for thinking this is a new trend that's just started; an invention of new technology.

But the truth is that we've known for over 100 years that treating people better gets better business results. It's important to focus on those words, so let's repeat them: “Treating people better gets better business results.” We have disengaged employees because we lie to them; treat them as adversaries; and give them crappy jobs without autonomy, excitement or accountability. The Engagement Bridge™ model will help you understand the things that cause disengagement, and show you the tools and strategies to address them.

If you're reading this thinking that you've already done work on engagement and it didn't work, ask yourself: Did you really change how your organization treats people? Because if you only focused around the edges—installing a new intranet, a tool that helps staff know whose birthday it is, or something to count how many steps they walked—then nice as that is, it won't have been enough.

For our purposes, we've always believed in a results‐focused definition of engagement. We define someone as engaged when they:

1. Understand and believe in the direction the organization is going—its purpose, mission and objectives—so they feel part of something bigger than themselves.
2. Understand how their role affects and contributes to the organization's purpose, mission and objectives.
3. Genuinely want the organization ...