How to remove the pain and add the profit into Employee Engagement

Executives tell me, in their more candid moments, that they doubt the value of the ‘employee engagement survey.’

They find it time-consuming and stressful, and most have all but given up on trying to calculate any return-on-investment. No wonder then such surveys have the reputation of being “all pain and no profit.” 

So why bother? The answer lies in why we form organisations.

Humans form teams and groups to solve problems they can’t do as individuals, and do so for mutual benefit. 

For example.  Say I want to solve a problem, Problem A.  If I can solve that problem myself, I will. If I can’t solve it myself I will recruit the support of another person who has the necessary skills, knowledge or time. 

And that introduces another problem — can we work with each other? Let’s call that Problem B. 

If Problem B is large, we will never solve Problem A.  

Every ounce of energy devoted to solving Problem B, is an ounce of energy diverted from solving Problem A. The more complex and bigger the problem, the more people we need. The more people we need, the greater the possibility of a large Problem B

Within organisations we evolve ways of working that aim to reduce Problem B. These ways of working are composed of

• accepted behaviours,
• shared values and
• written rules.

The cumulative interaction of these elements is called organisational culture.

Employee surveys were thus introduced to answer one very important question.

“What are our Problem B’s, and how can we reduce them so that we can solve Problem A?”

In other words,

““Is our way of working, our culture, our mode of collaboration, helping us or hindering us from achieving our collective objective?””

Surely then, every Executive would love to know the answer to this question for his or her organisation?

Absolutely.

But here’s the big challenge. The current approaches to employee engagement are very poor at identifying Problem B in the context of Problem A.

There are 4 meaty challenges with the current methods of understanding your corporate culture.

The 10-minute video highlights the challenges of the current method and demonstrates an alternative approach which overcomes them.

The narrative method

• ties culture to strategy;
• encourages employee engagement in solutions 
• measures effectiveness of initiatives, and demonstrates ROI.

So remember, we are looking for actionable insight how to remove the barriers to collaboration, in order to achieve our collective goals more quickly, at lower cost, and with the greatest mutual benefit.

If require any further information such as a case study, or if you wish to have a free trial of the method, please contact me at the Riot Point.