In yesterday’s Advisor, consultant Nicole Price presented 3 faulty assumptions about employee engagement. So, how do you fix it? Today we hear some tips from Price on getting (and keeping) your engagement efforts on track.
Nicole Price, vice president of training at Cy Wakeman, Inc., in Elkhorn, Nebraska, offered her tips at the 2014 Advanced Employment Issues Symposium (AEIS)—register now to attend this year’s upcoming AEIS.
5 Steps to Fix Engagement
Here are Price’s tips for getting an engagement program into high gear:
1. Stop surveying the victims. Yes, you have to give the survey to everybody, but get the opinion of the top-performing 20 percent of your employees. Ask this group, “What should the company do? What do you think about this?”
2. Fix the right stuff. Be careful about focusing on the perks and thinking that is the path to greater engagement.
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3. Plan action differently. Personally accountable people will tell you what they will do; entitled people will be silent. Flex is what you do to make sure this will work.
4. Work with the willing. With any given change, Price estimates, there is about a 3 percent chance you will avoid the resistance of the disengaged group. On the other end of the spectrum, your visionaries (the high performers) have the option of leaving if they don’t like what’s happening in the company.
5. Engage or leave. The biggest complaint of top performers is that there is no differentiation between them and the disengaged. The message for the disengaged crowd? Engage or leave. Tell them, “You think there’s a third option, but there’s not.”
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Three Final Tips
Price offers three additional tips that will help you on the road to accountability and engagement:
- Ask questions:
- When people complain, ask, “Why does that bother you so much?”
- When people tattle, ask, “What did you do to help?”
- Engage the silent people. Those are the ones who come up to you after the meeting, and say, “I agreed with what you said in the meeting.”
- Find common ground. With adversaries, start with a common interest, such as “If the company goes down, we all lose.”