Learning and development can help foster higher levels of employee engagement and improved business performance, but it's essential that the executive suite knows this.
Most learning and development professionals are likely already aware that a significant number of their employees are underperforming because of poor engagement. Heightened workloads, decreased confidence in corporate direction and growing mistrust of leadership have raised employee negativity while threatening productivity. Desiring better opportunities, many top performers have updated their resumes and begun looking for new jobs. In fact, in recent research studies undertaken by consultancy Right Management, more than half of employees reported they were approached to discuss a job opportunity with another employer in the past six months. Consider the findings of the Right Management research team:
a) Seventy-nine percent report workloads have increased due to layoffs.
b) About 2 out of 3 employees failed to take their allotted vacation last year.
c) As many as 4 in 5 workers say they want to leave their job this year.
d) Nineteen percent of employees rarely trust their manager to make good decisions.
e) Seventy-five percent usually work more than 40 hours per week.
f) Less than half usually take a lunch break.
The response to all of this? Employers need to make employee engagement a top business priority.
Opportunities for learning and development can help foster higher levels of employee engagement and improved business performance, but it's essential that an organization's executive suite realize this and allocate resources accordingly. Here are five tips to help make engagement a core business priority:
1. Keep it simple.
Don't overly complicate engagement with HR and training jargon. Be specific, relevant and pragmatic - not conceptual. Don't talk process, but rather focus on business results. Use a business-based dialogue to tie the people-related results to the financials. For instance, know the top companies or competitors the firm benchmarks its performance against. What is their cost of unwanted turnover, and how does it compare to yours? What makes the difference between your company and theirs? How does learning and development stem the tide and influence higher levels of engagement?
2. Make your case.
Demonstrate the importance of engagement with business-related, practical examples. Understand the hot-button issues for each member of the executive team. For instance, talk about a high-performing business unit and how it accelerated the time to market for a new product. Then, outline how it did this by linking the leadership behaviors that enabled improved people processes, such as demonstrating employees are valued and given a meaningful role in creating solutions. Higher engagement levels most likely contributed to the success achieved. In this way, you are linking engagement to meaningful data. Have a collection on hand of useful statistics and facts that relate engagement to business efficiency and improved organizational performance.
3. Build alliances.
Build a stronger business relationship with the CFO and put effort into measuring the impact of training on engagement and performance at your firm. Get comfortable with the language of business and understand the financials that are most meaningful to your organization. This most likely includes: What are your organization's top profit drivers? What are the expectations of shareholders? And how will a talent initiative impact the bottom line and show tangible returns? For instance, why does the company need to have a retention strategy? Is it a competitive necessity? Are there profit implications? What are the cost factors?
4. Hold leaders accountable.
Leaders at all levels need to be held accountable for engagement, and this includes the C-suite. Tie key leadership behaviors that foster higher engagement to performance expectations. This way, leader behavior and the measurement of leaders' alignment with engagement becomes a mechanism for accountability. Key leadership behaviors that have the most influence on employee engagement include demonstrating employees are valued and inspiring confidence in their ability to drive organizational success and effectively implement the organization's strategy.
5. Gain CEO ownership.
Help your CEO to "own" engagement and be an active participant. For instance, take the pulse on engagement every 12 to 18 months. Review the factors that are foundational to engagement and help the CEO drive these throughout the organization with action, communication and initiatives.
Without high levels of employee engagement driven by learning and development, organization performance, productivity and profitability are jeopardized. CLOs are in a prime position to elevate engagement to other C-level executives and make it a top business priority. Who can afford not to pay attention?
[About the Author: Michael Haid is senior vice president of global solutions at Right Management.]
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Neeraj Bhardwaj +919725479188 +919924711714
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