Employee Engagement – Getting Leaders to Care

Brennan McEachranCEO & Co-founder @i_am_brennan soapboxhq.com

Agenda:• Lots of context (but important because it’s a complex

problem)• Why leaders don’t care• How you can get them to care

Brennan McEachranCEO & Co-founder @i_am_brennan soapboxhq.com

This is the SoapBox Family. We’ve more than doubled in size this year to 35 employees (or

SoapBoxers as we like to call ourselves).

At Soapbox, everyone gets their own SoapBox Avatar

(me)

SoapBoxers now have a bigger impact on the success of SoapBox than I do, which has me spending more time thinking

about people and high performance.

I look around the office and worry if they understand the vision and strategy.✓ Are they focused on the right things? ✓ Are they doing things in an optimal way? ✓ Are they as (or nearly as) excited about this company as I

am?

However, despite our rapid growth (and my worries), employee engagement was NOT something I focused on.

And I’m guessing that this made me similar to many

leaders at many organizations, big and

small.

“Employee engagement is important, BUT it’s not clear how it helps me manage my business*. I don’t know how or why it’s helping us hit our objectives. So I’m going to focus on the things I know drive success.”

*For more on why employee engagement surveys fail, check out this post.

So why do leaders need saving? And why now?

Because with the current rate of disruption, only the most

engaged organizations will survive.

Let me show you...

This blue line is the average lifespan of a large company.

It’s dropped precipitously from 75 years to just 15

today! It’s predicted to drop to

6 years by 2020!

Why? Because disruption is the

norm and it’s hard for big companies

to change.(Check out this

blog post which provides further explanation on disruption and why it’s

hard for large organizations to change)

The red line is the growth in the

number of unicorns over the last few

years. A unicorn is a

private company with a valuation

over $1B. Most of these are venture-backed startups.

The punchline is how fast disruptive

companies can grow today.

The time it takes to go from an idea to a $1B company is shrinking.

So not only are disruptive

technologies and business models on

the rise, but the pace is faster too.

Which means that to survive, every organization needs to become more agile.

Is it possible to be big and still be innovative and agile? The short answer is yes.

Some successful “startups” like Google, Facebook, Air BnB and Uber have turned into big companies, but have managed to stay

agile and innovative with highly engaged workforces.Let’s look at some of the key factors that successful startups do to

accomplish this.

First, successful startups create a strong sense of purpose and set audacious goals

that are meaningful for each individual in the organization as well.

(Or as Google made popular, moonshots).

Purpose and big goals attract and motivate people.

For example – the top rocket scientists go work for Elon Musk at SpaceX. Why? Because he’s set an audacious vision for getting to Mars. If you’re

a top rocket scientist that’s what you want to work on.

The second thing is that successful startups are good at innovating and rapidly iterating HOW they will reach

their goals. It’s about great execution and getting stuff done in the most efficient and effective way possible.

What’s getting in the way of achieving goals? What opportunities exist to help reach goals?

When you think big, you have to think differently about how you’re going to get things done. You’re out of your comfort zone.

You’re doing something you’ve never done before.

It turns out empowering employees to figure out better ways to get things done also drives engagement.

When people see their ideas come to life – it feels pretty amazing. We’ve seen this with our NPS surveys that we do with

our clients.

Third, successful startups do a great job of getting employees engaged in helping the organization reach its big goals.

Big goals and empowering employees to solve problems are good for driving engagement,

but studies also tell us that one of the most important elements of the engaged (or

disengaged) employee is leadership and management*.

*For more on a look at factors that effect employee engagement, have a look at this post.

Which brings me back to not caring about employee

engagement.Let me tell you why.

We recently did an employee NPS survey. It was 80.

Great!But what do I do with that?

I could work to improve it. I could move it from 80 to

90.

Or I could dig into individual responses to

fix specific issues.

In our case, “Would you recommend SoapBox as a

place to work for you friends?” was what held us

back. Digging deeper, employees didn’t score SoapBox with

8’s, 9’s and 10’s here because they didn’t feel all

their friends were good enough to work here.

So I’m not sure in this case I want to “fix” this. But let’s

say I did. And let’s say I had a plan that I was confident would address the issue.

What would that do for the success of SoapBox?

Would we hit our goals faster?

Using employee engagement metrics, it would be almost impossible to answer that

question. So I don’t see it as very helpful in managing a

successful business.

Which is why I, and many other leaders, don’t focus

more on employee engagement.

So what’s the antidote?If employee engagement is a metric I don’t care about,

let’s look at metrics I do care about.

Core Objectives

Core objectives are the things that matter most. This is your P&L, market share objectives

etc. I care about core objectives a

lot.

How We’re Doing

Core Objectives KPIs

How We Did How We’re Going to Do

But to manage the business, I need metrics that help

me understand how we’re tracking against core

objectives. These are called Key performance

indicators (KPIs). KPIs have strong

links to core objectives. Sales pipeline is very

useful for forecasting revenue.

I care about those metrics a lot too.

Core Objectives KPIs

Other Metrics

How We Did How We’re Going to Do

Good to know

Then there are other metrics. They are interesting and

they’re good to know. But they

don’t help me run my business.

I only care about these metrics a tiny

bit.Employee

engagement is one of those metrics.

Core Objectives KPIsOther Metrics

Good to know

To get me (or other leaders) to care more, you could try to make employee

engagement a core metric by tying pay and performance to it.

Core Objectives KPIsOther Metrics

Good to know

But that’s the wrong way to do it.You miss the opportunity to understand how it truly impacts results. And worse, you may

have some managers trying to improve scores vs. improve engagement.

Apparently trying to influence scores isn’t all that uncommon. We just participated for the first time in Great Places to Work Canada. The last question in the survey was “Have you been

in any way influenced by management to answer in a particular way?”  

 If that’s happening at some organizations – that’s a huge waste of time and resources. They think they’re improving engagement, but

they’re not really.

Core Objectives KPIsOther Metrics

Good to know

There’s a better way.You make employee engagement a

metric leaders actually care about. You make it a real leading indicator of core

objectives*.

*For more on aligning engagment goals to core objectives, take a look at our ”Goal Setting Guide” Ebook.

Let’s look at a real world example from one of our clients. A leading global

resources company.

They wanted to get their employees engaged in cutting

costs because of falling resource prices.

More importantly they wanted to embed this focus on

efficiency and productivity as part of their culture.

Cost Efficiency

Productivity

Health and Safety

Great Place to Work

What you see here are the categories that this client wanted to get ideas from employees on.

Cost Efficiency

Productivity

Health and Safety

Great Place to Work

15%

15%

20%

50%

Half the ideas were focused on things that would improve the workplace experience, but not necessarily help drive core objectives.

Results captured shortly after launch

What you see are the percentage of ideas coming in. These numbers are what the client saw shortly after launching SoapBox.

20%

35%

40%

5%

Results captured at six months

Cost Efficiency

Productivity

Health and Safety

Great Place to Work

15%

15%

20%

50%

95% of the top ideas trending help drive core objectives.• 2,000 users

logged in• Submitting

1,700 ideas• Providing 2,000

comments• Voting 32,000

times

As the result of focused communications, things look very different 6 months later. Now over 95% of ideas are aligned to core objectives.

20%

35%

40%

5%

Cost Efficiency

Productivity

Health and Safety

Great Place to Work

15%

15%

20%

50%

Now 95% of the top ideas trending help drive core objectives.• 2,000 users

logged in• Submitting

1,700 ideas• Providing 2,000

comments• Voting 32,000

times

Results captured at six months

What employees are engaging on?

How engaged are employees?

These results show leaders at this organization both: • how

engaged employees are and

• what things they’re engaging on.

20%

35%

40%

5%

Cost Efficiency

Productivity

Health and Safety

Great Place to Work

15%

15%

20%

50%

Results captured at six months

If too few ideas are submitted on cost cutting, it’s a good leading indicator that long-term they may struggle to hit that objective. Importantly, you can also act on that to try and solicit more ideas. And you can see if your efforts result in more ideas.

We now use the metrics that comes from SoapBox as a KPI (that I really care about) for our core objectives: Offer a world class product Create efficient and scalable operations Grow and retain revenue Make SoapBox the best place to work

I can use these metrics to help manage long-term success for my core objectives by ensuring we tap into the insights of all

SoapBoxers.

And using these metrics to drive the right type of engagement is not only something SoapBox can do, or startups can do. Everyone can do this.

Every leader wants this.You just need to show them how to measure employee engagement in a way that fits into their goals.

Brennan McEachran : @i_am_brennan : @belikeastartup soapboxhq.com