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<\/p>\nAs I am reviewing some recent results from an employee opinion survey this week, I am reminded once again that employee engagement drives productivity and retention.<\/p>\n
We’ve understood the link between engagement, productivity and retention for years. I attended a meeting this week with HR professionals from a variety of employers in Austin, Texas, and we were discussing that employees like managers who like them, and from there, develop an \u201cownership\u201d mentality to their job, furthering their engagement.<\/p>\n
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Gallup, <\/strong>an American analytics and advisory company based in Washington,<\/strong> D.C.,has been studying the issue for decades. While it has questions and metrics that reveal levels of employee engagement and what employees say they need to feel engaged, one stat from Gallup’s Employee Engagement research<\/a> struck me:<\/p>\n An employee’s manager accounts for 70% of the variance in the employee’s engagement.<\/strong><\/p>\n In other words, nobody has greater impact on an employee’s commitment to the company than their manager. It turns out that the culture a manager creates for their workers in the team microenvironment may trump organizational culture.<\/p>\n In its analysis of the manager impact on employee engagement, Gallup’s recent report “Building a High-Development Culture Through Your Employee Engagement Strategy<\/em>” states that “if leaders could prioritize one action, it should be equipping their managers to become coaches. This means putting engagement front and center as a primary responsibility.”<\/p>\n Gallup\u2019s findings are supported by additional research.<\/p>\n Respondents to the Society of Human Resources Management\u2019s 2017 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement survey<\/a> ranked \u201cTrust between Employees and Management\u201d as the second most important driver of engagement. HR research and advisory firm McLean & Company<\/a> surveyed more than 50,000 people in its 2019 Trends Report, concluding that surrounding team members with high-quality colleagues is a primary driver of engagement. Thus, it advised that \u201cempowering managers to own and drive engagement\u201d as one of their recommended actions for engagement.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re going to make engagement an organizational priority, we should measure managers’ behaviors and outcomes that correlate with leading an engaged team.<\/p>\n The kicker is that most managers, in my experience, will benefit greatly from HR instructing, reminding and reinforcing how they can create a culture of engagement. Although, it may take some time to convince them of such.<\/p>\n With all the pressure put on managers to develop their employees, we need to support business unit and line managers by helping them develop the skills they need to create a high engagement team culture<\/strong>. And that means we need a vocabulary of KPI’s to help us measure a manager\u2019s performance regarding team members\u2019 level of engagement.<\/p>\n We can learn valuable lessons from research like that conducted by Gallup, McLean and SHRM. Although the reality is that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by complex data analytics. Business intelligence platforms can do the heavy lifting but even getting set up \u00a0to benefit from one can leave an HR team feeling discouraged.<\/p>\n The important step is to just get started \u2013 without jumping straight to a high-powered analytics system. Starting in a simpler way achieves a couple key objectives in the effort to develop employee engagement skills in managers. First, it allows us to build a foundation of a common vocabulary<\/strong> for behaviors and metrics used across all departments and that can be consulted on a regular basis. Second, starting the data collection and analysis in a more limited way lets us incorporate both quantitative and qualitative evidence as we establish company benchmarks and targets.<\/p>\n Using this approach, I’m sharing some of the data points we collect and questions we ask to get a picture of a manager’s behaviors and evidence of engagement from their employees. This information is used to assess where we see a correlation between a manager’s behavior and level of team engagement. Our goal is to uncover information that we can use to help managers change their behaviors in ways that will result in happier, more engaged team members<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Retention rates: <\/em><\/strong>Retention rates have long been a good starting place. As part of the exit survey, a leaving employee is asked to rank the top three reasons for leaving the company in order of importance. One of the 15 reasons listed is \u201crelationship with superior\/line manager.\u201d<\/p>\n Our HR scorecard for managers looks at both resignations and terminations. The circumstances of a resignation are instructive, but so are the circumstances around terminations. Since of lack of engagement can ultimately lead to low productivity, the question arises whether a high rate of terminations reflects a state of low engagement that can be resolved at the manager level.<\/p>\n Skills and professional development:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 Our HR scorecard dedicates a lot of real estate to professional development metrics. A critical KPI is training hour utilization. Of the training opportunities provided, are both the manager and the manager\u2019s team members using them? Since a manager greatly influences a team member\u2019s skills development, we set targets on what percentage of training hours are spent in different modes of training. Specifically, we measure percentage of time spent in on-the-job training, one-on-one feedback\/guidance from the manager, and formal courses.\u00a0 By looking more closely at how an employee gets uptrained, we can see how directly involved the manager is.<\/p>\n Employee feedback and soft skills performance:<\/em><\/strong> Employee feedback about their managers is also included on our HR scorecard for managers. We ask employees to rate how their manager treats them with respect to their development in employee opinion surveys. In annual performance management rankings, we ask managers of managers to evaluate how well their subordinate manager develops their talent. This subjective information is useful as one piece of the puzzle.\u00a0 We also look at employee scores on soft skills that correlate with high engagement as a measure of the manager\u2019s effectiveness. Being part of a team where many (if not most) of the team members show high abilities in collaboration and communication means they\u2019re getting the mutual support they need to meet shared objectives and feel well-informed about those objectives. Gallup, SHRM and McLean research has found that having support and being kept in the loop on what\u2019s going on are two of the needs identified by employees as critical to their feeling engaged with their employer.<\/p>\n Where we see underperforming scores in these competencies, improving them isn\u2019t just a part of the employee\u2019s personal development plan, seeing improvement in them is also part of the manager\u2019s personal development plan.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need an extensive software suite to start getting actionable intelligence from your data collection. The important thing is to start, so your organization starts building a discipline how to measure manager impact on employee engagement<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Beginning with a limited, focused set of KPIs and sentiment feedback, your HR and managerial teams can assess them in concert, using a simple dashboard to tell the full story. Look for where they\u2019re mutually reinforcing or inconsistent. For example, do employee sentiment surveys track with what you think the objective training metrics should tell you about employee satisfaction? Identifying both the consistencies and gaps helps you determine what\u2019s needed programmatically to move things forward.<\/p>\n The important matter is recognizing that employee engagement metrics are the lagging indicators. Managers\u2019 behavior and engagement KPI’s are the leading indicators. Where managers are the most influential factor in an employee\u2019s engagement level, tracking and developing their metrics offers the greatest opportunity for managers to respond to help improve employee engagement on a large scale.<\/p>\n An article by Kyle Swartz<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I am reviewing some recent results from an employee opinion survey this week, I am reminded once again that employee engagement drives productivity and retention. But what drives employee engagement? We’ve understood the link between engagement, productivity and retention for years. I attended a meeting this week with HR professionals from a variety of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":33806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"nivel-1":[],"nivel-2":[4700,4703,5985,6160,6159],"nivel-3":[],"nivel-4":[],"nivel-5":[5984],"topic":[7294,7301,7299],"coauthors":[6063],"class_list":["post-33851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","post_format-post-format-image","nivel-2-company-culture","nivel-2-company-management","nivel-2-human-resources","nivel-2-projects","nivel-2-proyectos","nivel-5-ferrovial-en","topic-business-and-people","topic-culture-and-society","topic-management-and-strategy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGetting Started with Manager Data When You Don’t Have an Analytical Platform<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n![\"working](\"https:\/\/static.ferrovial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2020\/01\/13131417\/photo-of-three-people-smiling-while-having-a-meeting-3184338-768x512.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"men](\"https:\/\/static.ferrovial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2020\/01\/13131416\/block-chain-4736371_1920-768x388.jpg\")
<\/p>\nGetting the Big Picture from a Collection of Data Points<\/h2>\n