This week I perused an advanced copy of Closing the Engagement Gap: How Great Companies Unlock Employee Potential for Superior Results by Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman with Joanne Gordon. I’m sure in these crazy times, the last thing management at any size company is doing is focusing on employee engagement, but that could be a huge mistake. The companies that are going to make it through this crisis (or should I make that crises?) are going to need engaged employees.
First off, I’ll be honest–I was expecting a bit of a dry textbook. But since my pal Joanne Gordon (Roadtrip Nation, Be Happy at Work) was involved, my gut said it would be worth the read. True to form, it was a bit lighter than expected and included lots of lists (excellent to use as HR checklists), as well as colorful anecdotes.
The book starts off with an interesting global work force study by Towers Perrin (Gebauer and Lowman are from Towers Perrin), which examined and categorized the top 10 items that drive employees and even broke those items up by different countries. The rest of the book is written in five sections that encapsulate how to engage employees.
- Know them
- Grow them
- Inspire them
- Involve them
- Reward them
Throughout the book, the authors incorporate the stories and experiences of eight companies that they call “the Engaging Eight.” These are: Campbell Soup Co. (hey, this week’s big stock market winner, so it must be doing something right), EMC corp., Honeywell, McKesson, MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Novartis AG and REI. Despite huge variations between the companies, there were clear similarities when it came to employee engagement.
Know Them–highlights:
- A checklist of “Ten things every organization’s senior leaders should know about the work force.”
- Interesting anecdotes from EMC about how it attracts self-starters, which instills some peer pressure to excel.
- The Campbell Soup stories were nice, about a divorced dad wanting a flex schedule to be with his kids, and another about a gentlemen who wanted to take a month off to sail with his father. Of course, right after I did the “awwwww” thing, my radar went up as I wondered whether a woman needing to deal with a deported nanny or ill children would’ve received the same treatment. (I know, in theory, yes; but let’s be real, they’d likely be labeled “not dedicated to the company.”)
- I liked the part about measuring company practices in comparison with employee expectations.
Grow Them–highlights:
- “Most employers can’t guarantee job security, but they can deliver career security as a byproduct of a learning culture, and in turn produce more skilled and engaged employees.”
- Create a safe place to fail and learn. “Given that failure is inevitable in life, in school and in sports, should it be less tolerated in the workplace? To be sure, failure’s consequences can be far-reaching in business, but its learning potential must be leveraged.”
- “From an employee’s perspective, career growth is not always equivalent to moving ‘up’ the career ladder.” (Cool. I didn’t even pay them to plug the underlying theme behind my blogtalkradio show, Smash the Ladder)
Inspire Them–highlights:
- There were some good stories about the engaging eight companies, especially those that focused on supporting people from the top down.
Involve Them–highlights:
- “To ensure their genuine involvement, employees must be knowledgable participants, treated as valued contributors and have the freedome to act in ways that they believe will enhance the performance of colleagues and the organization.”
- Create a business-literate work force. Help all your employees understand how your business works. This will help them see how they all play a role in its success.
- Gather employeee input to leverage experience and foster creative problem-solving. I was pleased to see that EMC was featured in this section for its use of social media via an internal, online tool it calls EMC.ONE that lets employees at all levels of the organization, located anywhere in the world, share ideas.
Reward Them–highlights:
- The four items that make up a good Rewards program: pay, benefits, development and environment.
- They also put it as “ABC’s” of rewards–appreciation, benefits and compensation.
Top Shelf Bottom Line: If you’re looking to ensure that your employees stick with you through the bad times, then you should definitely take a peek at this book and see how your company measures up to the engaging eight. At the very least, the checklist at the end is a must-have for your HR department to ensure that you engage your employees and obtain the results everyone wants.
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “How to Keep the Employees You Want”
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October 14th, 2008 at 5:04 am
[...] marketing campaigns, and business policies. Imagine your workforce feeling that engaged (see this post for an advanced review of a book on the subject which talks about EMC’s efforts in the [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:31 am
Now everyone is talking about the American economy and eclections, nice to read something different. Eugene