Getting full engagement for all the employees in a small company is essential if your company is going to scale successfully. Here are some pragmatic, proven ways to make sure that happens in your start-up.
One of the biggest headaches for companies in this post-COVID environment is figuring out effective ways to enhance employee engagement. According to a recent Gallup survey, only one-third of the average workforce is engaged in their work. In addition, the same poll showed an overwhelming 85% believed their well-being had declined during the pandemic, and 89% agreed their work-life was getting worse.
To help illustrate how start-ups are working on improving employee engagement, I talked with Peter Caswell, Chairman and CEO of Netbase-Quid, who is actively addressing these issues and offered some thoughts and suggestions on various ways in which employee engagement can be enhanced at a startup.
Why Employee Engagement Matters More for Startups — Particularly in businesses reliant on knowledge based employees, ensuring engagement and retention is foundational to business success. Employee engagement comes from their emotional linkage to the culture of the company, and that’s dictated by a set of values that everyone has to believe and commit to. Leadership and the CEO particularly have to live that culture and those values.
In early-stage startups, individual employees are often tasked with a broader range of responsibilities compared to those working at larger companies. When a key employee leaves a startup, the business repercussions can be significant, perhaps even fatal, to the firm’s future growth.The U.S. Department of Labor released data in June 2021 showing more U.S. workers are quitting their jobs at any time during the past two decades. But, according to a recent Builtin.com survey, the upside for companies who figure out how to create more engagement is lower absentee rates (i.e., 40% lower) and fewer employees seeking alternative employment.
Think Different: Applying a Marketing Mindset to Employee Engagement Marketers care deeply about customer engagement — it’s the critical link to everything they do, starting with new customers and especially with their high-volume clients. Creating and sustaining customer engagement is systemically built into a series of marketing activities, including developing the brand strategy, designing the customer experience, creating loyalty programs, forming strategic partners, and measuring customer satisfaction. Without employee engagement, it’s not possible to get sustainable customer engagement.There are steps you can take to address employee engagement. You just have to think like a marketer.
By applying a “marketing mindset” to improving employee engagement, startups can be proactive in enhancing employee engagement and positively contributing to the overall company business and culture. We know the product idea of “build it, and they will come” is a fallacy for products — marketing is key to bring those products alive and communicates their value to the people. Marketing should also communicate a company’s values and culture to the employee base. Without that, you might as well whistle into the wind for all the good you’ll do.
Here are five practical and affordable ways to get started:
1.) New Employee Onboarding — Who better to represent your brand than your employees? They want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Ideally, their employer ideally would have them evolve into “brand ambassadors”. But this is not going to happen organically; new employees need help understanding what the company’s story is and how they can enhance it.
Sadly, too many firms skip over the unique opportunity to educate and motivate new hires to understand what makes their company special. It starts with senior leadership making new employees on-boarding a high priority and taking the time to emphasize the company’s values and culture. This doesn’t necessarily require lots of money but does require serious thought and planning as well as a management commitment to do it consistently.
The first 90 days of a new hire’s time with a company are critical in making employee onboarding successful. It’s not just “one and done” on Day One. This onboarding process needs to continue with a series of planned activities and engagement with other employees, including senior management, in which new employees can ask questions, hear stories, and appreciate the different ways in which they can contribute to the company’s mission.
Peter agreed thoughtful onboarding is an essential part of making sure a new employee got off to a strong start. “Making sure a new employee feels comfortable in their new role and welcomed by the entire team is key to creating a strong foundation for employee engagement”, he noted.Peter also emphasized the importance of the CEO’s involvement in onboarding. “As far as possible, I believe it’s critical for a CEO to be part of onboarding employees, and the role the CEO takes should be to highlight how the company’s values and culture make the business work, and how important they are. This drives employee engagement and commitment, and sets a cultural foundation for all new employees.”
2.) Designing the Employee Experience — Having worked from home for over a year, many employees now want flexibility in how and where they work. Employers don’t have the luxury of saying “no” to these requests anymore. Your competition will gladly be flexible with these same employees if it enables them to steal valuable talent. Peter believes that those companies that don’t embrace flexibility will pay a price. “I believe those companies not supporting a flexible workspace, or even a full virtual environment, are on a track to eventual failure. The fact that a company has invested massively in real estate is ignoring the future and desperately hanging on to the past. In knowledge based businesses at least, real estate must be considered a sunk cost when it comes to culture and employee engagement.”
Before the pandemic, it would have been unthinkable to tell most managers their entire team would be out of the office for over a year. And yet, for many companies, not only did this paradigm shift work, it actually improved productivity. A recent Wall Street Journal survey indicated one-third of employees said they could focus better on work from home, and the overall quality of their work improved.
The key to making this new flexibility work, in the long run, is a greater focus on designing the employee experience. Managers need to focus on an employee’s progress toward agreed-upon objectives (rather than the number of hours they sit at a desk). A virtual workplace, or at least a flexible workplace, forces managers to manage. Going forward, a hybrid approach to work with a mixture of time in the office (especially for team engagement) balanced with work from home is a critical strategy in keeping employees focused on their work (rather than looking for their next opportunity).
Peter indicated that he’s putting a lot of time and thought into this issue right now. “We’re conducting employee surveys and team meetings. We want to find the right balance between being able to serve our clients while at the same time giving our employees the flexibility to get their work done in the most efficient and effective way possible.” He also emphasizes that it’s important to make the employees a part of this process, not simply the recipients of the outcome.
3.) Employee Recognition — Some of the most valuable currency a company possesses is the appreciation they can show to their employees for outstanding work. Rather than leave this to chance, innovative startups systematically create opportunities to recognize employees who do great work and enable peers to recognize each other as well.
Peter explains how Netbase Quid shows appreciation for employees that not only do good work, but live the company values. “Every month in a company-wide virtual meeting, we try to recognize key employees that have gone over and above supporting the company’s values and culture. These awards are proposed by employees and carefully scored, avoiding bias or favoritism. They reinforce culture, values and employee engagement.” Peter also notes that authenticity is important for these awards. “Don’t do this if your values don’t actually represent the company’s people and its culture; that would break employee engagement and culture.”
At their monthly All Hands meeting (which is still virtual), Peter always includes a portion of the meeting to recognize various employees around the world who have gone “above and beyond” their responsibilities. “These past eighteen months have been challenging for all of us, but I’m extremely grateful how all of our employees have responded. We want to make sure they know how much we appreciate their efforts.”
Getting started is easy. There are companies such as Gifted and Snappy which enable a startup to set up a budget for employee recognition. These can be planned events such as employee of the week or month or spontaneous recognition for employees who go above and beyond what’s normally expected.
Letting managers tell employees they are appreciated for their efforts, employee engagement will grow over time for both the recognized employee as well as their peers who see first-hand what’s important from an employer’s perspective. Perhaps more importantly, letting employees know publicly they are appreciated by other employees is even more powerful in developing an engaged team and a great culture.
4.) Giving Back to the Community — Many employees (especially younger ones) are passionate about a cause they strongly believe in and would welcome the opportunity to help out more. As part of their regular job responsibilities, employees should be allowed and encouraged by their employers to help non-profits who contribute to the overall good of the community.
As part of employee engagement planning, a startup would be wise to decide where they want their focus to be for their community engagement. Perhaps it’s related to the business their company is in, or it might be for a cause the company’s founder is passionate about. Either way, make it easy for your employees to get involved with their time or by matching donated funds.
At NetBase Quid, the team focused some volunteer time on helping analyze COVID-19 vaccination rates. “We recently helped out with some complex analysis around Covid Vaccination uptake,” Peter shared. “We hope it helps folks understand what’s going on, and perhaps may help increase the vaccination rate and save some lives.” It’s also critical to measure the impact these efforts are making so a company can enhance their impact for these non-profits organizations over time.
Just as with employee recognition, there are companies that make it easier for your employees to give back to their community. The leading firm in this area is Double the Donation, which enables employers to track all matching gifts as well as providing aggregate usage data.
5.) Employee Engagement Measurement — Since “that which gets measured gets done”, employers should have a reliable and systematic way to measure employee loyalty and engagement over time, so they can understand what’s driving it. Staff tenure and a low rate of voluntary staff turnover is the ultimate measurement. In the short term, internal surveys run by HR with careful interpretation can inform how successful or not a company is in fostering employee engagement. The same process used to measure and analyze consumer loyalty (NPS) can be modified and used to measure employee loyalty and engagement.
While a startup can hire vendors who can provide this type of service, it’s simple enough to get started on your own using platforms such as Survey Monkey or Wispform. The fundamental question to track is “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this company as a place to work?”. The second question is the critical one worth analyzing and acting upon — “Why?”. By regularly tracking this survey data among your employees, managers can get a better real-time sense on what’s currently enhancing employee engagement (and what still needs work).
It is important to take measurements such as this as one data point in a group of many. Peter explains, “Beware of taking external sources of customer satisfaction as gospel — they’re unduly influenced by a few disaffected employees and can be manipulated by unethical businesses that pressure their employees to comment positively.”
Employee Engagement Is Key To A Company’s Success — There was an old adage, “management by walking around.” For Peter, it never worked. “I tried it. In the 90’s I followed Andy Grove’s advice and moved my desk to different parts of the business every couple of months to engage with people, not just ‘fly by’. That worked.”
While technology allows people to connect with each other at any time, it’s important to actively engage with them. Peter explains, “Just like in-person communication, answering your phone or accepting interruptions (or pretending to be engaged while actually reading emails) is easy to spot and will destroy any chance of engaging with that person or team. And they’ll not engage with you or your company as a result. Genuine engagement from a leader will deliver greater engagement from your teams.”
As Richard Branson put it, “Train people well enough that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” There’s enough real-world evidence to prove that companies who focus on strategic initiatives such as robust new employee onboarding, flexible employee work arrangements, recognition of great employee work, enablement of employees to give back to their community, and regular employee engagement measurement have a sustainable advantage over their competition.
Originally published at https://kipknight.medium.com on June 28, 2021.