There’s a reason business leaders list Employee Engagement among their most pressing concerns: despite small advances reported by Gallup, a whopping 2/3 of the workforce remains disengaged. Disengaged employees have 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity and 15% lower profitability. That’s a hit of about about 34% of a disengaged employee’s annual salary, or $3,400 for every $10,000 they make. So that complacency is costly. Too costly not to address.

What makes fixing the engagement problem so challenging?  “The biggest challenge to engaging employees,” according to Leapgen CEO and co-founder Jason Averbook, “is FOCUS.”

We have thousands of ways to “engage” the workforce, but Human Resources remains structured in siloed Centers of Excellence. This means different teams are responsible for engaging at moments that matter to THEM – Talent Acquisition is focused on engaging during the recruitment and hiring process, Performance Management is focused on engaging when it’s time to review performance, Learning & Development is focused on delivering engaging learning content – but there is a diluted overall focus because people don’t know where and how the overall business needs to best engage its workforce.

Employee engagement strategy needs to derive its focus from the organization’s business strategy.

LEADERSHIP FOSTERS ENGAGEMENT

Besides a lack of focus, employee engagement also suffers when there is a lack of leadership. Engagement problems are usually not an individual employee issue; engagement, or lack thereof, is a systemic leadership issue. We don’t know how to be great people leaders because we’re not TAUGHT leadership in business. And organizational leadership is not easy: we have a globally and culturally diverse cross-section of no less than five generations working in today’s active workforce. With a growing need to help the workforce thrive in change and flux, truly great people leadership will only get harder.

HR can’t take this on by itself. There needs to be a partnership with the business to address engagement opportunities. This starts in standardizing and focusing our definition of engagement. HR uses “catch-all” descriptions when they describe engagement in the organization. We need to use better, more specific language to describe where the business is falling short in meeting its talent strategy and business strategy initiatives. There’s not one big engagement problem; there are pockets of specific issues within the organization that are causing employees in that area to disengage. Get specific.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

What is the role of workforce technology in solving this business problem? To understand that, we need to first understand the difference between digital (which asks why) and technology (which explains how). To create a more engaged, worker-focused organization, organizations need to align around a common, unified, top-down vision that clearly explains the problem and the way you want to solve it. “I want to take this part of the workforce and get them here. I want to address this kind of worker and get them here.”  With this kind of clarity and from a digital-first mindset, we can better apply the right technology in the way it can be best leveraged as fuel for the experience you need to deliver to the workforce.

FOCUS<VISION<EXECUTION

Tackle employee engagement with FOCUS, with clarity of VISION supported by LEADERSHIP, and supported by sharpened EXECUTION strategy.  If you can’t articulate the problem you’re trying to solve and where you’re trying to go in 30 seconds or less, STOP<SIMPLIFY<CLARIFY. Take the time to figure it out before you act, or you’re just trying to boil the ocean.

Watch Jason Averbook with Jason Lauritsen on Igniting Employee Engagement. No more scattering of engagement definitions, programs, and strategies. Be more specific, get alignment and focus around one problem, and execute defined solutions.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Averbook is a leading analyst, thought leader and consultant in the area of human resources, the future of work and the impact technology has on that future. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Leapgen, a digital transformation company shaping the future of work by broadening executive mindset to rethink how to better design and deliver employee services that meet the expectations of the workforce and the needs of the business.

Prior to founding Leapgen, Jason served as the CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC). In 2005, he co-founded Knowledge Infusion LLC and served as its CEO until 2012, when the company was sold to Appirio. Earlier in his career, he served as the Chief Business Innovation Officer at Appirio Inc., where he led the HCM business. He has also held senior leadership roles at PeopleSoft and Ceridian Corporation. Jason has more than 20 years of experience in the HR and technology industries and has collaborated with industry-leading companies in transforming their HR organizations into strategic partners.

ABOUT LEAPGEN
Leapgen is a global digital transformation company shaping the future of work. Highly respected as a visionary partner to organizations looking to design and deliver a digital workforce experience that will produce valued outcomes to the business, Leapgen helps enterprise leaders rethink how to better design and deliver workforce services and architect HR technology solutions that meet the expectations of workers and the needs of the business.

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