by Julie Gebauer, Towers Perrin
Getting top leaders on board with engagement efforts is a must-do, especially in today’s environment. We’ve found that the best tactic to bring leaders into the process is to build a compelling business case linked to your larger business strategy.
There are many studies you can use (including the one we discussed in our recent webcast) to demonstrate how significantly employee engagement levels influence business outcomes. It’s also useful to highlight performance differences across different units in your own company and illustrate the change in business outcomes if all of your units moved to higher levels of performance.
A few other tactics that are effective in gaining commitment include:
- Providing benchmarking/best practice information on top competitors in your industry and region
- Relating employee engagement and key behaviors to customer engagement and buying patterns
- Focusing on one or two top leaders who “get it” to champion the effort
- Holding an executive work-out session to identify untapped opportunities for business improvements.
If engagement is viewed as something “nice to do” that only HR is championing, leaders and managers will tend to go through the motions rather than making a genuine commitment to execute differently.
2 Comments
We’ve found the same to be true for strategic employee recognition programs — in fact “executives sponsorship and defined goals” is one of our five tenets for success. Two of our clients (Symantec and Avnet) explained this well in webinars on Building the Business Case for Strategic Recognition by proving the bottom-line value. Webinars are available at these links: http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/03/symantec-making-business-case-for.html and http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2008/04/building-business-case-for-strategic.html
You need the head honchos with you… Absolutely.
And you better come to them with a very strong case. If you don’t, your not just likely to fail to gain full cooperation, you risk having the rug pulled completely out from under you.