Making Employee Engagement “Mmm, Mmm, Good” Again (MMP #21)
By David Zinger on Jul 9, 2007 in Disengagement, Employee Engagement, Engagement, Management, Monday Morning Percolator, Workplace Engagement
Employee Engagement Monday Morning Percolator #21
At the turn of this century, the Campbell Soup Company’s employee engagement was not “mmm mmm good.” In addition, soup sales were stagnant and the stock was slumping. The executive wanted to assess employee engagement but many employees, including managers, did not want to complete the anonymous Gallup employee engagement questionnaire and when the results were in, Gallup told Douglas Conant, the CEO, that it was the worst level of employee engagement they had ever seen.
Douglas Conant now focuses as much on employee engagement as he does on soup, manufacturing facilities, and marketing efforts:
Every day, you’ve got to be making deposits in the emotional bank account of your company. When people do something right, you have to celebrate it, and then you have to celebrate it again. And if they do something wrong, you have to thoughtfully call them on it, because this isn’t a patronizing culture, it’s a performance culture.
Conant believes that lifetime loyalty is a thing of the past, but said that doesn’t worry the young people joining Campbell Soup today right out of college.
They are not looking for a job for life; they want meaningful experiences where they can do something special and contribute. It’s not about security. It’s about making a better world.
Get Perking:
- Heat up performance and engagement for the benefit of employees and the organization by making the workplace a better place to be.
- Carefully craft the ingredients in your recipe to create chicken soup for the employee engagement soul? Make the cultural broth of your workplace performance based not patronizing or penalizing.
- Transform your organization so that employees are slurping up nourishing work and saying, “mmm, mmm, good” rather than cracking under too many demands, lack of meaning and trust, and an increasing sense of disconnection from the work and each other.
- Click here to read the New Jersey Star-Ledger article that inspired this post.
