A conversation with Kevin Sheridan and David Zinger

I encourage you to listen to this 20 minute conversation with Kevin Sheridan about his views and experiences with employee engagement. There is also a transcript for the recording with time stamps you can use to go to specific sections of the dialogue.

Kevin Sheridan and David Zinger on Magnetic Employee Engagement from David Zinger on Vimeo.

David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger. I want to welcome you to a brief dialogue on engagement with Kevin Sheridan and myself on magnetic employee engagement. It’s really my honor and privilege to bring Kevin to this dialogue. He’s written a fantastic book on magnetic culture, has such a background; he’s not only a mountain climber, he’s a guy who’s into the numbers, but also into lots of practical elements. Welcome to the dialogue, Kevin. [00:41]

Kevin Sheridan: Thanks so much, David, happy to be here. [00:45]

David Zinger: Maybe you can tell us a couple of things about yourself or your background of how you got interested in engagement, and then maybe on a more personal level, what engages you most in your work, Kevin?[00:57]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, I’ve really dedicated the last 30 years of my life to studying how employees are feeling in their jobs in all major industries and watched the measure of that transform more from satisfaction to engagement, and really, really excited about the whole concept of engagement delivering a much higher ROI than the world of satisfaction. Actually there’s a pretty colorful comment in the Building a Magnetic Culture book that quotes the front band for the band REM about you can have a lot of shiny, happy people holding hands, but they’re not productive, and for me my engagement comes from innovation, trying to think of the next new angle on building a magnetic culture or building engagement. [01:49]

David Zinger: OK, and so it’s almost like the difference between looking at a beautiful mountain and climbing a mountain, as you voice satisfaction versus engagement? [01:59]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up, because outside of work one of my lifelong passions is high altitude mountaineering, and I’ve been on the journey to climb the seven summits – the highest mountain on every continent, and I’ve been on four of them, summated three of them, and there was a lot of parallels between getting to best in class on engagement and getting to the summit of a high altitude mountain.[02:26]

David Zinger: Yeah, and if people want to skip right to the end of the book if they purchase the book, you’ve got a little bit of a profile of your background in mountaineering. Right now I’m showing the cover of the book. Marshall Goldsmith gave it a ringing endorsement; it was on six best seller lists including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. A book like that obviously takes a lot of work to put together. Do you want to talk just very briefly about the process of putting it together and then what the book is primarily designed to do for managers and organizations? [02:58]

Kevin Sheridan: Absolutely. Well, about a year and a half ago I had one of my rock star millennial employees come into my office from our marketing team and her name is Amelia, and she came and she said Kevin, I just landed you a book deal with McGraw Hill, one of the largest publishers in the world, and Amelia and I shared about seven seconds of euphoria and then we were like oh, now we have to write a book, and it was really a lot of fun because it was almost like expunging all of these case studies and knowledge of over 30 years of experience, and our marketing team helped with the book, and McGraw Hill has been an excellent publisher to work with, and I have to say as a first time author it was quite humbling when the book hit all those best seller lists and you see your name next to the Jim Collins of the world, and it’s just very, very humbling, so, and very rewarding. [03:55]

David Zinger: Well, what stands out in my mind about the book, Kevin, is I mean as you say in the book, you’re a numbers guy, you’ve got the research, you’ve got the background, I mean you went through Harvard, you’ve got the sense of organizations, and you weave together the numbers with very practical perspectives that are more evidence-based than just a perspective on the field. [04:20]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, it’s interesting. I have a little bit of an unusual background. I have been playing in the HR sandbox, if you will, for the last 30 years, yet my background and foundation educationally in the first part of my career is actually in finance, so I’m no stranger to numbers, and what I love about that is often times there’s a natural tension between human resources and finance about, you know, is there a true ROI to some of these people-related expenditures like employee engagement efforts, and employee engagement surveys, and it’s been a lot of fun proving that there is an ROI to that to the finance people. [04:59]

David Zinger: Yeah, and it seems to me that the next generation we’re in already, but it seems for many just they’re starting to understand it as the whole field around predictive analytics and looking at engagement and other variables and being able to predict, you know, sales and all kinds of other factors with that. [05:17]

Kevin Sheridan: Oh, definitely. I mean some of the great outcomes you’re no stranger to, David, the linkage between employee engagement and better customer satisfaction and customer engagement, the effect it has on retaining your best people and lowering your turnover, the effect it has positively on lowering absentees which is significant; I think the average employer in North America it costs them $600 per employee per year on absenteeism, and engaged people are going to show up with their A game everyday – they’re much more likely to show up for work and not leave work early. [05:59]

David Zinger: Yeah. So, the title is Building a Magnetic Culture, and I have the definition of a magnetic culture on the slide here: it draws talented employees to the workplace, empowers them, and sustains an environment. Where did you latch on to the metaphor of the magnet and can you talk about what that says to you? [06:20]

Kevin Sheridan: Sure. It came to us about 10 years ago, we thought about the historical definition of engagement, i.e., the intent to stay, and engaged employees are very loyal to their organization; they don’t want to leave at the drop of a hat, and at the same time they’re ready to exert that extra discretionary effort. So, the magnetism that comes with engagement is not only keeping people employed, but keeping them emotionally and intellectually connected to the overall mission of the organization and they have what I call the two P’s of engagement: they are passionate about what they do and they are very prideful about where they work. So, we actually trademarked the term magnetic culture 10 years ago long before the concept of writing a book on it. [07:09]

David Zinger: And so the real weave there is that passion and pride; I think kind of the two pulls of the magnet really draw people together, and it’s like the magnet works both ways – the organization benefits as does the employee. [07:26]

Kevin Sheridan: Exactly, exactly, and it feeds on itself. There’s a wonderful upward spiral of optimism, and magnetism, and engagement where your engaged population is almost infectious in a wonderful way in terms of their optimism and they’re more apt to be ready to change and be improvement officers, if you will, and be mentors to the people that are in the middle category, which frankly as you know, David, there aren’t enough engaged employees, and the big category of engagement is the one in the middle where people are not engaged and they’re not disengaged, and I’m often reminded of the old Duncan Donuts commercial with the guy that’s 4:30 in the morning and he’s saying to himself time to make the donut. Unfortunately a lot of people approach their job with that level of ambivalence, and it’s not necessarily their fault; I think that leadership and particularly the supervisor really is an opportunity to reengage people and to marry them up with the engaged people, or get them involved, and as you know in the book I talk about the likelihood to volunteer. One great way managers can identify that ambivalent or neutral population is ask for volunteers, and you’ll watch these people not raise their hand, hide under a table or behind a pillar, and sometimes maybe they need to be volun-told where the manager says David, really exciting new initiative we have going here, and you are on the task force, and we’re really excited about your contribution. [09:16]

David Zinger: So, really drawing them in, and the slide I’m looking at now is metrics for magnetism. You have a lot of data in the book, even on page 6 “engaged employees are eight times more likely to feel their supervisor encourages their growth, seven times more likely to feel they receive regular feedback, four times more likely to be satisfied with their job…” On page 85 you talk if you look at 50 people and just have a 10% loss in productivity from those 50 people it’s like you’ve lost five people. What numbers, you know, you’ve been involved in these numbers for such a long time, Kevin, what numbers have really stood out for you around engagement? [09:58]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, the cost of disengagement as it relates to turnover is enormous, and it’s estimated that in North America $350 billion are lost in turnover costs because of disengagement. I mentioned the cost of absenteeism before, that’s significant. The example you just sited has to do with a question that’s pretty ubiquitous in most engagement surveys, which is do you have the resources you need to do your job effectively? A lot of people answer no to that question, and when you look at the loss in productivity of 10% and it’s like losing five people off the payroll in terms of their productivity. One of the great studies that was done a long time ago proving the ROI of engagement was done at the Working School of Business in Pennsylvania, and it proved definitively that the returns, the profitability returns for those organizations that were on the best places to work list were three and a half times higher than an average company in North America, and that’s significant.[11:14]

David Zinger: Oh, that’s just huge, and before we fear… In danger of getting someone fearful that if they open the book it’s just going to be numbers. You’ve given all kinds of examples, personal examples, challenges with an employee, and the best from employees, and one line that really stood out in my mind is one of your employees who said when it’s harvest time it’s harvest time. Can you elaborate on that? [11:42]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, this is a great example of hiring the right people and trying to hire people that have the right attitude that can sustain their level of engagement, and there is a woman on my team that actually started out as my executive assistant. It was really kind of a tough time to start in that job because the previous job incumbent quit working two weeks before her departure, didn’t provide the training that one would have hoped, and meanwhile I was traveling, so as her manager I was not there to consol, and coach, and motivate other than over the phone, and I was frankly very concerned that I was going to lose this special employee that I had just hired. So, when I got back to the office I actually met with her and I started reassuring her, and I said it’s not always going to be like this, and I’m so sorry that you were left with all this mountains of work, and we’ll get through it, and she finally just put her hands in the air, she goes Kevin, I grew up on a farm; when it’s harvest time it’s harvest time, and that was just a beautiful thing to witness, and she has just thrived in her career at HR Solutions and heads up our sales and marketing area, and it’s really a great example of knowing the right people to hire, and I knew that during the interview process as well. [13:04]

David Zinger: Yeah, it’s a great phrase, and then I also put on the lesson of the donuts, and you know your staff were talking about donuts and you weren’t so sure, but in an engaging organization and in a magnetic culture you start to make changes based on what you do experience from your staff. Can you briefly just say the lesson of the donuts? [13:26]

Kevin Sheridan: Yeah, the donuts actually I kind of make fun of myself when I train managers on how to respond to employee survey results, and in particular what might be referred to as quick wins, and a quick win is maybe a plausible suggestion that’s made in the write-in comment section of the survey or maybe made in a focus group session when asking for qualitative feedback about the statistical results. So, years ago, literally 15 years ago one of the first surveys we ever did for my own staff someone wrote in the write-in comment section that, you know, we don’t really have staff meetings as frequently as we should, and by the way, you know, Kevin won’t buy us donuts. Well, part of my work DNA is I come to work to work and I was raised in that baby boomer work ethic, you know, do your share of the work, so that kind of went right over my head, and it took unfortunately three surveys, and by the third survey there were like 15 comments saying he’s still a cheapskate, he won’t buy the donuts, and it’s a classic example of a quick win staring you in the face and you not seeing it, and I can tell you that on the third survey I finally stepped up to the plate – I said not only can we have donuts, you can do whatever you want as it relates to food for our staff meetings. The reaction to that, it was a kin to Moses parting the Red Sea, I mean people were like oh my god we can have donuts at the staff meeting, and… We had one of these quick wins recently as it relates to casual dress. A lot of the younger workers do not want to dress up for work and they want something more casual, and we instituted that about a year ago, and people were screaming when we announced it, we were like wow that’s awesome. So, sometimes a quick win is right there and you just have to be clear enough to see that while it might not be important to you, it is to other people.[15:24]

David Zinger: So, there’s a lot of, you know, in your survey work there’s a lot of key questions, but in your book you also talk about demagnetizers. We don’t have time to get into the depth of that, but I am wondering if you could talk about one demagnetizer at work? [15:39]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, one thing that is in the book as a demagnetizer is when leaders and managers are not genuine and I honestly believe that I think we need to put the human back into human capital management, and part of this is driven by how busy we are, we’re being asked to do more with less, and people forget to just get to know one another, and my advice to leadership and managers is be personal, you know, ask an employee what do you love to do outside of work, or ask them what stokes them towards greater levels of engagement, what do they find passionate about what they do, and get to know them on a personal level, you know, where do their kids go to college, where do they live in town, and I just don’t think there’s enough of that, and people want to know that they’re working for somebody that truly genuinely cares about them, and if they don’t see that it is a demagnetizer. [16:34]

David Zinger: OK, and when you look at taking action you talk about Gandhi’s old quote about be the change expecting the world, and you sent me a slide with a teeter-totter and management on one side, employees on the other. Can you explain that perspective, Kevin? [16:50]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, this is one of the reasons Marshall Goldsmith just wonderfully wrote that jacket cover endorsement you see on the front of the book. Years ago, about four and a half years ago we had a client challenge us that something was missing with the engagement solution, and every vendor in our industry including HR Solutions were delivering results back to management telling management to take them seriously, build meaningful action plans, and implement, and unfortunately a very important constituent was left out of the solution, that being the employee, and as one of our customers said, how can you have employee engagement without the employee; isn’t that the ultimate oxymoron? And the answer is yes. So, we thought how are we going to correct this imbalance, and the urging of this wonderful client that won the Malcolm Baldrige Award just outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey, we actually created a mechanism through which the employee could not only empower themselves to discover which bucket of engagement they fall in based upon how they’re feeling in their job, but we empower them by giving them advice, giving them advice on what they can do to become more engaged. They get a personal employee engagement report. Those of your listeners that are interested in getting one for free can actually order PEER from our website www.HRSolutionsInc.com This is a great way to build engagement from both sides of the fence, and I think what the old model was, it was fairly paternalistic where employees as you see on the teeter-totter are waiting to be engaged, and this corrects that imbalance. [18:40]

David Zinger: Yeah, so you’ve got a lot of practical steps of I put the slide up, on taking action and the personal employee engagement report, and I’m also just putting up the slide on taking action (wwwbuildingamagneticculture.com). Where do you see yourself headed with engagement in the next couple years, Kevin? [19:00]

Kevin Sheridan: Well, there’s much to be done and we will never be complacent in terms of discovering the next new way to look at engagement and build a magnetic culture. One of the things that we’re very proud of and I think it’s missing from a lot of the solutions is most of the vendors out there that are helping companies measure engagement are instilling a one size fits all solution, and as you know David, all the great work you’ve done on this topic, you know, different people have different engagement drivers, so not only should we tailor the measurement tool on those different constituents, whether they be women, or men, or millennial versus traditional, or baby boomers, that’s something that I still think is not being done as frequently as it should. The other big take away that is in the book is if engagement is this important, and you pick up every major HR journal there’s probably a feature article on employee engagement. The sad thing is if it’s that important, why isn’t it being talked about in performance reviews? Only 5% of managers conducting performance reviews have a dialogue with the person about their engagement level asking them what drives your engagement, how can I feed you more of that wonderful stuff, and is there anything that’s detracting from your engagement, and that’s not being done enough, that dialogue between the employee and the manager.[20:24]

David Zinger: Yeah, I think that’s a missing piece, and really we need to get engagement woven into the fabric of work and management as opposed to ever being perceived as something extra that we do, and that certainly could be a step in the right direction. Kevin, you know I want to thank you very much for taking 15-20 minutes of your time to share a little bit of the wonderful book that you did. You’re not the Senior VP of HR Optimization at Avatar, and in regards to HR work that you’re doing, you’ve got Building a Magnetic Culture, a whole bunch of resources. Thanks for taking your time with us today, Kevin. [21:03]

Kevin Sheridan: David, I’ve really admired the work that you’ve done and the network that you’ve created. I always believe in the personal touch and should any of your listeners want to get a discounted version of the book with my personal autograph, they can get it through our website at www.buildingamagneticculture.com, and thank so much for having me. [21:22]

David Zinger: Well, thanks for coming on board, and this recording will be on the Network, it will be in a number of places, there’ll chances to look at it, and I do encourage people to go forward and buy the book. Thank you very much.

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David Zinger is a global expert on employee engagement currently working with a Pyramid of Engagement to help managers be more engaged and engaging.