Here is a short interview with Peder Anderlind VP Employee Engagement at Credit Suisse. Peder will be presenting a case study on employee engagement on Thursday April 23rd in Barcelona at the 2nd Annual Employee Engagement Conference. Click the Barcelona button below for the conference brochure.
1. What are the 2 or 3 keys you see to engaging your people.
Leadership (Top management, as well as direct managers) need to be perceived as authentically embracing and living the values of the firm. Unless leadership are seen as “walking the talk”, followership can not be expected, which is an important element to engagement. Managers need to understand what drives/dilutes engagement for their individual team members and need to adapt their interaction with them accordingly. Employees should feel accountability in driving their own level of engagement. Identify barriers to engagement and do something about it.
2. How do you engage the line manager and leadership to drive engagement.
We use every opportunity we can to explain that engagement is correlated to higher retention, higher productivity and an easier time to attract talents to their teams. In essence higher engagement will make them more successful (and expose them to fewer management related challenges). There is also a certain level of competitiveness that comes from sharing data that includes comparisons with their peers. We see a lot of energy from areas that do not want to be perceived as an area with low engagement. We also try to present engagement data within other HR data. For example link of engagement with performance, potential, attrition, profitability…
3. How do you share information and best practices about engagement.
We look for opportunities to broker best practices and experiences between high/low perceptions across the various engagement drivers. We also look for areas working on similar challenges to work together. We have learned however that in many cases it is preferable for areas to reflect on their own solutions around engagement challenges, as 1) it drives accountability, 2) many best practices can not simply be copy/pasted into other areas, as root issues tend to be fairly unique (historical context, culture, leadership and employee profile…) and 3) we want management of the various areas to reflect on human capital opportunities / challenges and being served with solutions tend to reduce time for reflection.
Barcelona Conference. I will be chairing the Employee Engagement Conference in Barcelona. I look forward to hearing more from Peder about engagement at Credit Suisse. Email Julien Salvi julien.salvi@teneoevents.eu to get information or to register for the conference.
Click here for the conference brochure: barcelona-employee-engagement-conference
Hi. And see you again.