Employee Engagment Chronicle #5

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article. The Chronicle begins with a bullet point for each of the following articles:

Get The Point:

• Trust is a must or employee engagement is a bust.
• Find the people who make a difference and integrate their story into your engagement culture.
• When it comes to employee engagement know your score.
• An employee engagement gulf.

The Canadian Managment Centre focused on Human Resources Management Tip – A Trusting Relationship Retains Key Employees. The article looks at the importance of trust in keeping employees. The article includes a top 10 list of how managers can build trust including: (1) Spot an employee’s unique talent or skill and coach him/her to get the very best out of that. (2) Do not micro-manage; give employees space to find their own solutions. (3) Provide important information rather than holding on to it for political reasons.

Michael McKinney wrote about turning the difference makers into cultural stories based on Quint Studer’s book on Results that Last: make a conscious effort to look for and collect the stories of those people that go above and beyond and know when to break the rules in order to make a difference. Then retell them over and over to make them a part of the organization’s culture. The stories should have a behavior-oriented point and help people to connect their situation to that of the heroes in the story. “Finding your heroes and recognizing their behavior is key because recognized and rewarded behavior is repeated.”

Scorecard Metrics for HR focused on Some Useful HR Metrics for Large Organizations. Here is a snippet on employee engagement: Another important aspect of HR to measure is what is known as employee engagement. This refers to the relationship between employees and the management. High employee engagement would mean that employees tend to value their employment, and hence stay with the company as productive members. The metrics in this category take the form of employee survey results that can gauge employee satisfaction. For instance, the percentage of employees who look forward to coming to work is a useful metric, as is the percentage that feels comfortable with current management practices.

Gulf companies fail to engage employees for the long-term. Here are a couple of statistics from a November 2007 study in the Gulf: Fewer than half of Gulf employees think their organisation manages to attract the best talent or engage them to perform once they are inside the corporation. Even fewer (just over one third of employees) think their companies are good at holding on to the best talent.