Rules of engagement: Getting employee buy-in can make bottom line a blast

Kansas City Business Journal 12/19/05

When Steve Gardner and Paul Schmidt bought Five Star Speakers & Trainers LLC in February, they brought a vision for boosting sales, which had seemingly plateaued in recent years.

Overland Park-based Five Star already was one of the nation's top agencies for matching speakers with corporate events. But Gardner and Schmidt wanted the company to generate more revenue through its training business. To get the veteran sales staff to buy into the strategy, the new owners restructured compensation, improved some back-office systems and required each team member to make 40 calls a day.

Gardner and Schmidt also do what experts say a growing number of managers and business owners aren't doing: They listen to their employees.

"We're smart enough to know that we don't have all the answers, and we're smart enough to go to the employees and ask, 'Hey, guys, how are we doing?'" Gardner said.

Sounds simple. So does recognizing employees for good work and putting them in roles where they can excel. But many managers fall woefully short in those areas, which contributes to a worldwide decline in employee engagement, according to two recent studies on the subject:

A survey of 472 organizations conducted by Right Management Consultants Inc. and the International Association of Business Communicators reported that one in three companies successfully motivates employees to understand, believe in and execute the company's business strategy.

They do it by hiring good people, investing in their career development and making them feel important to the business' success, said Denise Kruse, executive vice president of organizational consulting for Right Management's Heartland Region.

• A poll of 85,000 employees in 16 countries by Towers Perrin HR Services found that just 14 percent -- 21 percent in the United States -- said they were fully engaged on the job and wanted to go the extra mile for their companies.

Most managers understand this correlation between engagement of employees and productivity but don't do enough to address it, Kruse said.

"Senior leaders in an organization can create the goal and the strategy to achieve the goal," she said. "The piece they forget is how does the organization meet these standards. We see mission and vision statements that are a paragraph long, and not only do the employees not understand them, they often can't repeat them."

Often it's a matter of simplifying goals and having better communication between the manager and the employee, said Joe McKenna, a Kansas City organizational consultant and a former business development director for Marion Laboratories Inc. To illustrate his point, McKenna recalled a long-ago performance review in which he shared with his manager 23 professional goals for the coming year.

"He just kind of laughed and said, 'I'd like to know three or four things you can do in your position to really move this company,'" McKenna said. "It's really just a process of managers understanding how to connect the vision and the purpose and the goal of the organization to the individuals."

Like a lot of large organizations, Commerce Bank surveys employees every year to measure engagement. But Dee Joyner, Commerce's director of organizational development, said the bank takes those results more seriously than other companies.

This year, Commerce is putting its 1,200 managers and officers through a daylong workshop on accountability and taking ownership of company results. The program, Joyner said, is a direct response to employees' concern about that topic in the 2004 survey. "Where we may be different is the level of follow-up we go into to try to drill down and understand what the employees are telling us and turn those into things that are actionable," she said. Employees tend to be engaged and inspired by managers they admire. Gardner said he tries to live up to his people's expectations by putting in at least as many hours as they do and not being above any role at the 22-employee company. That often means working the phones for new business like everyone else on the sales team. He proudly notes that Five Star's sales are up about 10 percent from a year ago.

"We can tell them every day how much we value them," he said. "(But) it's got to be what they see us doing."

Ryan Lawn & Tree Inc., a tree-trimming and yard maintenance company in Overland Park, demands long hours and hard physical work from its 80-plus employees. But President Larry Ryan also offers an employee stock-ownership plan, writes everyone holiday cards and doles out $25 Price Chopper gift certificates at Thanksgiving.

Those niceties help management energize employees, Ryan said. So does hiring the right people. Ryan has strict criteria for his "Ryan Pros." They must be caring, career-oriented folks who enjoy the outdoors, have horticulture or forestry degrees, and are friendly to customers.

They also must be self-starters. The company has a few PowerPoint presentations but no formal training program. New employees must learn on the job.

"I am convinced that real training programs are set up for companies that don't have the right people, and no matter how many times they're taken through it, they never really quite get it," Ryan said.

Having the right people in the right positions is part of the three steps Kruse advises to fuel engagement. In the "envision" stage, company leaders develop a strategy and devise how to communicate. The "evolve" stage requires creating the processes and positioning employees to succeed with the new strategy. Finally, the "engage" stage is making each employee understand his or her role and expectation in the big picture.

Organizations of all sizes struggle to comply with the three E's, Kruse said. It's a common myth that small to midsize companies have better engagement because everyone knows one another.

"We all know how that works between a husband and a wife," she said. "You're usually running very fast, you have fewer resources and often fewer communication channels."

written by Stephen Roth

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