Real Time Data Can Drive Employee Engagement

Engagement in some organizations just seems to happen naturally.  In others it seems uneven and difficult to sustain. People seem to be treading water, there’s no real enthusiasm, momentum or positive attitude.  But this disengagement is not always visible.  A paper written by Glint entitled “The Chemistry of Engagement” reveals the data-driven strategies of innovative companies who have adopted emerging technology of real-time employee engagement.

There are many organizations that don’t realize they have an engagement problem until they have a retention or performance problem. They gain understanding from these issues, but often it is too little too late.

Consider these stats from recent research:

• 77% of CEOs feel they don’t have the right systems to address the issue of employee engagement (Deloitte)

• 79% of CEOs believed they have a significant retention and engagement problem (Deloitte)

• 18% of employees are actively engaged, only 30% of employees are engaged, 52% are disengaged (Forrester Research)

Here are three reasons often given by HR leaders for these above findings:

• There are challenges staying connected as the company grew and became more successful.With rapid growth there are so many new people that old employee surveys weren’t working

• The diversity and disbursement of employees makes it difficult to maintain cohesiveness and engagement.

• The wide variety of employee types (salaried, hourly, technical, customer facing, main office, remote etc.) makes it difficult to keep them all engaged

• With constant management changes because of growth there is a lack of consistency.

One answer to all the above according to Glint is real-time measurement using real-time technologies.  If the problem is present, you need present time data to solve it. 

But three factors have kept companies from measuring in real-time:

1. The annual survey because it is still just annual

2.  It’s not just an HR thing.  While HR has been the owner of measuring engagement and the strategies to use to improve it, it’s very difficult to drive behaviors across large and diverse organizations.

3. An issue of money or time. Many companies are forced to limit consultant based research to once a year, and if they do it themselves, the time and manpower to do it right can be very lengthy thus mitigating the “real-time” issue.

The answer, according to Glint, is to use the platform they have developed that creates programs for measuring and improving engagement, understands which factors drive employee satisfaction and empowers managers with interactive dashboards to lead them to action.  

While this certainly sounds like a workable approach to improving engagement, it leaves out a very important piece of the puzzle.  To change behavior you need to include positive reinforcement to turn those changes into habits.  Employee recognition and rewards has always been a driver of employee engagement.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Reinforce Performance to Shape Behavior

From the Aubrey Daniels Institute comes the following information on “Shaping” that we found particularly interesting when considering behavior change within employee recognition.  The information comes from previous commentary by Dr. Andy Lattal, the Centennial Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University

While we don’t often hear the terminology, shaping is when a person who has a target response he wants, proceeds to reinforce the “shapee” with approximations of that response in order to change behavior. In this context, “shaping” is one of the most ubiquitous of all behavioral phenomena. An example from Lattal:

“Consider, for example a child who has a skill deficit in, say, making a certain sound. The shaper knows what the sound should sound like, and provides reinforcement for close and closer approximations to the sound until the child eventually produces the sound as it should sound. This is an accurate description of what happens, but it omits an important element in many instances of shaping that involve people in everyday situations: the behavior of the shaper is not immune to the consequences of his or her attempts to shape the behavior of the shapee.”

Shaping relies on positive reinforcement as the results get closer and closer to the target.  When you use a “positive reinforcer” that a person desires, the behaviors will more likely result in a positive outcome.

While we are rarely cognizant of this phenomena, the behavior of the managers in providing recognition is essential to the employee to improve performance.  In addition, the manager is also positively affected by the positive performance of the employee.  They are more likely to provide the recognition when the employee is engaged in the target response. As a result, there is a reciprocal relation for reinforcement for both, a sort of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” arrangement.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net