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Engaging for success: Enhancing performance through employee engagement A recent survey of Mace employees conducted by Kingston Business School’s Employee Engagement Consortium shows that investment in good line management is paying off and that roles remain engaging. Approximately 90 per cent of employees strongly or very strongly agreed that they were intellectually and affectively engaged in their roles, and 80 per cent agreed that their manager helped them to fulfil their potential. Mace has also found other business benefits to engagement: engaged employees are more prepared to recommend their organisation to others as a good place to work, which is an important objective for Mace. Engagement has also benefited retention, with 94 per cent of employees saying they plan to stay at the company. Mace has a lower turnover rate than the industry average. Although it is hard to directly account for the impact of engagement on Mace’s profit margins, the company believes that engaged employees increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn, boosts profitability. Case Study Network Rail When Network Rail was formed in 2003, it brought in a consultancy firm to measure engagement and found very low levels of engagement in the organisation. In their business, employee engagement is key in a number of areas of business performance, including safety, and action had to be taken to improve engagement as a means of improving performance. Network Rail saw good leadership and good management as being the most important elements of high engagement, as Bob Hughes, Talent and Employee Engagement Manager says. “There is no magic bullet to high engagement; it’s simply about improving the relationship between manager and managed. So, we invested in leadership development programmes designed to move us away from a command and control system to one where people felt able to show leadership wherever they were in the organisation – people taking ownership and being accountable; managers trusting their people and delegating tasks to them.” Core to this cultural change was a training programme for managers showing them how to take a coaching approach to leadership of their teams. So far, Network Rail have put around 1,000 managers – about 25 per cent – through the accredited training programme. In addition, around 100 of Network Rail’s managers went on to volunteer as an internal coach, and that pool of coaches is used to coach others across the company. 84
Chapter 4: Enablers of Engagement – What has to happen to make engagement work The results of this investment are clear: engagement scores of the teams managed by attendees of the programme are significantly higher than teams where the manager hasn’t been on the course. And this positive engagement outcome translates into vital business indicators. Absenteeism in engaged teams is around three-quarters that of the less engaged teams, and engaged managers are responsible for half the number of signalling errors and incidents compared with less engaged managers. Case Study Telefónica O2 At one of its largest contact centres, O2 found that some of its managers were spending too long on administrative tasks – time that could have been spent face-to-face with their teams. Over two months, managers at Preston Brook were asked to track what they were spending their time on, enabling O2 to build a picture of how they spent their average working day. It found too much of their time was being taken up with administration that it could train non-managers to do. “We trained up our admin team so they could perform some of these activities – things like auditing goodwill credits and reporting sickness absence stats,” says Customer Service Operations Manager, Lorraine Connolly. “That freed up our managers to spend more of their time where they should be – in amongst their teams taking care of their people with one-to-ones, coaching and so on.” Only by spending quality face-to-face time with their teams can O2’s managers meet the company’s promise that your manager will be there for you. Account Manager at Preston Brook, Nico Versluys, whose 11-year-old stepson has cerebral palsy, said he was grateful his manager made time for him. “Ryan needed a series of operations on his legs and it was a very stressful time,” said Nico. “But my manager always made time for me to talk about it. He said if things ever got too stressful then he’d give me the space I needed to get my head around things and talk it through. I never really needed to in the end but it was reassuring to know the offer was there if I needed it. “Customer Service can be a very busy and stressful part of the business, so it’s easy for managers to look at their team as a bunch of KPIs that need to be monitored or improved. But the best managers are those who appreciate that their team are human beings and will perform at their best when they feel supported, listened to and involved. As the saying goes: ‘happy people equals happy customers.’” 85
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