Employee engagement — rocket science or data science?
Which generation is more demanding at work — the Gen X, the millennial or the fresh wave of Gen Z in the workforce? Regardless of the employees’ age demographic, employers are now upping their game to engage and retain today’s staff.
According to a Forbes article, organisations are attracting and retaining talent by creating consumer-grade experience at work which reflects their attractive, authentic employer brand.
We spoke to Leong Chee Tung (pictured below), co-founder and CEO of EngageRocket, a start-up that provides an employee engagement management solution, at the side-lines of the DBS Asia X Creativity and Innovation Day. He shares tips on employee engagement in the digital era, as well as his own journey as an employer.
1. What inspired you to start EngageRocket?
My co-founder and I were managing the Southeast Asia division of a global research and consulting company. We worked with several Fortune 500 companies on their employee engagement surveys and analysis, as well as other aspects of organisational research.
During that time, we encountered a few problems — survey data could only be shared with leaders and managers weeks, sometimes months, later. The survey analysis was shallow and didn’t really tie in with the other experience data about the employee lifecycle. And finally, because the data was collected so infrequently, it was anyone’s guess what had caused changes to employee sentiment over the extended period.
So we started EngageRocket, a quick and easy way to collect and analyse employee experience data and measure the pulse of the organisation in real-time.
2. What were some of the highs and lows in your personal start-up journey?
The life of an entrepreneur is really like a roller-coaster. Some of the highs include closing our very first customer — it felt great that something we conceptualised created enough value for another business to pay us for the software. Another high was when we received our first investment cheque, which prolonged our cashflow to raise a strong first funding round.
Of course, there were also many lows, especially in the early days when there was so much uncertainty. It was also a low point for me to let people go because their skillsets proved to be incompatible with what was needed to grow the company. That was very emotionally draining for me, but even more so for them.
3. Why should employee engagement matter to organisations? Why should they invest in it?
It is now a strategic imperative for many leaders and HR teams. Many studies about intrinsic motivation and engagement point to robust links between engagement and business performance. A study by Gallup showed that more engaged companies within the S&P500 returned 147% earnings per share more than less engaged companies, and several meta-analyses highlight improvements in talent retention by up to 59% in more engaged teams.
4. From your experience, what are organisations’ biggest pain points when it comes to engaging with their employees?
One of the biggest pain points, at least in this part of the world, is figuring out what the company is engaging employees for. Very rarely do companies engage employees for its own sake — Asian companies that we’ve seen are way too pragmatic for that. Also, if engagement is taken as a side initiative from HR rather than an intrinsic part of business, it will always be a check-the-box compliance exercise.
Even after finding a compelling reason for engagement and embedding it into business culture, there is the considerable challenge of measuring and improving it in a data-driven way. Traditional methods of running once-a-year employee surveys just don’t work and they yield poor returns to the investment of time and energy to run them. Using data to derive employee lifecycle insights within the company is critical in understanding where intervention is necessary (usually only around 20% of the time), and where the employee journey is healthy (80% of the time).
5. What are some insights about employees and the workplace today gleaned from the data gathered by EngageRocket?
Facebook published a study showing that employees who did not take their engagement pulse survey were 2.6x more likely to leave within six months. Interestingly, we found similar insights for companies based here in Asia.
Perhaps not surprisingly, other data show a strong negative correlation between engagement and talent attrition at the work-group level. This is particularly notable because the variation between work-groups is much higher than the variation between companies. In other words, it is far more accurate to analyse the impact of engagement on attrition using cross-sectional team engagement data than to rely on external benchmarks or norms.
Our results also show a lack of ‘recognition’. Leaders and managers don’t seem to have a habit of patting their staff on the back regularly nor do they encourage positive peer-to-peer recognition. Employees also value ‘relationships at work’, a trait that is tied to the Asian bias of having a tendency to bond with colleagues as they would with family members. This suggests a high-level of camaraderie among teams.
6. How has technology transformed the way we work and do HR today?
One of the biggest ways that technology has transformed the way we work is by lowering the barrier to becoming data-driven in every aspect of decision-making. Data collection, processing, analysis and insights-generation are accelerating in volume, velocity and variety of use cases, making it almost quaint for anyone to openly admit that they relied on gut-feel for a decision.
The other big trend is in the consumerisation of workplace technology. Employees expect the same level of digital sophistication at work as they enjoy in their personal lives. Clunky ERP systems with poor user experience inevitably lose market share or are forced to modernise.
The improvement in communication technologies has enabled remote work, gig work, and flexible work, and is almost a pre-requisite for attracting dynamic, high-performing talent. Coordination across distributed teams has also become easier. For instance, methodologies like SCRUM and agile can be applied without fear of communication latency. This means the pace of work and change have picked up tremendously — the average lifespan of an S&P500 company was 67 years in the 1920s, whereas it is closer to 15 years today.
7. What does the future of work and employee engagement look like to you?
The future of employee engagement is a holistic approach to the employee experience. This involves two main components.
The first is the generation of lifecycle insights. Employees don’t suddenly become engaged or disengaged just around the time of the annual engagement survey. Systems that capture employee sentiment in real-time, and correlate that to actual behaviour and business impact across the span of their lifecycle will proliferate. The data science challenge of making sense of this information is almost solved, while the sophistication of HR teams and leaders to use the output would increase.
Next is the personalisation of the employee experience from those insights. Just as companies have become extremely good at personalising customer journeys based on demographic and psychographic data, they will soon be equally good at personalising employee journeys.
This is good news. Our work-lives are about to get much better once our employers know more about how to motivate and inspire us than we do ourselves.
8. How do you personally cultivate an innovative mindset — for yourself and in your company?
My method is an adaptation of Warren Buffett’s practice of meeting with three random acquaintances a month. I feel like I constantly need to expose myself to new ideas, either through books, new people I meet, blog articles or TED Talks. If I’m working on a problem, I force myself to frame it in a way that I know where to potentially look for help. I seek out the most highly-respected person in that space who will meet or speak with me and buy them coffee.
The other big aspect of cultivating an innovative mindset is very counter-intuitive. It’s ensuring that people get enough downtime, and look after their mental, physical and sometimes spiritual health.
Working less, but better, is something we strive to do across our whole team at EngageRocket. We respect weekends and non-working hours.
Leong Chee Tung is co-founder and CEO of EngageRocket, a HR start-up that helps to automate employee feedback and analytics to deliver management insight and improve employee experience. He was one of the panellists for the panel discussion on “Are we ever ready for the future of work?” at the inaugural DBS Asia X Creativity & Innovation Day that took place on 16 April 2019.
