Employee Engagement: Keeping Momentum
“I’m putting a man on the moon”
Start researching Employee Engagement and you’re bound to come across this famous example of what this term is all about. It was 1962 and John F. Kennedy was visiting the NASA space center. He came across a janitor, who when asked what he did there replied, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Employee Engagement means that no matter your role, you’re contributing to the bigger picture.
According to a recent Gallup poll — 68.5% of U.S. employees are not engaged in their current roles. Within that group, 17.5% of the workforce characterised themselves as ‘actively disengaged’, which means that they are actively working against their own organization. This reminds me of a Dutch reality show called Wie is de Mol? (EN: Who is the mole?) in which one contest in the group secretly has to sabotage every challenge.
This is the third and final article in a series I’ve been writing about my learnings as a founder relating to Employee Engagement. The first article Biting the silver bullet, was about the first signs that a significant portion of my team were disengaged and how feedback was the compass which got us on track. The second article was about Doing Employee Engagement without any need for BS and practical tips I’d recommend to anyone working on Employee Engagement.
To wrap up the series I want to offer my thoughts on keeping momentum. Employee Engagement isn’t a destination. It’s not a ‘check-in-the-box’. It’s a continuous process. I thought to myself that if I was to fast forward to starting up another company, there’s a few things I would definitely keep in mind.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
In a previous article, I wrote about the concrete steps we took in diagnosing issues in our culture and what we did to go about fixing them. Once you outline the topics you’ll touch on and you’ve identified quick wins then you will for sure start seeing results quickly, but significant changes take time to embed in your organisation.
I’ve written before about the need to base all the improvements to your culture on a solid mission and values that are representative of you are. If I was to start from scratch I wouldn’t expect a definitive set of values and the most bulletproof mission and vision from day one. To some extent, this is a chicken and egg question. Starting up, you’ll hopefully build a team around solid principles that you believe in. But inevitably your culture is a reflection of your people, so as you build out a team there will be different core values.
We made the mistake of introducing our values and not embedding them in practice and giving them visibility. As well-thought out as they were, we weren’t living by them. The key learning is to check in regularly with everyone and update on your progress — what you’ve implemented that embodied your core values.
A values interview
To keep our culture advancing we hire engaged people in every position. I do the final interview myself for every hire. The conversation is anchored around our values and I figure out how well they resonate with the candidate. It’s a great way for me to learn about the candidate, and for the candidate to learn about Starred. It’s the perfect moment to explain our values, so they don’t come as a surprise later. Of course our values are visible on our social media and web pages — so any candidate doing their research will have come across them — but nevertheless it’s always best to have a proper conversation. In a way, they ‘commit’ to the values in this final interviews because I’ll discuss with them how they resonate with them in their everyday life, as well as previous work experience.
I’ve received a lot of great feedback from candidates about this interview. They find it extremely positive that a founder is committed to a great culture and values. My last question to the candidate is always the same: “How’s this arrangement going to work? What do you expect from us as an employer, and what can we expect from you as an employee?” It’s important to make sure you have the same expectations. Flexibility goes both ways.
Knowing what’s next
Keeping momentum in Employee Engagement has a lot to do with not letting any topic slide. Call it spoon feeding if you want, but when you’re in a phase of hyper-growth and everyone has a billion things to do, you’ve got to keep things bite-sized and comprehensible in a way that your whole team understands what it means for them.
It’s a challenge to know what to tackle next in your big Employee Engagement project. Everything can seem equally important when you’ve got voices coming from all corners making compelling cases for why this and not that. The best thing you can do is survey small and regularly and find out what’s important to people. Encourage managers to find out in their 1:1s with their team. As a founder and leader it’s your obligation to have many conversations and find out what’s important to your people. The quantitative data from your digital surveys can provide crucial input into prioritizing improvements to boost your employee engagement. Just be sure you don’t do this in an ivory tower. There’s plenty of bad things that have been written about management figures running pulse surveys and otherwise not engaging with staff. There is no compelling argument for why you shouldn’t gather data and have plenty of real, meaningful conversations.
Great leaders carry the luggage
This borrows from Dan Lyons’ excellent article about leadership. He uses the story of Carla Overbeck — former captain of the U.S. national women’s soccer team — to make a crucial point about what it means to be a good leader. With Overbeck as captain, this team achieved Olympic gold in 1996 and won a World Cup in 1999. The ‘heartbeat’ of the team and one of its unsung heroes, Overbeck had a peculiar habit on tour. When the team arrived at a hotel, she would carry everyone’s bag to their room for them.
Unusual right? As Lyons writes, “It’s not the kind of thing you expect a leader to do. Leaders are supposed to show up surrounded by an entourage, with people carrying bags for them.” The point was this: by going the extra mile for her team and doing things like carrying everyone’s luggage, Overbeck earned the right to be demanding of her team and push them to be successful.
The key takeaway from this in a business context with regards to Employee Engagement is that as a leader you need to be the most prominent exponent of your values and your mission. You need to do the heavy lifting and ‘carry the luggage’ so that others are inspired to do the same. I’d say this is an intrinsic kind of motivation to earn the engagement of your team.
We integrated our values into our performance reviews. Leadership positions are evaluated through a mixture of job content and living by the Starred values. We figure that this way, as we grow, we’ve got more people ‘carrying the luggage’ and earning the engagement and commitment throughout the organisation.
Being a great company is an end in itself
As a founder, you need to check in with yourself regularly and ask what you want to be remembered for. I believe having a company that is great to work for is an end in itself and therefore something worth striving for.
An overnight success takes an awfully long time to build, so you need to ask yourself what’s important on the way there. Ben Horowitz’s maxim of prioritising the people, the product, the profits — in that order is a helpful guide.
Many tech companies have gained notoriety by fostering toxic, exploitative work cultures in service of growing quick and cashing out. But here’s the thing — no amount of ping pong tables and flashy perks compensate for real engagement. In an earlier article I referred to Debra Corey and Glenn Elliott’s guidelines for Employee Engagement. Engaged employees understand and believe in the direction your organization is going in. They know how their role impacts and contributes to the mission. They feel shared success. The cultural dimension of growing a business is sure to become as important to investors as showing rapid financial growth. A combination of both is a recipe for success.
Whether your putting a man on the moon, or building software like we do— it doesn’t matter — every role needs to be united behind a strong mission and culture. I hope some of the thoughts and practices I’ve shared in these articles inspire others.
As I wrote in my first article — there’s no silver bullet for scaling an organisation. The only silver bullet I know will work, and it’s a hard one to have to bite, is getting feedback from your team(s), improving and measuring again. Employee Engagement isn’t a one time thing. You need to keep momentum.
I’m eager to hear what Employee Engagement means at your organization. Reach out and let’s discuss!
