Employee Engagement Strategies vs. Performance Strategies?

Most leaders already know that the most important resource in the knowledge economy, the creative economy and the experience economy is the highly specialised, creative employees. This broad group of employees is crucial for both private sector competitiveness and public sector quality and efficiency. The challenge for future leaders will therefore be to release the full potential of this type of highly specialised, creative staff.

One way to release the employee’s full potential is to balance employee engagement strategies with/and performance strategies. Many companies create new employee engagement strategies and employee performance strategies through the annual Employee Engagement Survey and on that basis meter the climate in the organization.

However, most leaders are way more comfortable working with employee performance strategies than with employee engagement strategies. So the true challenge for future leaders will be to find the right balance between these two strategies.

A crucial part of any employee strategy should be to conduct regular 1-on-1s with your people. 1-on-1s is an essential means to exchange feedback, to show recognition and to build trust and relations between the leader and the employee.

However, most companies rely mainly on annual employee engagement surveys. The most crucial flaw with the annual employee engagement survey is that they point 4–8 months backwards and therefore becomes reactive.

The life cycle of the annual employee engagement surveys begins with a two-three months period of collecting data followed by a two-three months period of analyzing the data and manufacturing reports. After 4–6 months, these reports end up at the desk of the strategic management or HR department who then initiates the revision of the existing employee engagement strategies and employee performance strategies. Once new strategies are created and first actions taken, most likely 4–8 months have past since initiating the survey process.

Do things change in 4–8 months? YES — probably almost everything changes within 4–8 months. People, tasks and organizations change so rapidly that the strategies based on annual surveys are most likely outdated when they hit the floor.

That is the main reason why many companies are now looking for new ways and tools to create and combine proactive employee engagement strategies with performance strategies.

Using 1-on-1 meetings strategically

Using a high frequency of 1-on-1s strategically will provide a proactive and continuous approach that fits the modern and highly specialised, creative staff. But don’t just transfer the old habits of the annual surveys into your 1-on-1 meetings.

1-on-1s should be about more than just task management, performance evaluation and to-do lists. Instead, finding the right balance between employee engagement questions and performance strategies questions is essential.

At Duuoo we have thought a lot about just that. We have talked with endless numbers of managers and employees about what is valuable for them to include in a 1-on-1 meeting and compared it with the most recent research in the field. Our results show, that an effective and valuable 1-on-1 should encompass questions about performance — at a macro level — combined with intrinsic non-performance questions.

The Duuoo Conversation Engine

The Duuoo Conversation Engine is designed to provide a balanced distribution of Talking Points within two overall entities:

• Employee Performance
• Employee Engagement

It is our experience, that for many managers it is difficult to find the right balance between employee performance questions and employee engagement questions in the 1-on-1 meeting. Many managers simply feel more confident attending to employee performance than to employee engagement.

In Duuoo we believe that the two overall entities are equally important in order to manage successful and engaged teams — the one entity being a prerequisite for the other. That is the reason why The Duuoo Conversation Engine provides Talking Points within both employee performance and employee engagement at every 1-on-1 meeting.

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Originally published at duuoo.io.