04 Jan How can Employee Engagement Coaching help Leaders ?
We have observed across companies that they spend millions on employee engagement surveys. These surveys are conducted to find out from employee how engaged they are at work or what they perceive and feel about their work, environment , supervisory support, colleagues, career growth etc.
How Employee Engagement Data is Used?
Once the data is collected from these engagement surveys, these companies ask their leaders to generate action plans. It is done to ensure an engaged and productive workforce.
All these actions plans are then translated to create new programs and initiatives, resources , with tweaks and changes in human resources or process policies. What they often don’t create is a change in the leaders behaviours.
Employees usually have a dilemma whether these employee engagement initiatives are truly meant in spirit, and not just as words on posters and screensavers.
Need for Coaching of Leaders on Employee Engagement Action Plans
In one of the IT companies, employees shared that lack of career development opportunities was one of their top disengagement factors.
The top leadership formed an executive committee consisting of cross-functional senior managers to meet and find practical solutions to the problem.
The outcomes of those meetings were to set up a Career Development centre, online career resource portal with published internal postings, apps.
There were virtual posters and standees across companies on Leaders Learn, Grow and Develop. The company had the latest technology with access to a well-recognized online university.
All the initiatives and programs were widely promoted through weekly newsletters, screen savers and app notifications. There was a buzz among employees and they started to take action.
During the ongoing launch, they was a dipstick survey done. One of the employees shared that when he had asked his senior manager whether he could go and explore the career opportunities at the Career Development centre. He was categorically told, that since he was working on a critical project , he was required to be around the team to get the work done.
Imagine how engaged that employee must have felt after the conversation with his manager. He found it to be another tall talk of career promises but without real intention of career development.
The senior and top managers were not properly assimilated and trained on the action planning process post the employee engagement survey.
They were unaware of the personal leadership changes they needed to make to ensure that career development initiative was a success.
Fortunately, the dipstick survey helped to recognize this gap.
All senior managers and project managers were put through Employee Engagement Group coaching to ensure successful implementation of the career development initiative. The next survey data will now reveal if there have been any changes on the career development factor.
Do you observe similar launch of employee engagement or other initiatives, programs and policies without real change in leadership and culture ?
This post is based on interventions developed after employee engagement survey findings analysis by George Zacharia . It is based on real-time issues as shared by managers across levels and employees during the diagnostic study and intervention.
No Comments