Consistency drives Employee Engagement & Business Outcomes

?? Engagement is a business outcome itself.

Only 42% of employees have a consistent EX and Engagement is 5.5X higher when EX is aligned to culture and strategy. High-performing organizations add sand and water by looking for ways to ensure the employee experience consistently supports the business goals, and by “personalizing” the work experience to address the needs of different cohorts and groups.?So consistency and personalization is a magical combination.

?? Leaders must act on 3 powerful factors to achieve a more engaging work experience: Connection, Consistency and Courage, according to a new interesting research published by Kincentric Spencer Stuart using data from more than 9 million respondents from over 2,500 organizations, across 162 countries and 62 industries.

?Employee Engagement is plateauing

Kincentric researchers noticed that EX scores consistently falling in the high 60% engaged range over the last six years or so.

In the early 2000s, around 50% of employees surveyed had scores in the “engaged” range. Over time, as more companies have focused on and taken actions to drive engagement, the number has steadily increased1 to the point that we now see scores consistently falling in the high 60% engaged range over the last six years or so.

?A new normal?with Optimism

Researchers found that several aspects of work experience have improved over the last year and global trends reveal that employees have more optimism about their personal future and general work experience than in the previous year. There is also more confidence in the effectiveness of virtual work, both in meeting the needs of customers and being able to collaborate productively with coworkers.?

Researchers look at 4 different aspects of work experience:

• Career Development
• Return to Office and Virtual Work
• Workload and Clarity
• Manager Effectiveness

? Negative aspects of Employee Experience

Researchers noticed that employees are becoming more demanding regarding what they want from their leadership and work experience.

Perceptions of senior leaders are falling back to pre-pandemic levels in terms of showing care and concern, keeping people informed and creating optimism about the future. In addition, despite being confident about collaborating virtually, fewer feel they are getting the connection and support they need from their work group and only about half feel their ideas and suggestions are being heard.

Researchers also noticed that organizational values are being understood but not being demonstrated. During the pandemic, employees felt heard, considered and cared for in many ways. As we return to a “new normal,” there may be a shift in the expectations that people have of their leaders and in how values are not just expressed, but truly lived in day-to-day work experiences.

?EX needs alignment to strategy and culture to drive business impact

To achieve the largest return on critical business outcomes, leaders must intentionally act on the employee experience to make it consistently great.

Researchers found that every employee experience effort - both measurement and transformation - ultimately should start with business strategy

?? Business strategy should be connected to the culture of your organization as well. Culture defines the values, beliefs, behaviors, artifacts and reward systems that ultimately shape how work gets done. When your culture is not aligned to business strategy, the ability to deliver on the strategy may become blocked by the culture itself. But when culture and strategy are connected and aligned, success in achieving business goals is greatly enhanced.

Researchers found that 3 general factors that may be contributing to this disconnect between business strategy and employee experience:

1?? Over-reliance on managers to drive/own the employee experience:?

2?? Over focus on engagement as a metric, rather than a focus on the experiences that drive engagement

3?? Survey measures as a “feel-good” process rather than a tool to drive change

?? Researchers finally believed that many aspects of these disconnecting factors can be resolved by shifting focus toward consistency of experience and not just the outcome of engagement.

?The Seven Key Core Experience Elements

Researchers identified 7 core elements of employee experience grounded in strategy, culture and maturity:

??Enabling

??Leading

??Recognizing

??Performing

??Developing

??Managing

??Connecting

?? Researchers found that “Enabling” and “Leading” tend to be influenced more by organization-wide or top down initiatives. “Managing” and “Connecting” tend to be more influenced by team actions (e.g., changes in manager behavior, day-to-day enrichment). “Recognizing,” “Performing” and “Developing” are influenced by both organizational and team actions, with organizational actions being more focused on processes and structures related to these elements, and team actions being more focused on enacting on these processes reliably, while also adjusting to local and individual needs.

?Consistent Employee Experience lead to higher Employee Engagement

?Researchers readily found that consistency of experience was related to engagement levels, with those demonstrating low consistency showing the least engagement (r = .44, p <.001). Furthermore, the range of engagement scores was limited by level of consistency. Those with low consistency at best were less than 50% engaged, whereas those with high consistency showed no less than 81% engaged. Moderate consistency shows some possibility of achieving above-average levels of engagement, but most fall within the average range

?Consistency across experience elements has a dramatic impact on engagement levels

Researchers noticed that employees with a highly consistent experience are more than 5X likely to be engaged than those in the inconsistent experience group, and intent to stay was over 2X higher for the highly consistent group than for the inconsistent group.

?Consistency translates to better Business outcomes

Researchers also noticed that over 2X differences between highly consistent and inconsistent groups - with about 65% to 70% of the highly consistent group respondents rating their organization as above average or better on financial performance and customer satisfaction, compared to only about 30% of those in the inconsistent experience group.

Here, too, being in the moderate group doesn’t take performance beyond average performance, you need to have consistency across most of the elements, not just several of them, to get the largest potential payoff.?

?Courage from the C-suite makes employee experience a business asset

Researchers ?have identified 3 critical factors that contribute to a more consistent and connected employee experience:

??Shift the ownership back to top leaders

??Empower managers to amplify through personalization

?? Drive HR with intention and cohesion to deliver more mature, personalized experiences

Researchers found that the more prevalent drivers of engagement often include measures related to senior leadership, but not managers. They believed that this makes sense, as senior leaders set the priorities in their organizations, are the ultimate owners of the processes that people engage with in their work, have oversight of these processes, and are able to determine when changes are made and to what end. Influence and support from both levels of leadership are required, but while managers play an important role in creating an engaging work experience, research shows senior leaders have a stronger level of influence.

?Leadership strength impacts consistency

Researchers found that the strength of leadership influence also has an impact on consistency of experience.

When there is strong leadership influence, consistency improves, especially with high manager support (1.2X compared to low manager support). Conversely, they found the least consistency of experience when senior leadership influence is weak, regardless of whether manager support is high or low.

?? However, high manager support can help to amplify impact in the absence of strong leadership influence, somewhat improving the employee experience.

?Leadership influences on Business performance

Researchers discovered that organizations whose financial performance was rated above average or better, those with both high senior leadership influence and high manager support outperform those with low senior leadership influence and low manager support by over 50%.

The extra manager support helps them bring leader vision and priorities to life in a more consistent way, which in turn can translate into stronger business outcomes.?

?? Researchers suggest leaders to ensure your managers are provided with a consistent experience themselves, which will enable them to amplify and activate the vision and strategy of senior leadership. It is equally important to ensure both your managers and senior leaders have a clear understanding of their authority to make decisions, particularly as it relates to processes and procedures that can shape the employee experience.

?? Researchers conclude that the more favorable work experiences an employee has, the more likely this translates into a higher level of engagement. In other words, the experience is reliable enough for one to feel engaged.

These findings suggest that a highly consistent, great employee experience has the biggest positive impact on business performance. Conversely, less consistency suggests excessive “noise” or inconsistency in the experience, which can often hamper business performance

It is important to note that achieving consistency does not mean that everyone’s specific experience is the same - rather, it means that every experience strives to give people the same effect. Positive perceptions about core EX elements such as Developing, Recognizing, Managing and so forth will come from the experiences that are most relevant to both the individual employee as well as various cohorts within the organization.

Thank you ??? Kincentric Spencer Stuart ?researchers team for these insightful findings:? Jeff Jolton Amy Vinh Seymour Adler David Perna Chiara Miuccio Ashley Hajnos Réka Bakos Katherine Waite Sophie Oberkampff de Dabrun Robin Boesen Dnika Travis Kevin Connelly Anna Kovasna

Dave Ulrich ?George Kemish LLM MCMI MIC MIoL

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