Why Employee Engagement needs a ‘Triple Bottom Line’ (3BL) of its own

In this blog, Customer Faithful founder Rick Harris argues that today’s limited success of employee engagement at work needs a more holistic structure to be effective. He advocates adapting the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ approach of People, Planet, Profit that has changed how firms address sustainability and workforce management, as well as borrowing from marketer’s use of unique selling points (USPs) to build personalised employee experiences that drive employer loyalty and reduce churn.?

Succeeding in employee engagement is still proving a struggle for most firms. Gartner’s?latest global survey of 5000 employees?and 150 HR leaders found that employee engagement has been flat since 2016, with just 31 percent saying they felt their company offers something unique. Even more damning was the finding from an?Inpulse 50,000-response survey?that more than half of employees (54%) don’t believe their organisation will act as a result of employee engagement surveys.

So what can fix this?

Like some in the industry, we believe employee engagement needs to break away from an emphasis on traditional employee benefits and instead focus on an employee ‘triple bottom line’ – financial, physical, emotional.

The original triple bottom line (3BL) was coined nearly?forty years ago by?John Elkington. It highlighted that corporate profitability was too narrowly defined, and argued that social and ethical, as well as environmental responsibility are as important as financial performance. In so doing, 3BL implies that each facet should be measured and reported with equal rigour and transparency. Advocates of 3BL quickly adopted a shorthand for it - to think?People, Planet, Profit. Whilst only a select group of firms like?Novo Nordisk,?Unilever?and DHL have committed themselves to 3BL wholeheartedly, its wider impact has been as a framework, or ‘agent of change’ – encouraging organisations to look for places it can make its biggest 3BL impact, like IKEA’s ‘Zero waste to landfill’ or Griffith Food’s circular economy commitment to 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 (currently 92%).

In the same way, an employee ‘triple bottom line’ could support employers to think much more broadly in what drives engagement. Surely, this employee 3BL’s time has come, as the pandemic has driven employees to re-evaluate what they really want from their job, resulting in the so-called ‘Great Resignation’, where people are voting with their feet.

So how could an Employee 3BL work in practical terms?

Perhaps this is best illustrated by a topical example - exploring more people working from home. Traditionally, this has meant firms providing comfortable office chairs, a stable (and secure) wifi connection, printers and such like. But this physical infrastructure emphasises re-creating an office environment in your home. Under Employee 3BL, employers might focus more on supporting a renewed balance of living and working in the same place – perhaps with dedicated initiatives for children, pets, food, personal learning and beyond. What personal commitments could an employer not just accommodate but actively?encourage?– a daytime yoga class, sharing the school run, volunteering, caregiving? This is beyond flexitime – it’s proactive support for holistic living, and it’s still rare.

At global pharma Novartis, each team chooses what work patterns will be the most effective for their members – this kind of flex is well understood by freelance teams within agencies, but it’s not often found in corporates and often viewed as impossible to manage for SMEs with small workforces.

The concept of marrying personal growth and employment learning certainly isn’t new. Back in the 1990s, I worked for German-owned media group Bertelsmann in its London office. The company offered free German language classes to all employees, believing that it could combine both career growth opportunities as well as personal learning satisfaction for staff. There was a sense of shared purpose, and I still remember that atypical experience of having senior Directors and the most junior workers sitting down to learn together!

The starting point for beginning a shift to 3BL employee engagement is recognising the need to making physical and emotional wellbeing as central to a work role and culture as financial reward.

During 2020 and 2021, Customer Faithful worked extensively with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), exploring ways to address the pressing issues of ‘burnout’ in the profession.?Following many informal ‘reflection’ sessions and structured focus-groups, the RCVS convened a Workforce Summit to tackle the challenges of recruitment, retention and return-to-work head on.?

Source:?RCVS Workforce Summit 2021: a report of the day

One of the clearest headlines from the Summit was the realisation that solving physical burnout and emotional stress of the job could only come from a change in culture within the profession, reflecting modern-day expectations of today’s workforce as well as rising demand. An industry culture that ‘institutionalises’ additional hours and working through lunchbreaks has knock-on impacts on to other colleagues at work, loved ones at home, even long-term health & safety risks. It leaves employees questioning their career purpose – how well invested, valued and cared for they feel in their chosen vocation.

The Human Deal

Gartner Group describes incorporating such staff emotions into the wider Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and refers to them as “The Human Deal”. It reflects many of the examples raised earlier in this blog, including ‘radical flexibility’ (finding ways to harmonise work and life) and ‘shared purpose’ (enabling staff to link their personal goals to company aims and values).

Yet for all the warm language of “holistic well-being” and “deeper connections”, the real secret to Gartner’s Human Deal is the outer ring of the word “I”.

Why is this first-person pronoun so important? Because it points towards the successful delivery of employee 3BL initiatives. It makes the expression of the Human Deal truly personal – unique to everyone in how it comes alive, including their own personal preferences and choices.

This uniqueness is not just an employee takeout, but an important competitive advantage too. Marketers often speak of USPs – unique selling points that make up why customers will buy from a particular brand and stay loyal to it. The two key problems with USPs is that:

1. If the feature or benefit is really that great, competitors will try to copy it
2. Changing trends, economic conditions, even legislation can make them out-of-date or obsolete

In the same way, generic, non-personalised employee 3BL initiatives can suffer the same fate. Working-from-home might once have been a key reason why some employees chose a job role or company. Yet, after the pandemic experience, this is becoming far more common practice, with?some Governments now examining it as a potential legal right.

A 3BL mindset would encourage focusing on how to make the work from home experience a unique blend of support, incorporating how company policy, team colleagues and personal preference come together to make any idea of leaving the employer much less attractive.

Finally, when John Elkington reviewed his 3BL idea 25 years later, he reminded us that “stated goal from the outset was?system change?— it was never supposed to be just an accounting system.” Its success has been in how so many more companies have broadened their purpose away from purely stakeholder return to incorporate social good, in how its culture impacts its employees, communities and the physical environment.

That sense of purpose is how to make employee 3BL achieve success too – a feeling of engaging in a balanced and worthwhile way at work.