UPMC administers surveys to all 80,000 employees across 20 different hospital systems, doctors’ offices, clinics, and long-term care facilities to understand the employee voice.
We have reached the age of the employee, and the majority of organizations are not meeting their employee’s expectations. Learn how to change that.
The authors of The Employee Experience will share best practices for improving the employee experience and creating engaged employees in your organization.
What you can expect to learn:
What are the different contracts we make with our employees can lead to expectation misalignment
The difference between the Employee Experience and Employee Engagement
Company maturity impacts your employee experience strategy
All attendees will receive a free book signed by the authors.
Dr. Tracy Maylett: Tracy’s business, coaching, and consulting background extends over a period of two decades and across five continents. Tracy is the Chief Executive Officer of DecisionWise, and is responsible for guiding the overall strategy of DecisionWise, as well as leading large-scale change efforts for clients throughout the globe.
Presented by: David Long and Justin Warner Date: March 22, 2018 – 1:00pm EDT
One question to consider as you think about whether to put effort and investment into employee engagement: “Is engagement worth the effort and investment we put into it?” The short answer to this question is “yes,” but depending on the type of organization you are, engagement may be more critical or less critical to your success.
During this webinar we’ll share the best methods for preparing, administering, and rolling out the results from your employee engagement survey based on over 20 years of experience conducting surveys around the world. We’ll also identify the most common mistakes organizations make when conducting an employee engagement survey and how to avoid them.
HRCI and SHRM Credit Approved.
Employee Engagement Pulse Surveys are critical to every employee engagement strategy. During this webinar, DecisionWise’s President, Greg Zippi, along with David L. Mason, Director of I/O Psychology explore the benefits of using frequent pulse surveys as part of your employee listening strategy.
Topics for discussion
Defining the different types of employee surveys
Proper use of pulse surveys
How to avoid survey fatigue
How technology improvements allow you to have a pulse on your overall employee engagement
How scientific questions with a statistical process can increase clarity around pulse survey response
A short demonstration of the DecisionWise pulse survey tools
Presenter Information:
Greg Zippi:
As President of DecisionWise, Greg Zippi is responsible for all client-facing aspects of the business including product development, marketing, sales and delivery. In addition, he oversees all strategic business development initiatives.
Dr. David Mason
David is an experienced Consultant and leads the I/O Psychology and Data Science learning and curriculum efforts at DecisionWise, and is responsible for the design of our training, facilitation, and workshops. He leads sessions throughout the world on employee engagement and workplace learning. Having completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at Columbia University, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in Psychology at Brigham Young University, Dr. Mason turns his understanding of adult learning and psychology into business concepts, working with numerous businesses and academic institutions. Prior to joining DecisionWise, David taught in the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual, and Brain Sciences at University College London. In addition to Dr. Mason’s strong presentation and facilitation skills, DecisionWise often taps into his extensive knowledge of statistics and research in developing and evaluating assessments.
DecisionWise will help you understand how to create an engaged workforce. This is the age of the employee, and the majority of organizations are failing to meet their employee’s expectations, why?
The authors of the best selling book The Employee Experience will share best practices for improving the employee experience and creating engaged employees in your organization.
What you can expect to learn:
What are the different contracts we make with our employees can lead to expectation misalignment
The difference between the Employee Experience and Employee Engagement
Company maturity impacts your employee experience strategy
Market trends that may impact the employee experience
All attendees will receive a free book signed by the authors.
Dr. Tracy Maylett: Tracy’s business, coaching, and consulting background extends over a period of two decades and across five continents. Tracy is the Chief Executive Officer of DecisionWise, and is responsible for guiding the overall strategy of DecisionWise, as well as leading large-scale change efforts for clients throughout the globe.
Matt Wride, JD: As DecisionWise’s Chief Operating Officer and executive consultant, Matt oversees the company’s operations, as well as its finance, legal, and administrative functions. He consults with executives around the globe on creating employee engagement at the organizational, team, and individual levels.
During this webinar we’ll share the best methods for preparing, administering, and rolling out the results from your employee engagement survey based on over 20 years of experience conducting surveys around the world. We’ll also identify the most common mistakes organizations make when conducting an employee engagement survey and how to avoid them.
During this webinar we will cover the following topics:
6 anchor questions that measure employee engagement
How to achieve high participation
Ensuring confidentiality to collect honest feedback
3 common survey administration mistakes
Effective ways to roll out the results
Training managers to conduct action planning meetings
Holding leaders accountable to improve engagement
Receive HRCI and SHRM credit for attending.
About the Presenter: David Long is an Engagement Consultant at DecisionWise and leads a team of consultants who conduct engagement surveys for clients around the world. He is an expert on how to conduct employee surveys and get the most from the results.
I have often been guilty of using the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a happy non-performer” when discussing the idea that basic human nature is to be disappointed when performing poorly. In all honesty, it was, at times, my way of justifying (to myself and others) letting an employee go or reprimanding for poor performance. In addition to the performance component, I was telling myself that the employee couldn’t have been happy because he was an underperformer—my way of justifying the psychological component.
I still believe the above—for the most part. However, my thoughts have shifted. I still believe that most underperformers are unhappy. Aren’t we generally happiest when we feel that we are performing well? Still, that doesn’t explain the fact that there are many employees who are “getting by” at work, just “putting in their time,” yet they seem to be perfectly content. We’ve all seen it. Perhaps we’ve been there. I then discovered the notion of employee engagement, and shifted my adage to “There’s no such thing as an engaged non-performer.”
Allow me to explain. Engagement is not simply a state of being—a psychological condition. Happiness, on the other hand, is just that—a feeling. Engagement requires action. It’s both psychological and behavioral. Think of it this way: psychological = “feel,” while behavioral = “do.” Engagement requires that I both feel and do. I can’t simply feel engaged; that’s only part of the equation. This psychological state is merely a feeling until I act upon it. That’s engagement.
Engagement requires that I both feel and do—the psychological and the behavioral. Happy employees, or, for that matter, “satisfied” employees do little good for an organization. That’s why so many of us have hang-ups about whether employee satisfaction actually translates to the bottom line. The truth? It doesn’t! Don’t waste your money. It’s great to have happy and satisfied employees (and we have an important moral responsibility there), but that doesn’t keep the widget line running—at least not at optimal capacity. It’s only when what the employee feels is translated into action that the bottom line gets a boost. Organizations today waste an absurd amount of money on employee satisfaction, as well as keeping employees happy. It’s a noble effort, and one that absolutely needs to continue, but still doesn’t address the “do” component.
Did those new coffee machines really increase productivity, or just make employees happy until they realize they don’t have the Smoothie Man come in every Friday, like the company down the road? Satisfaction is not engagement. Satisfaction and happiness are the “price of admission.” It lets us play the game, but it’s not what results in the win. Let’s don’t confuse the two.
So, happy non-performers? Sure, it’s possible. Engaged non-performers? The very definition of engagement tells us this isn’t possible.
Organizations generally start off with the question: “How do we motivate them to (insert your latest change initiative here)? This implies that motivation is something done TO your employees—something inflicted upon them.
I was talking to a friend of mine who works as an analyst for a data analytics firm. He is a quiet, intelligent, hard working professional from Mexico City. He talked about how different the business culture is here in the United States. He explained that in Mexico City, if you work hard, your efforts are recognized and rewarded. In contrast, he says that in the U.S., you need to tell people all the time about yourself—what you know, and how capable you are.
His assessment caused me to pause and reflect on my own experience and the times when I believe my hard work was rewarded without me having to tell my story about it. On the other hand, I have also had exactly the kind of
experience he talked about when I simply had to tell others about my effort and the impact it had. And, frankly, I do believe that in order to win the opportunities you want and have a positive impact in your organization, you must proactively influence the perceptions others have about you.
Marketing experts understand that perception is reality. Likewise in business, what others perceive about you is their reality about you—whether or not those perceptions are technically accurate.
Your supervisor, peers, direct reports, and other co-workers already have perceptions about you, and they make decisions based on those perceptions. The question is, what are these perceptions? Are they good? Bad? Accurate? Not? Whatever they are, to influence and perhaps change them, you must first be aware of what they are. I have found the 360-degree feedback process to be an effective way to help you do just that.
I work daily with individual leaders as well as executive teams from all over the world, using the 360-degree feedback process to help them become more fully aware of the perceptions others have about them. The feedback the leaders receive helps them become more aware of the impact of their behaviors and perceptions of personal professional competency.
The 360 process, coupled with effective coaching, helps leaders see more clearly what has brought them success as well as what skills they can develop or work on to become more effective. They become aware of blind spots and areas that, if left unchecked, could overshadow even the good things they are doing and possibly derail career progression.
With heightened self-awareness and appropriate coaching, the leader learns how to create appropriate actions from the feedback, work more effectively with others, and contribute more significantly to the goals of the organization. In short, they proactively manage their own behaviors as well as other’s perceptions, which allows them to more positively impact business results and how those are achieved. Everybody wins.
Prior to joining DecisionWise, I worked as an HR business partner and a senior HR generalist. In both of these roles, I spent a lot of time administering employee engagement surveys and interfacing with company leadership to prove survey validity and efficacy. Any HR practitioner knows that getting buy-in from executives for an engagement program can be challenging. To do so, we need to adhere to a set of engagement process standards. Over the years, I created a list of employee engagement survey best practices that made the survey process valuable to both company leadership and the participating employees:
Encourage employees to participate—A survey isn’t effective unless it has high participation rates – perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but I’ll take a moment to elaborate. Without high participation, company leadership will perceive the investment as a sunk cost because we can’t truly know what the employees are thinking and feeling. Some of the best ways to encourage participation are also the easiest: start a competition, provide small incentives/prizes, and talk about the survey’s confidentiality (more on that later).
Focus on what you really want to measure—When working with clients, we make a point to discuss the difference between engagement and other feelings like happiness, satisfaction, and motivation. Engagement surveys should include engagement questions. Don’t clutter the survey with questions about benefits or other items that cannot be changed. Use a small number of anchor questions to measure overall engagement, then use the other questions to determine what is driving engagement in your organization.
Ensure and maintain confidentiality—If employees feel like they will be personally identified by their responses, you can bet they’re not going to give you candid (i.e., valuable) feedback. Promoting confidentiality will help employees speak up without fear of retribution, and will yield a significant ROI on the survey process.
Report results back to employees—Since employees already made an investment of their time and energy by thoughtfully participating in the survey, they would of course be eager to see the overall survey results. Transparency throughout the survey process (1) reinforces the principle of confidentiality, (2) shows the employees their opinions are valued, and (3) demonstrates that the organization intends to act on the results.
Choose a few key items to improve, then act—Few things are more frustrating than taking the time to provide honest, candid feedback, without ever seeing any changes made. Unless the organization turns employee feedback into results, employees will become bitter and distrustful about the survey, which will ruin any survey opportunity in the future. As we work with clients, we help them focus on quick-wins: smaller issues highlighted in the survey results that can easily and immediately be fixed. By focusing first on just a few quick wins, the organization shows employees that it is going to act on the survey results, which augments employee confidence in the survey process and the goals of company leadership.
Whether you’re dealing with exempt or hourly employees, the same five keys of engagement need to be in place–the only difference is in the ways you can bring each of these elements into play.
experience he talked about when I simply had to tell others about my effort and the impact it had. And, frankly, I do believe that in order to win the opportunities you want and have a positive impact in your organization, you must proactively influence the perceptions others have about you.
