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FIRST THINGS FIRST: THEY HAVE TO TRUST YOU

Think paradigm shift . . . game changer . . . a new idea or piece of data that completely changes the board. Once you know it and completely digest it into your thinking, you never view the subject in the same way again. This chapter presents one of those ideas that will powerfully shift your thinking.

Gallup Says So

Two Gallup studies take the lead. Gallup continually monitors employee engagement in many countries, and its data for the U.S. is very discouraging on two fronts. First, employee engagement has barely budged since 2000. When one considers the changes in our country during that time—the impact of 9/11, what we hope is a worst-in-a-lifetime recession, periodic strong economies, war and peace, and varying Democrats and Republicans in office—we must grasp that nothing outside of our work buildings impacts our engagement. Gallup’s specific conclusion is: “While the state of the U.S. economy has changed substantially since 2000, the state of the American workplace has not.”¹

So the cavalry isn’t coming. We have to solve this on our own. And obviously, we don’t know how.

Gallup says that 33 percent of employees are giving their best and bring passion to their jobs. Gallup refers to the remaining 67 percent as either sleepwalking or, worse, sabotaging. This means that they are subtracting from rather than adding to productivity.

So engagement is stuck and few are engaged. That data describes our problem. The following data clues us in on how to fix it.

In a separate study, Gallup asked a broad sample of employees who had been included in the previously mentioned surveys to respond to this statement: My manager and I have one of the strongest personal relationships in my life.²

I imagine the Gallup researchers sat around a table and asked each other, “What is the most powerful statement we can write to identify the degree of closeness between an employee and her manager?”

Gallup asked employees to rate this statement on a 5-point scale, with 5 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree. They then sorted the resulting data according to their three levels of engagement.

The results were astonishingly clear: A full 65 percent of the engaged employees scored this statement a 3 or higher, whereas 80 percent of the saboteurs, four out of five, scored it a 1. If you want to increase your engagement score, get closer to each member of your team.

Engaged employees are also much more likely to consider their relationships with their managers to be crucial to their success. Of engaged employees, 49 percent strongly agree that “A strong positive relationship with this person is crucial to my success at work,” while just 12 percent of saboteurs strongly agree with the same statement.³

Some might say that certain employees are hard to form personal relationships with, and some if not many of these saboteurs close themselves off to us. Others would ask about the boundaries of these personal relationships. Are all work-related discussions okay? Yes. Should I ask if little Johnny’s knee is okay since hurting it in Little League? Yes. How should I respond if an employee tells me his marriage is ending? With empathy and care, but without asking detailed questions that are not your business.

The important message is that each of your employees wants to know that you care about their happiness, in all corners of their lives. Even the employees who seem most distant or who perform least well.

So if “strongest personal relationships” are the unquestionable key to increasing your team’s level of engagement—and their own individual engagement survey scores—what does this tell us about the value of the items in our engagement survey improvement plans? We usually include things like more employee meetings, better newsletters, employee-of-the-month awards, and social events centered around food. And we add in things our company responds with like pay programs, non-core benefits like vision care, and total compensation statements.

These are the solutions we’ve been using for the past 15 years, and as Gallup tells us, employee engagement has been completely stuck over this long period of time. All of the items in our improvement plans are probably better to do than not, but they haven’t and they don’t raise employee engagement. Or your own department’s employee engagement score.

None of these programs matter as much as your employees feeling close you, regardless of the program’s dollar cost or broadness of scope—or if the CEO introduces it with a video. Engagement is mostly on you.

Peer Relationships Matter, Too

Here is our next clue. Gallup asked employees if their organization “encourages close friendships at work,” again sorting the responses by levels of engagement.

The key difference here is the contrasting percentage of those who strongly agree: a full 55 percent of the engaged employees believe their organization encourages close friendships whereas just 9 percent of the saboteurs feel the same way. Gallup also found that 51 percent of employees who strongly agree that their organization encourages close friendships at work are extremely satisfied with their place of employment, compared to just 19 percent of employees who disagree with that statement.

What does this tell us? That the engaged employees, the ones you want, have a strong need to feel openness in the workplace so they can easily collaborate with others, at work and otherwise. Our knee-jerk reaction might be to schedule more social events so people build better work and nonwork friendships, and this is certainly okay. Better, though, would be to hire people who genuinely like to work with others and who can set their egos aside and be vulnerable enough to build close friendships.

You ARE Your Company to Your Employees

So to increase your employee engagement score, so far we’ve learned the following:

1. You must develop “strong personal relationships” with each member of your team.

2. They also must develop close friendships with their colleagues.

And here’s the third point we’re about to learn:

3. Your employees rate their pay, benefits, and other key aspects of work based on their relationship with you; it’s not about your company, it’s about YOU.

Kenexa surveyed a large group of employees who had left their organizations and asked about their fit with their supervisors as well as their satisfaction with pay, benefits, learning, development, and advancement. They found employees’ opinions on all topics were “mediated,” or influenced, by their relationships with their direct supervisors. The statistical relationship between employees’ perceptions of their ex-supervisors compared with their perceptions of their pay, benefits, and the others was so strong that Kenexa concluded: “Offering a higher salary or developmental/advancement opportunity may not be enough to retain employees.”⁴

A new light goes on. Now we see that how employees see all aspects of work ties directly to how they see their relationship with you. So complaints about pay, communication, or lack of recognition for a particular department—the usual complaints we find on engagement survey results—might just mean that the boss for that department is a jerk. This new information tells us that the prism through which employees see their organization is how they see their relationships with their boss.

This trumpets the massive misunderstanding about employee engagement. Engagement happens down low in organizations, at the bottom of organizational charts, within the relationships each employee has with her manager and her peers. Far above this daily action, CEOs are mistakenly checking annual engagement survey scores against survey-provided benchmarks, and they are feeling good about meeting the benchmark or simply being okay. They are willing to be just okay on this one metric because they believe improving these scores costs great sums of money for more pay and more benefits. It does not.

Improving employee engagement scores doesn’t cost a dime.

Here’s Where Building Trust Comes In

The solution to winning on all we’ve discussed here is to build trust, one-on-one, with each member of your team. Here’s data to back this up.

The Great Place to Work Institute is the survey backbone for many of our world’s best-place-to-work awards. Each year, the Institute surveys over 11 million employees in 52 countries, all to form the lists you might see under banners like the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, the 25 World’s Best Multinational Workplaces, or the Best Small and Medium Workplaces.⁵

Based on this very large amount of data, the Institute draws these three conclusions:

1. Employees who trust their managers give their best freely, and their extra effort goes right to the bottom line.

2. Managers who trust their employees allow innovative ideas to bubble up from all levels of their company.

3. Employees who trust each other report a sense of camaraderie and a feeling of being part of a family.⁶

Another study by the Great Place to Work Institute quantifies these results in dollars. As the data-provider for Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, each year the Institute compares the shareholder returns for the publicly-traded companies that win a place on the list against the ones that do not. The result is that the selected companies outperform the marketplace by 366 percent.

So companies that excel at building trust return nearly $4 more to their shareholders, their most important metric. And the Institute’s measure of trust is based on how much each employee trusts his manager, not on how much employees trust top management or their organizations in general. This data is about you and your relationships with each member of your team.

What actions should you take with all this data? My company has studied which specific behaviors managers should apply to maximize trust—and therefore engagement and also retention—with their teams. See Figure 2.1 for our list, and beside each behavior is a space for you to score yourself. Use a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being high and 1 being low for each behavior.

When I speak to large groups of managers, I usually say this: “Comparative math tells us one of you in this room is the best at building trust with your team, and one of you is the worst. The rest of you fall into a continuum somewhere in the middle. Look around the room, and think about where you fit.”

So where do you fit on the trust-building scale with your peer managers? Or more importantly for building engagement, where do you fit with your team? I suggest you copy the previously mentioned 12 statements, and ask three members of your team to score you the same way, 1 to 10. Choose three who you know will be truthful, who will look you in the eye and tell you what you might not want to hear. Develop a dialogue where you listen, probe, and ask for examples, so you can learn which behaviors to keep and which to change.

The conundrum, of course, is that they are more likely to tell you how to improve trust if they already trust you.

This exercise is the first step toward improving your employee engagement score.