Moving the Engagement Data Glacier
Posted: April 18, 2012 Filed under: Murmur | Tags: continuous engagement, employee engagement, engagement surveys, Murmur, staff engagement 2 Comments »We are seeing a trend towards a more constant streaming of data – we are looking at daily data or even hourly data wherever we can. Now, this is not to say that more regular data is always the best, but to my mind the trend is towards the finest temporal resolution that people can make sensible use of – which of course will be determined by a mix of subjective, pragmatic, and statistical (probably also somewhat subjective) factors.
Take house prices for example. Australians are obsessed with house prices and nearly as many are obsessed with arguing over the data and predictions. Recently we have seen the development of the RP Data-Rismark Daily Home Value Index which imputes a daily estimated house value for all Australian Capital cities. I won’t be going into the methodology – the point I am making is that such is the hunger for frequent data that imputation methods are being developed so that we can keep an eye on what is happening daily. Interestingly, it appears some commentators have developed some fatigue in trying to comment on the results on a daily basis and are instead analysing the weekly figures. The important observation is that the data is allows people to make an informed choice as to what timeframe is appropriate.
Taking things to the extreme recently, Stephen Wolfram posted a mesmerisingly geeky/interesting blog article summarising hourly data for his email (ingoing, outgoing etc.). keystrokes, calendar events, phone calls and footsteps. The resulting dataset allows him to track various stages of his life and the overall patterns that have governed his working life since 1989. Some of the patterns are at the day level (more footsteps at lunchtime), some of them week level (writing a blog) and some of the patterns reflect multi-year trends (working on a major book). Again, Stephen’s data collection allowed him to zoom in and out and decide the appropriate levels of analysis.
Now, where does this leave the average employee engagement data stream? With many companies asking their employees for culture feedback once a year – it seems engagement measurement is lagging nearly every other metric in the world. However, there are a growing number of companies who have realised that yearly culture and engagement tracking is not timely enough.
We regularly collect daily data from different employees and this allows leaders and managers to decide what the appropriate and meaningful timeframe for analysis is. We have observed interesting intra-day effects. However, for most companies, or business units undergoing change management, weekly data has been the smallest timeframe of value. Whereas other companies are settling into a rhythm of checking data on a monthly and quarterly basis. Since we have begun collecting this data we are yet to see an organisation who finds a yearly datastream adequate.
The verdict:
Hourly = academically interesting and fun to watch on your screen
Daily = see above
Weekly = beginning to become very useful in change management scenarios and large companies enacting initiatives – allows managers to try different things each week if they have large enough teams
Monthly = as above for weekly and great in change management, and larger companies, and also for linking to other monthly data such as customer satisfaction or Net Promoter tracking
Quarterly = commonly makes the most sense for many companies and ties in well with most other business metrics – many companies are gravitating to this as it also only requires each person to complete a 5-10 minute survey once every 3 months
Yearly = generally fine for global climate change data (sea levels, glacial melting etc.)
Employee engagement: a relative thing
Posted: March 8, 2012 Filed under: Murmur, Uncategorized | Tags: employee engagement, Gallup, staff engagement, staff surveys 7 Comments »I recently wrote a post discussing the annual ebb and flow of employee engagement research results – one of the issues is that some research firms will suggest engagement has remained stable while others suggest engagement has gone down. This phenomenon has been discussed in some detail in other engagement forums (e.g. David Bowles provides a nice account and discussion here). I stated previously that this is no great surprise; different firms often use different questions, or different samples, or different methods (or all of the above).
Another issue recently posed by Aubrey Daniels is that with all of the attention and focus on employee engagement in the last 20 years why hasn’t it gone up? Why does Gallup keep finding engagement levels are relatively stable when their clients are paying them big money to improve it? It should be going through the roof right?
But what if the relationship between work conditions and employee engagement is similar to the relationship between wealth and happiness?
The Easterlin Paradox, although not irrefutable, is based on substantial data showing that despite great leaps forward in terms of income per person people are not really any happier on average. Individuals with more money tend to be happier, but the average level has remained quite consistent – and the increase in happiness with rising income gets smaller the richer you get. The answer to this seeming paradox, based in both economics and psychology, is that people mostly care about where they are relative to other people (social comparison) and where they are relative to their own past position (habituation).
How might this apply to employee engagement? Well, if your company has been offering cheap gym memberships and flexible hours for the last few years this may have improved employee engagement. But, if your major competitor is now offering free gym membership and personal nap spaces for employees – then your benefits may not look so great for much longer.
Overall then, in a changing workplace landscape, we probably shouldn’t expect average employee engagement levels to go up over the long term; and in our own companies we might find we have to stay focused just to maintain our relative position. And yet, at the same time there will be companies improving engagement faster then their competitors and some being left behind. Which would you prefer to be?
Culture Amp Book Club
Posted: February 22, 2012 Filed under: Culture Amp | Tags: bookclub 2 Comments »The other day we were discussing “must read” books that we found inspirational. We quickly realised that if these really were must-reads, then each of us was behind on at least two or three.
We’re pretty busy on Murmur at the moment, but we’re all going to make an effort to get across these and report back. So here is. The inaugural Culture Amp reading list (in random order).
- Didier recommends The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
The book that popularised what was to become one of the most overused phrases of the 90s – “the learning organisation”. Still, it became such an overused phrase because as an idea was an extremely powerful and persuasive. Time and time again I find myself referring back to his idea that it is often the nature and/or structure of our interactions that gives rise to behaviour – not the personality of the individuals involved. Some of it might seem old hat now, but it is refreshing to read about complexity theory, agile management and OODA loops – but without those names!
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- Jason recommends No Two Alike by Judith Rich Harris
Judith Rich Harris has been praised by Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker and many other notable thinkers and scholars – and in my view she outshines them too. Judith sleuths her way through every shred of evidence she can find in an attempt to answer one of the greatest mysteries in psychology – how can identical twins actually be so different? The question opens the doors to questions about what makes us truly individual and the answers are not what many people currently believe. There are a few academic casualties along the way. Judith’s back story makes it all the more amazing.
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- Jon recommends Maverick by Ricardo Semler
Ricardo inherits Semco, a Brazillian manufacturer getting hit hard by a brutal economic downturn. After a health scare and a flash of inspiration, he decides to turn the company on it’s head and embarks on an unorthodox transformation. Employees hire their bosses, share in the profits, share jobs, choose their own timetables and define their own work. It’s a great reminder that you can do things differently and succeed.
. - Rod recommends Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” – this is the essence of Dr Viktor Frankl’s message. Split into two parts, Frankl first shares his lessons learned whilst incarcerated for several years in Nazi concentration camps, and how through this torturous experience, it was his clarity of purpose that willed him to survive. The second part of the book formally introduces ‘Logotherapy’, a form of psychotherapy that Frankl developed as a result. It may sound a little bit poetic, but I love the accountability that Frankl places on each of us to not be a victim of circumstance – “man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment”.
. - Doug recommends Peopleware: Productive Projects & Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Written over 25 years ago, Peopleware is still as relevant today as it ever was. DeMarco and Lister explore the ‘human’ aspects of developing software by first building successful team dynamics. They explore and contrast the individual and their needs with corporate ideology, discussing everything from the importance of the working environment, to teams gelling, corporate entropy, and the high (often hidden) costs of turnover.
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Enjoy! If you’ve connected with these books, or you’ve got any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.
Employee Engagement up 20% in 2011
Posted: February 20, 2012 Filed under: Culture Amp, Exit Surveys, Murmur 4 Comments »Actually, I just made that up based on some inspiration I got from a recent blog post by Aubrey Daniels (“Employee Engagement: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing“). It’s an interesting post. I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the points raised because there does seem to be confusion out there about this ‘engagement’ concept.
Aubrey draws attention to the fact that only 21% of employees are engaged according to a Tower Watson survey and 31% are engaged according to a BlessingWhite survey. The implication perhaps being that these are very low numbers. However, the specific numbers are simply the result of the manner in which these organisations have decided to classify ‘engaged’ and each firm will tend to use different questions, different response scales, and different samples in the research that uncovers these figures. One also imagines that making the numbers low provides a good selling point for them.
Aubrey also asks: ”With all the work that has been done on this topic during the last 20 years, why have the numbers not moved?”
The problem with this question is that we’re only given figures for 2011 so we can’t really judge whether they have moved or not. Even so, this would tell us nothing about whether individual organisations or teams had managed to improve or ruin engagement levels during this time.
The important thing for an organisation is to improve their own engagement levels, not the global average in Towers Watson’s benchmark database – which will go up or down depending on the mix of companies in it, the state of the economy and numerous other factors. Some of these will relate to you and your organisation, but countless more won’t.
Aubrey also brings David Zinger’s book on engagement to task and claims that some 300 ideas for improving engagement are presented without any evidence. In stark contrast, Aubrey claims that there is only one way to rapidly improve engagement that is supported by “literally 100′s of studies” – positive reinforcement. Now, I’m a big proponent of evidence, but this is a pretty big call – and unfortunately Aubrey hasn’t directed to any of these studies.
So what are we to make of all this? I’ll hang my hat on these three conclusions:
- There is no single definitive measure or benchmark of employee engagement – and there never will be
- Engagement benchmarks will differ from each other and go up and down in response to many factors
- The most important benchmark is the direction your company is travelling
Forbes on the Empowered Employee
Posted: February 16, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 3 Comments »John Hagel, Suketu Gandhi & Giovanni Rodriguez of Deloitte have posted a terrific Forbes article, The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready? It’s a great read. In particular, I latched on to a statement on Page 2:
In the end, the great invasion is not just about the tools that originate in the consumer world, but the metrics and leading practices of consumer engagement. In other words, business people hoping to engage the empowered employee need to think like consumer marketers.
This really resonated with what we’re doing with Murmur. Part of our philosophy was that there is a lot of innovation in the Consumer Engagement domain that can be bought to Employee Engagement.
A core example is that we’re moving to real-time – not many companies serious about consumer marketing would assess their consumers every 1-2 years. However, this is exactly what happens with traditional engagement surveys. We’ve already got customers that have enacted actions from a Murmur survey. Critically, they have also been able to assess these actions within weeks and retune their approach.
It’s no longer an annual one-off. It’s a powerful tool that is commonplace in the consumer market, but for employee engagement it really is extraordinary. Another more subtle example is the use of Net Promoter concepts in our charting.
There are a few systemic reasons why the employee space has lagged. The funding model for Human Resources is one. Often HR is competing for funding with other departments – departments that have a more tangible link between investment and revenue. For organisations that are single-minded about ROI and the bottom-line, HR easily loses out to the internal competition.
Compounding this is the fact that IT projects have historically been a significant Capital Expense (CAPEX). You need to buy the software, get it installed, maintain it, update it and depreciate it. This has the unfortunate consequence that HR becomes the poorest cousin in terms of IT systems. What HR does get is a payroll system (you have to have it). Since that’s all you’ve got, everything else gets shoe-horned onto that platform. It’s a substandard result.
As much as it’s shrouded in buzz, the rise of SaaS and “The Cloud” really does make a difference here. It turns that heavy CAPEX project into Operational Expenditure OPEX. No upfront costs, no project lead time. This is true for all domains, but the difference in the HR space is profound. This means HR can now buy capabilities that were previously out of reach. You can already see this occurring, and it’s likely to accelerate over the next 12-24 months.
It’s an exciting time. We’re looking for companies to come along on the ride – if that’s you, drop us a line.
Exit Survey Dashboard
Posted: February 13, 2012 Filed under: Exit Surveys, Murmur Leave a comment »In our previous blog post Jason discussed the latest addition to Murmur – the ability to run, instrument and report on exit surveys.
As Jason mentions, a lot of organisations are already running exit surveys, but they lack the facilities to make the most out of this data. Murmur includes a range of process improvements for exit surveys and interviews – effectively aligning them as complementary workflows and data sources. However, just as with Engagement surveys, the other key difference with Murmur is the reporting dashboard.
The Exit Dashboard has been constructed with three “lenses” – each providing a different view for future action and planning:
Short Term Planning
This is all about keeping your business operating – it includes turnover, as well as the key metrics around exits. It also contains some of the highlighted summary figures from later sections.
The idea here is to get an initial view on how everything is going. If you had a sudden increase in the number of exits (scheduled or otherwise) in a particular department – you’ll see it immediately here.
Medium Term Planning
Often considered the primary function of exit interviews, this lens is all about retaining talent. It shows the type of employees existing, where they’re going and why. You can also drill in to make sure you’re looking at exactly the right demographics.
The most significant items are highlighted, clicking into the detail tab gives you the whole picture.
Long Term Planning
This lens focuses on what can be learnt from exiting employees. In our engagement dashboard we specifically chart progress but with exit surveys it is about determining the critical engagement level that may propel an employee to leave. In this lens we are also taking advantage of open feedback.
Additionally, if you want to get a deeper understanding of a particular issue the system will support you; you can filter on ‘regrettable’ leavers only and then look at “reasons for leaving” for a particular department, or tenure. These answers will give additional context & insight. Like the medium term lens, this view only shows the most significant results. Clicking through will give view of all questions, with a detailed breakdown of the segmentation.
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That’s a quick overview for now. You can see all of this working together in the exit screencast. In later blog posts we’ll dig into these sections and the unique insights they provide.
Murmur Exit Surveys
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Murmur | Tags: exit, exit surveys, Murmur Leave a comment »
Murmur Exit Dashboard
Working with clients on engagement and culture projects we often hear stories about employees leaving organisations and the postulated reasons for this. When we ask how this information is captured it often turns out that there is a messy folder full of Word documents and spreadsheets named ‘Exit Interviews’. The reporting was non-existent, at best HR managers poured over the existing documents and email trails to enter into another spreadsheet.
Organisations differ in the exit feedback process they use, but they are united in lacking a way to link quantitative and qualitative data together. Even those who were using technology solution often indicated that the most important information was not readily available in a user-friendly format.
One example is the turnover figure. Turnover is often calculated by dividing the number of employees leaving by the average number of employees in the organisation for the year. This simple turnover metric may be interesting, but what organisations really want are more specific figures such as their “regrettable” turnover – the number of people who you’d rather not have left. If you have 20% turnover overall and 19% regrettable turnover you have a real talent retention problem; if you have 20% overall turnover and 2% regrettable turnover perhaps you have a hiring problem.
We’ve always aimed for Murmur to provide an employee lifecycle view and we see a great opportunity to better manage the exit process and get improved metrics and insights at the same time. Our new Murmur Exit platform allows users to do just that. We’ve been running this with some clients and the results look great so far.
Benchmarking for Social Profit Organisations (SPOs)
Posted: January 24, 2012 Filed under: Murmur | Tags: employee engagement, employee surveys, engagement benchmarks, engagement surveys, not for profit employee engagement, staff engagement Leave a comment »We have a special affinity with organisations that are more traditionally called ‘not for profit’ organisations. But the idea of defining an organisation by what they’re NOT about seems a little negative to us, so we’ve decided to call them Social Profit Organisations (SPOs).
We’ve frequently found SPOs to be incredibly enthusiastic towards innovative approaches to tracking engagement, and perhaps some of this is due to necessity – they often have the workforce capability, skills, morale and retention issues that all companies have, but with a smaller budget for dealing with them. They also have more at stake in many cases because it is primarily their vision, mission and culture that retains and motivates their staff – higher salaries are generally not an option for attracting and retaining the people they need. Benchmarks for staff culture are thus important for understanding an SPOs ability to leverage culture for advantage – but what benchmarks should we be using?
External benchmarks
External benchmarks for employee surveys have always been a problematic beast and they can often create a significant and unhelpful distraction. The case argued for them is that without them you simply have no idea how your organisation stacks up against the competition. But who exactly is the competition? Do you compete for employees, talent and skills in the one industry? What exact organisations should you benchmark yourself against and when were they last surveyed? Unfortunately, the more specific you get the smaller the benchmark samples get and the larger they get the less relevant they get. The main point to make is that they are always some sort of compromise and they should always be taken as one piece of contextual information – not as a silver bullet. Remember, with most organisations conducting surveys annually, a focus on external benchmarking can create a focus on what was mediocre last year, or even the year before in some cases.
Internal benchmarks
The other important source of benchmarking data comes from within your own organisation; internal benchmarks provide you with a view of what is possible within your very own context and can be a very powerful source of energy for change. Although managers often claim external benchmarks are irrelevant (being too specific, or too general, or too old) it can be much harder to argue against internal benchmarks that show parts of their own organisation that are achieving much better levels of engagement and performance. Internal benchmarks should be at least as important as external benchmarks and for line managers they should perhaps be the only benchmarks to focus on.
SPO vs FPOs
Staff engagement for SPOs is much the same as for any For Profit Organisation (FPO) – you’re interested in staff being proud, committed and motivated by your mission. What is different however is that staff within SPOs can often have incredible levels of pride while not being committed to staying with the organisation – and this often translates to a lack of advocacy for the SPO as a place of employment. This means that overall engagement levels can be similar to FPOs but the engagement profile can be very different.
What is also often quite different are staff perceptions of organisational and operational performance – this is going beyond engagement and using staff as an important source of internal and external intelligence. Increasingly these are often the things that staff in SPOs are most glad to see us asking in our surveys. When we ask front line staff whether resources are being efficiently directed towards the organisations mission we often see huge differences in organisations (and between different departments of the same organisation) and this is often pushing talented and devoted staff out the door – even when they’ve been proud to have been there trying.
Where to from here?
Organisations should use a balance of external and internal benchmarks to contextualise their cultures. This should be an external benchmark that they feel best represents the broad areas where they can attract (or lose ) staff and they should use an internal benchmark that identifies a clear performance target from within the organisation. The external benchmarks can alert an organisations to relatively large cultural differences while the internal benchmarks can help communicate that the culture is about realistic improvement and celebrating success where it exists.
Your benchmarking checklist
If you’re using an external benchmark supplier:
- Ask whether your benchmark is based on organisational level surveys or a panel survey: Some survey consultancy firms claim they have thousands of companies in their benchmarks but it is really just a market research panel of people who work for those companies and often they will have one person from each of the companies in their benchmark – this can be useful but it is not the same.
- Ask exactly how many organisations are in the benchmark (for each question in your survey) and how old the results are: Some firms will use results for the past three years or even the last decade – this is not what most people are after.
- Ask for a breakdown of the size and types of the companies in the benchmark: Often a benchmark for financial services will include a range of small organisations that manage a pension fund, for example, which will be quite different from what most people have in mind for ‘financial services’.
And if you’re interested in participating in a more open method of benchmarking:
We will be providing SPOs an innovative and cost-realistic alternative for culture benchmarking – all participating organisations will have full access to all benchmark data within the system. If you’d like to know more about our engagement and exit engagement survey platform have a look here and get in touch.
The problem with employee surveys is…
Posted: January 9, 2012 Filed under: Murmur | Tags: engagement surveys, exit surveys, Murmur, staff surveys, Survey Monkey Leave a comment »We had a hectic run to the end of 2011 with Murmur – our platform for real time analytics of staff engagement. We’ve now rolled out surveys in Australia and globally – for some reason companies in New York love Murmur! As well as the core 50 Amp engagement survey we now also have our Exit Engagement Survey system up and running. The ultimate goal is to collect and integrate employee feedback across the whole employee life cycle; attraction, onboarding, engaging and exiting.
With the new year here I thought it was a good time to summarise why we built Murmur in the first place. Basically, it came down to a bunch of common problems we continually hear about traditional surveys – so here are the problems and the reasons we built Murmur.
1. It costs so much money – if you go to a high end consultancy it can cost an absolute fortune. You have to sign up before you see anything done and once it’s done you don’t have any money left to act on the results.
Murmur has a built in world class core survey (50 Amp Engagement) and we can do this at a cost more aligned with Survey Monkey than a high end consultancy. Furthermore, Murmur works on a monthly subscription based on companies using (and loving) the system. This leaves more money for actions and/or consultancy focused on action rather than measurement.
2. If you go the cheaper option and do it yourself using Survey Monkey etc. it is hard to get insight unless you really know what you’re doing.
Murmur has a built in analytics system that provides a core methodology similar to what the high end consultancies use. Murmur uses reliable indexes as outcomes and provides automatic driver analytics to guide you to the most important drivers of engagement.
3. Annual surveys are too slow and infrequent for providing feedback and managers claim the results are out of date and irrelevant by the time we get them to them.
Murmur provides live reporting so there is no need to wait for your survey results and it can poll employees making sure people only get surveyed a certain number of times a year but still allowing continuous tracking.
4. Surveys are ugly and slow.
Murmur has a more attractive looking survey with modern aesthetics that can be done in 10 minutes or less and can be done on an iPhone/Android phone. People love it and it is frequently one of the the key thing that clients and respondents remember – “it makes you want to do the survey” we’ve heard.
If you want to try it out contact us here
Have some Pride in your Engagement Models
Posted: December 21, 2011 Filed under: Murmur | Tags: employee engagement, employee pride, employee surveys, engagement, engagement model, Engagement questions, pride 3 Comments »
‘I am proud to work at ACME Corp.’
Our Murmur engagement survey includes an engagement index that is comprised of five questions [1] – this is one of them. This question is sometimes referred to as the ‘pride’ question (for fairly obvious reasons) but it is also called the ‘heart’ question (as in ‘hearts, minds and hands’ models), the ‘emotive’ question (as in ‘rational, emotive, behavioural’ models) or the BBQ or pub test question (not sure on the model here – maybe the sunday afternoon model).
A colleague once told me about a company he worked with who quintessentially passed the test – employees in this company were known to wear their boldly labelled work uniforms (aprons actually) down to the pub on Friday evening, for the entire evening. Put it this way – imagine being a BP employee attending a BBQ in late 2010 (just after the deepwater horizon oil spill) and someone asking you ‘hey, where do you work?’.
For some organisations this feeling of pride is a tremendous asset, in particular this can drive employee resilience in organisations experiencing internal difficulties. In Not-For-Profit organisations it is often related to employees being connected with the mission and purpose of the organisation; in retail and hospitality it is often linked to brand image and it can be fostered by creating a sense of fun and excitement in the workplace. Strong pride can be found in old companies with great heritages and sometimes in emerging organisations with barely a year to their name.
The great thing about this question is that it is nearly aways indicative of GREAT places to work – but rarely for the same reasons.
[1] Nearly every management consultancy company have their own Engagement Index. An Engagement Index is a group of questions that are put together statistically (usually nothing more than an average) to provide a single number output that is then used to quantify Engagement. Some firms use hidden proprietary methods so that you cannot change survey vendors and maintain historical benchmarks – but that’s a story for another day. A set of questions generally provides a better measure of something than a single question will for a variety of reasons. Those reasons are also the reasons why the exact set of questions are not as important as many people will try to tell/sell you. If you think about the index as a team of questions it just means that any individual question is not as important as the team.
