AN ENGAGED TEAM IS A WINNING TEAM

 

The Employee Engagement Survey was up on the screen. The room was silent. 60 senior managers were holding their breath. We were about to find out how the 600 people making up our business felt about working for the company, about working for us. My eyes anxiously scanned the bars on the graph, one for each department, one for each manager. My palms were sweating. It was our first Employee Engagement survey. I had no idea what to expect. “Trust the Team” had been my approach to the survey, my standard answer to most challenges on site. “Share what the survey is about, and involve the team in planning how to get it completed. Just be ourselves. Don’t try to influence the outcome. We want to know what the issues are so we can fix them” I’d said. Brave words; I wasn’t feeling brave now. My eyes focussed and found the site score on the screen. Now I was feeling elated and surprised; I was feeling proud for the site and the team. Our score was 73%, into World Class territory.

“How did you do that?” asked a colleague.

“We didn’t really do anything different to normal. The site is on a journey - I think it’s more to do with how we feel and act.” I replied. Her brow was furrowed. I knew that my answer hadn’t helped her as it was meant to.

It was a three hour motorway drive back to site. The traffic heavy but flowing, brain on autopilot, plenty of time to reflect. Plenty of time to come up with a clearer explanation of what I’d done. I hadn’t directly chased an engagement score, the same way I hadn’t directly chased KPI numbers. I had lead the site on a journey though, and we’d delivered those results along the way. How could I explain my approach more clearly and link it to delivery of business results?

My start point is each being proud to own our piece of the action.(See Emotional Economics post). If we can successfully invest our creativity in a venture and are treated with respect we reap immense personal reward, we keep doing it and we get better at it. We grow and improve as the business grows and improves.

The first building block on the road to engagement and KPI improvement was to make the site own-able by the front line teams. The site covers 18 acres with multiple processes housed in separate buildings run by a team of 200 working different shift patterns. Walking round the site could feel like walking through a city centre. It was full of bustle; it didn’t really belong to any one. Everyone there was passing through, in a hurry, with no time to help a stranger. I needed to create some local neighbourhoods; some sense of belonging, of identity. We called the neighbourhoods “ Zones”: processes or areas that a community of 8-10 people could own; could personally invest in, could make a difference to.

Creating the potential for ownership and personal investment is only an enabling step. My challenge was how to give the team a reason to commit themselves to ownership and personal investment; to make that difference. Antoine de Saint-Exupery faced the same challenge:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to go to the forest and gather wood, saw it, and nail planks together, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint- Exupery

I had the feeling that he spoke from experience. I gathered the whole site team for a team day. It was the first time that the whole site team across all shifts had ever met. We started the day creating a joint vision of what the site could achieve, what that would feel like and what the outcomes would be. As energy and noise levels built in our Zone groups and feedback sessions we decided that it would feel fantastic! We wanted to be there! We quietened down a bit as we listened to each Zone update on where it was now: the successes and opportunities from the year just gone. We were thoughtful, maybe slightly daunted, as we split back up into Zone groups. Our challenge was to commit to three actions per Zone that would move the Zone closer to our fantastic vision. The feedback session was loud, laughter filled, uplifting. We knew where we were going. We knew how to get there. Most of all though we each knew that we could make a difference, would make a difference and what that difference was. We knew that it was our plan and our vision. We knew that we could make it happen.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” – Andre Gide

I read Andre Gide’s words after the first team day and after we’d gone on to post record Safety, Quality, Service, Cost and Employee Engagement results in the year that followed it. I share it because I know that it took me courage to trust the Team to set their own Zone objectives; and because I know what we then achieved as a result: RIDDOR accidents reduced to zero for 3 consecutive years, A 44% reduction in Quality complaints, Service level consistently better than 99%, £1,000,000 cost reduction and a 75% Employee Engagement score. Countless individual, discretionary, actions taken by team members in their Zones built into our overall success. I certainly hadn’t initiated the actions directly, neither had my managers. We’d enabled the site team to invest emotionally though, and we were all reaping the reward.

The Employee Engagement Survey was up on the screen. The room was silent. 60 senior managers were holding their breath. We were about to find out how the