Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rob Markey for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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How did you feel about coming to work this morning?
I’m sure many factors influenced whether you felt like digging right in, but one of the most significant was almost surely your boss.
It seems obvious: Direct supervisors who set their teams up for success, observe them in action, ask for feedback, identify the root causes of employee concerns, and then follow through with meaningful improvements have happier, more engaged employees.
Why, then, do senior executives who tout the value of employee engagement so often delegate it to the HR department? HR serves an important function, but not even the best HR staff is in a position to take the actions required to affect the attitudes of individual employees or teams.
And employee engagement remains a challenge for companies worldwide. Recently, Bain & Company, in conjunction with Netsurvey, analyzed responses from 200,000 employees across 40 companies in 60 countries and found several troubling trends:
o Engagement scores decline with employee tenure, meaning that employees with the deepest knowledge of the company typically are the least engaged.
o Engagement scores decline as you go down the org chart, so highly engaged senior executives are likely to underestimate the discontent on the front lines.
o Engagement levels are lowest among sales and service employees, who have the most interactions with customers.
Yet some companies manage to buck these trends. IT-hosting company Rackspace, for instance, has a mantra of “fanatical” customer support. Energized, motivated “Rackers” put in the discretionary effort that creates a superior experience for customers. In turn, customers reward Rackspace with intense loyalty, contributing to the company’s 25% compound annual revenue growth and 48% profit growth since 2008.
Rackspace and other leading companies invest heavily in creating a culture of employee engagement. But what are their secrets?
[Here’s one of four that Markey shares.]
Line supervisors, not HR, lead the charge. It’s difficult for employees to be truly engaged if they don’t like or trust their bosses. Netsurvey’s data shows that 87% of employee “promoters” of their companies also give their direct supervisors high ratings.
That’s why it’s critical for supervisors to treat team engagement as a high priority — and why their bosses, the senior executives, can’t merely prescribe rote solutions. Instead, senior leaders give supervisors the responsibility and authority to earn the enthusiasm, energy, and creativity that signal deep employee engagement.
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Note: Jon Kaufman, a Bain & Company partner based in New York, contributed to the research and analysis mentioned in this post.
To read the complete article, please click here.
Rob Markey is co-author with Fred Reichheld of the book The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World (Harvard Business Review Press). Markey is a partner and director in Bain & Company’s New York office and leads the firm’s Global Customer Strategy and Marketing practice.