Involving Employees in Change

Organizations going through change should involve their workforce as much as possible in the process.
Employee surveys have now become standard in most organizations. Yet too often, the wrong questions are asked and the wrong things are measured. To make employees feel completely involved in the organization, "satisfaction" with the workplace alone is not enough. An employee who is satisfied with his salary or the amount of annual leave is not necessarily, of his own free will, going to lend full support to his employer and his employer's goals. Satisfaction can be connected to passivity -- employees can be satisfied and yet still be indifferent.

The stronger the engagement, the more likely the employee will act in the interests of the employer.

There is more value in optimizing the work environment, thereby increasing emotional attachment -- or engagement -- to the organization by rigorously fulfilling employees' core needs and expectations. The stronger the engagement, the more likely it is that the employee will act in the interests of the employer -- and the more engaged employees there are, the more productive the organization will be. It is possible to measure the degree to which these core needs and expectations of the workplace are met.
What to ask and where to start
Building on years of research, Gallup has developed 12 items -- the Q¹² -- and employee responses to these items give information about the state of employee engagement, which in turn correlates with organizational performance. It is crucial that the results are discussed at the workgroup level as well as with the leadership and that action plans are put into place and followed through. The results act as a focus point for intense discussion within the team. (See graphic "The Employee Engagement Hierarchy.")
To ensure that the process is sustainable, the survey should be carried out regularly. Also, changes in the survey results over time need to be discussed within the team, and both action planning and follow-through must be monitored. Only when this happens will the employees feel really included and get actively involved in action planning. The results of the employee surveys can also be correlated with key performance indicators (KPIs). By combining these two types of organizational data -- the "soft" employee engagement data with the "hard" KPI data -- we can demonstrate the direct economic benefit of the actions on costs and growth.

Stryker Navigation is an example of how this can be put into practice. As a company, Stryker is a global leader in the manufacturing of navigation systems for computer-assisted surgery. Stryker's machines help doctors and surgeons perform operations more quickly, more safely, and more accurately. Development and production for global markets is done at Stryker's site in Freiburg, Germany.
Decreasing motivation rang alarm bells
When the Freiburg management team registered that the engagement of its employees was decreasing, it set alarm bells ringing, as the company was facing some difficult technical issues that needed to be resolved. It was not going to be possible to produce some important products as quickly and economically as previously thought. This lack of engagement became particularly apparent in the cooperation between teams -- for example, between the Development and Production teams. While the individual departments were performing well in their own range of tasks, they were not prepared to view the manufacture of new products as a complete process that required their collaboration.
Stryker turned to Gallup to measure the employees' engagement and to help the company develop actions for improving the situation. In addition to the Q¹² items, questions were asked about the collaboration between teams. The results were analyzed at the project team level and at the department level. The advantage of this approach is that it allows many different opinions on a project to be heard and discourages siloed thinking. The employees involved in a project can then work together to produce a list of actions, which serves to strengthen connections beyond departmental borders.
The most striking results were gathered in a presentation. Using Gallup's database comparisons and benchmarks, Stryker was able to see the areas in which the company was performing at excellence and those in which it was below average. Each team received its own scorecard, and internal benchmarks were used to show the teams how they ranked within their department as well as within the company as a whole.