Energize Your Workforce

By Linda Carter
Vice President, Retirement Planning
The Benefit Advocates
lcarter@benefitadvocates.net

Saks Fifth Avenue is empowering and engaging its employees — with impressive bottom-line results.

If you believe it can’t be happening in your organization, think again. Several highly respected research and consulting organizations have found that about half of American workers only do what’s expected of them.

This middle group of employees are not energized or motivated to excel. No wonder then, that they rarely create great products or provide exceptional service.

Because of so many underperformers, companies are operating at a 30 percent efficiency. What would the impact be if a bank opened only 30 percent of its branches every day?

Organizations are increasingly discovering the impact fully engaged employees can have on company performance —without much trouble or expense.

Many of the drivers of engagement are subtle issues that require minimal investment. The most critical drivers are immediate supervisors closest to employees.

Instead of pay, engaging workers is about employee satisfaction and about emotions — the innate human desire to contribute something of value in the workplace.

It’s about treating the employee like a person. If more people understood this basic concept, many of today’s employees and their employees would be a lot better off. The premise of “I as the manager, have all the power, just do it,” has long since worn thin and proven its ineffectiveness. Gone is the old traditional loyalty and in its place is an enlightened form of loyalty based on shared values and goals and mutual caring and respect.

Some may think this approach unnecessary when millions of Americans are out of work. Yet, for people rescued from unemployment, the gratitude seldom lasts unless their job and managers inspire them.

The process of improving employee engagement typically starts with one basic step. Ask workers how they feel.

Some companies poll workers as often as every month; others as infrequently as every other year. The key is to find out how many employees are fully engaged and identify them.

The employee survey is the diagnostic tool of choice in the battle for the hearts of employees.

Walker Information, an Indianapolis research and consulting firm, conducts workplace studies annually. They report the following factors as having the greatest influence on an employee’s commitment to a firm:

• the company’s care/concern for employees
• Fairness at work
• Feelings of accomplishment
• Day-to-day satisfaction
• Appreciation of ideas

ENGAGEMENT IN ACTION: SAKS FIFTH AVENUE

Saks Fifth Avenue is a great example of the power of engagement. The New York luxury retailer found that making engagement a part of the culture meant increased sales — with stores with the greatest level of engaged employees increasing sales by 20 to 25 percent!

It’s not just higher sales — but how you got there — that’s important. At Saks, the way management and the sales force communicate has changed.

Saks now makes it a point to ask employees what they need most to do their jobs best. Some suggestions were as simple as opening stairwells to eliminate a 10-minute wait to go by elevator between floors. Others meant upgrading computers and implementing a flex-time program. The key message management wants to send is that the two-way dialogue is a permanent feature of how the store does business.

Saks made more than 100 changes over a three-year period. The result? A proven correlation between employee engagement and customer engagement, with even more loyal and repeat customers and increased sales.

The most important part of improving engagement is finding, training and keeping good managers. Good managers should not hesitate to empower their employees. Employee empowerment improves production and service and allows everyone to bask in the glow of success.

Source: HR Magazine, February 2004