As I was scrolling through the message boards of the Linkedin groups I belong to, trying to find inspiration for a blog post, I found myself feeling overwhelmed by how many companies are trying to sell a silver bullet for employee engagement. Like, if you implement this one, super special thing employees will be more engaged and productivity will increase.
Everyone has a solution. I get it. I’m in business. I have a solution to offer too. But it would be short-sighted of me to say that my solution is the be all end all.
Maybe saying that makes me a bad business person. What’s more important to me though is being an honest business person. I know the work my team and I do delivers results. I have that evidence. But I also know our work, and our results, don’t exist in a vacuum. That’s one of the reasons I truly believe my client relationships need to be partnerships.
Here’s why the work my team and I do doesn’t exist in a vacuum: we inspire and empower employees to take action. If employees have a shitty experience when they take that action, then the work my team and I did is all for naught. That is not the outcome my team or my clients want.
Case in point, a client wanted to increase enrollment and participation in their wellness program. Before my team and I figured out the communications strategy or created a compelling engagement campaign, my client invested significant time finding a platform that was easy to use and aligned with their strategic goals. Once they identified the platform they believed best met their needs, my team set to work figuring out how to re-introduce the wellness program to employees and eligible spouses/partners.
When the campaign first launched, there was a significant spike in enrollment. What’s more is that over the next three months, as we continued to drive awareness, enrollment increased at a steady rate. That’s not solely due to our engagement campaign. There were compounding factors.
First, my team and I created a really compelling, emotionally engaging campaign. We took a multi-channel approach to catch employees at different points in their day, different locations, and in ways they hadn’t experienced before.
Second, we had a very simple and clear call to action: Register at URL. Since the wellness platform was designed to be sticky and easy to use, the hypothesis was that once employees registered it would take over and keep employees coming back. It did. So the combination of the positive experience when using the platform, along with environmental visual cues, drove engagement – and word of mouth – among colleagues.
If the communications failed, employees wouldn’t have known to register for the new wellness program. If the wellness platform wasn’t easy to use once they got there, employees would have dropped after their first experience.
This is one example but the same is true of performance management, learning and development, recognition, financial programs, etc.
If people don’t know about it, they can’t use it. If they use it and it sucks, they won’t come back.
In order to be successful, you need to think about both parts of the equation. What do you want the employee experience to be? And how are you going to let employees know it exists?
It’s a symbiotic relationship and working through one without the other decreases the chances of success.
Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash