The Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA), a coalition of organizations dedicated to the pursuit and promotion of enterprise engagement, is now offering two key tools – the Enterprise Engagement Indicator and the PollStream Enterprise Engagement Meter – to help companies understand and measure levels of engagement within their organizations.

The Enterprise Engagement Indicator (EEI) is an online survey tool that can be used to quickly determine whether an organization can benefit from a more formal engagement strategy. The results pinpoint where and how an engagement strategy would be most effectively applied – from consumer and channel marketing to sales, customer service, operations, and/or administration. Go to www.EnterpriseEngagement.org/indicator to view the EEI survey and a sample follow-up report.

The PollStream Enterprise Engagement Meter was created in conjunction with PollStream Inc., a leading social software and technology firm based in Toronto, Ont. Residing on the EEA Portal at www.enterpriseengagement.org, it allows any individual to quickly and privately assess their organization’s engagement opportunities. The results are instant and there is no charge.

Is there a payoff to a company’s employee engagement efforts? Can companies expect a return on their investment in efforts to engage employees in their work, with their companies, and with their company’s mission? There is and they can. A recent webinar sponsored by the Human Capital Institute and the Enterprise Engagement Alliance provided a close look at both the cost to companies of workers who are disengaged, and the return on value they can earn by engaging their work force. The event featured Rodger Stotz, chief research officer of the Incentive Research Foundation, and Jim Dittman, president of Dittman Incentive Marketing. Their topic: “Return on Value by Engaging Talent: What Leaders Can Do.”

The economics of talent engagement are widely accepted; however the investment begins with how leaders engage their teams. When leaders shift their mindset from ROI to Return on Value, they energize innovation, collaboration and discretionary effort. The investment leaders make to create highly productive teams can be low (when they know what behaviors make the most impact), but the value is high. The webcast focuses on the economic reasons to engage talent and goes beyond leaders who believe in ROI, to what leaders can do to create value from talent engagement. The speakers offer examples of leaders and organizations that excel at engagement and insight into achieving high levels of engagement in your own organization.

Specifically, Stotz and Dittman say, organizational leaders can support their company’s engagement efforts and boost their bottom lines, by: • Understanding the cost of disengagement. • Looking for a Return on Value beyond the strictly financial. • Developing employee performance measures and incentives. • Training and recognizing employees. • Making a top-down commitment to engagement. • And making that top-down commitment permanent.

Interested in learning more? Click here to visit the Human Capital Institute Incentives and Engagement Practice Area website. Or click here to download a recording of the "Return on Value by Engaging Talent" webinar.

The Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA) and PollStream, a leading social software firm, recently announced a partnership aimed at promoting and improving employee engagement best practices. Specifically, PollStream will lend its voice to the EEA as a frequent contributor to the coalition’s portal and blog, providing insight and proven best practices on how the intelligent use of social software can increase employee engagement and earn discretionary effort.

“Engagement is a going concern for any organization motivated to recruit and retain their best employees,” says Stephen Green, president and founder of PollStream. “The real value in an engaged, connected, collaborative organization is what we call social capital – an asset as rich as an organization’s investments in equipment or training and just as integral to productivity.” PollStream’s social software tools will be integrated into the EEA’s portal, a move that will naturally enrich and personalize the user experience for EEA members and those that are new to the coalition.

Allan Schweyer, chairman of the EEA, welcomes the opportunity to use Pollstream’s polling technology to help the business world better understand how to implement engagement strategies at the practical level. “We believe that Pollstream provides a unique opportunity for us to collect invaluable information from the front-lines of management who face the issue of engagement on a daily basis,” Schweyer says.

For more information on PollStream, visit the company website at www.pollstream.com .

Engagement doesn’t just happen, and in most organizations frontline management has a lot to do with the success – or failure – of an organization’s engagement efforts. Recent research from the Gallup organization on employee disengagement in Germany, for instance, suggests that highly motivated people can become disengaged when their supervisors don’t ask for their opinions, don’t offer feedback, show little interest in them as human beings, and ask them to do jobs that are not suited to them. “Quitting is almost always a statement against the immediate supervisor,” says Gallup strategic consultant Marco Nink. For a more extensive interview with Nink on the supervisor’s impact, click here.

Another error that frontline managers sometimes make is to focus their performance improvement efforts on employees’ weaknesses, rather than focus on their strengths. But Gallup research shows that the worst thing managers can do is to ignore their employees. According to Gallup researchers Brian Brim and Jim Asplund, “If your manager focuses on your strengths, your chances of being actively disengaged at work are only 1 in 100. If your manager ignores you, however, you are twice as likely to be actively disengaged than if your manager focuses on your weaknesses. Being overlooked, it seems, is more harmful to employees’ engagement than having to discuss their weaknesses with their manager.” For more on Brim and Asplund’s research and conclusions, click here.

To be successful in the evolving world marketplace, and even in their own workplace, leaders and managers must begin to understand their constituents’ state of mind, says Gallup’s chairman and CEO Jim Clifton. Human decision making is more emotional than rational, the research suggests, and “State of mind is everything that matters to leadership: talent, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, optimism, determination, and all of the other things that create economic growth,” Clifton says. Successful leaders, he adds, will be those who can quantify those states of mind to better understand the emotions that cause behavior. “If you are making decisions without understanding what your constituency is thinking, you are making bad decisions,” he says. For more of Clifton’ comments on “The Next Generation of Leadership,” click here.

According to the latest Ouch Point survey from Opinion Research Corporation (ORC), employers may face an exodus of workers once the job market improves if they don’t ramp up their employee engagement efforts. As many as 80 percent of those respondents who are currently employed would consider leaving their current job if presented with other opportunities. Fully one quarter of respondents (25 percent) said they have plans to leave their present employer once the job market stabilizes. Employees in the 18-34 age bracket were found likeliest to change jobs (36 percent).

“Given the high percentage of respondents who would consider leaving their present positions to pursue other opportunities, many employers may find themselves faced with serious turnover issues when the job market opens up,” says Lisa Wojtkowiak, of ORC’s Employee Engagement practice. “To prevent this, employers will need to focus on increasing their employees’ level of engagement,” she continues.

“Even if they don’t intend to leave,” Wojtkowiak says, “disengaged employees can undermine the success of an organization by wreaking havoc in two significant ways. First, they are not strongly committed to achieving a company’s goals and objectives, and may not be motivated to act in accordance with its mission and values. Second, they tend to create a less than favorable impression of their company as a potential employer in the marketplace.”

ORC’s Ouch Point series examines the tolerance thresholds of Americans in common scenarios they face daily in both their professional and personal lives. For more information, visit www.orc-ouchpoint.com

A recent item in Hay Group Insight Connections talks about some of the insights the company has gleaned from its research into employee engagement with hundreds of companies. Following are some of the highlights of the Hay Group research.

• Organizations in the top quartile on employee engagement demonstrate revenue growth that is 2.5 times that of organizations in the bottom quartile. And companies in the top quartile on both engagement and employee enablement achieve growth that is 4.5 times greater.

• Companies with high levels of employee engagement show turnover rates that are 40 percent lower than companies with low levels of engagement. (Hay Group estimates the cost of replacing employees to be between 50 percent and 150 percent of salary.)

• Hay’s research linking employee survey data to performance ratings show that highly engaged employees are 10 percent more likely to exceed performance expectations. But highly engaged and enabled employees are 50 percent more likely to exceed performance expectations.

The bottom line, according to the Hay Group, is that “highly engaged and enabled workers create dramatically better business outputs, more loyal customers, and better financial performance during good times and bad – and organizations are likely to retain these employees and sustain these results over a longer period of time.”

In the New York Times dated Nov. 23, 2009: IBM uses a collaborative approach with its employees to improve translations generated by its n.Fluent product, a machine translation system designed to facilitate near-instant translation of company messaging. Leveraging the increasingly sophisticated social-networking tools on the company’s Intranet, the company was able to get about 6,000 employees to participate in the project, providing improvements to 11 languages involving millions of words of text. Points were awarded to the largest contributors, which were converted into prizes donated to charitable organizations.

The process of using employees to develop products was termed “employee sourcing” as opposed to outsourcing. Another term for the process: crowd sourcing, although in this case the crowd is the company’s base of employees.

Our only question: why no awards for the employees who took the time to contribute? Our guess: company’s project managers thought they needed to be politically correct about noncash rewards when in fact recognition and support are critical to fostering ongoing participation in such efforts. According to the New York Times, the project management team heard that contributors would appreciate receiving “trinkets,” as well, which the company says it has now begun to institute.

The article author’s comment: “Something any six-year-old could have told you.”

A direct connection exists between employee attitudes and sales, according to a study to be published shortly in the Strategic Management Association Journal as reported in the New York Times. Based on a survey of over 4,000 customers and employees at multiple branches of nine service companies, the study found that sales growth was based more on what employees felt about the company than "society at large." According to one of the study's authors, Michael Kamins, a business professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the study found that, while customers tend to forget their positive feelings toward a company, customers' perceptions increased significantly when the company's employees had a much better attitude than expected. More proof that a company's brand is cemented by employees, not advertising.