The cost of employee engagement

DHL have made big news in the past few weeks with their not insignificant investment of €100 million into an employee engagement programme.

Clearly not small potatoes and it comes at an interesting time in DHL’s life – with considerable loses being made within the business – clearly Ken Allen (CEO) sees engagement as a very direct way of moving the business back into the black.

We are incredibly strong advocates of employee engagement and the benefits to both an organisation and its workforce of having high levels of engagement.

In DHL’s case however, it begs the question, why now and why such a huge sum?

There’s a word of warning here for organisations. You don’t need to invest huge sums of money in expensive and expansive employee engagement programmes – but this could well be what you end up doing if you leave it so late and at a dire stage in your organisations history.

Start engaging now, right throughout your organisation. Look for areas of your business that are performing well – spend time with these teams or departments. Understand how they do their work, what the management style is and how much autonomy employees have. Listen to the employees within these teams to understand, directly from them, what makes them so successful.  Make sure you hire the right people!  When you advertise for new people, does the description for the role actually match reality, if not then you are likely setting yourself up for a fall.  Ensure you get the right personality for the role – it might not be sensible to hire an introvert for an outward facing sales role for example.

Organise for less successful parts of the business to spend times with these teams, so they can understand and learn from them. Facilitate a process of implementing ways of working from these successful teams to other parts of your business. Those managers that are working well, delivering and are successful – organise for them to be seconded onto key projects and other parts of the business – setup a mentoring programme whereby they can offer their skills and insights with other managers.

Yes, this is time intensive but in terms of actual monetary investment – it’s small fry and the benefits you can reap are huge.

Find out how we can help you improve employee engagement without breaking the bank by calling us on 01255 850051!