Hello and welcome to Business Reporters Human Capital Campaign, hosted by the Telegraph
Online.
I'm Alistair Greener and today I'm going to be talking to Glenn Elliott from Reward
Gateway about how staff engagement can make the difference between success and failure
in your business.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Let's start off with a basic question.
Employee engagement.
What exactly is it?
And for that matter, why is it so important?
Employee engagement is when you've got all of your workforce understanding the direction
the company is going in, understanding how their role contributes to your business success
and really wanting and driving for the business to succeed.
In the inverse of that, employee disengagement, which unfortunately many companies have, is
where you're really getting just a bare minimum from your staff.
They turn up, they do their job, they don't get fired, but they're giving you no more
than the minimum.
Engage workforces, they innovate more, they make better decisions for their customers
and for their business, and they work harder, they're more productive.
And disengaged businesses do the opposite.
So if you think about your competition, if you've got a disengaged workforce and your
competition's got an engaged one, they're going to be making better decisions, innovating
more, building better products, building better services, and delighting their customers
better.
And that's really what's important.
It sounds pretty obvious, but are employers actually getting this?
Do they understand that concept?
Yeah, they do.
I think they do very much.
There was a Harvard Business Review study last year which surveyed executives about
employee engagement, and three-quarters of them said that they believed employee engagement
was critical to their business success.
But only 25% of the same executives thought that they had a highly engaged workforce.
So that difference between 25% having it and 75% needing it, that's what we call the
engagement gap.
So what can be done to close this gap, if you like, to make employees more connected
with the employer?
Well, the interesting thing is, when you talk to employees, forget about leaders and managers,
but talk to employees within businesses, they actually want to be engaged.
They always see the problems that they see in leadership and management in their business,
so they want to.
So actually, the first step you take to creating a more engaged workforce is by saying it,
by saying we want to have you on side, we want to build a bridge, we want to build a
relationship with you, our workforce.
And I think the most important thing to start it on is open and honest, transparent communications.
So we have a model which we call the bridge, which is based on, you start with open and
honest communications with your staff, you then need to make sure your staff have got
a shared mission and purpose, so they understand what the company is trying to do, and you
have clearly stated values, and then you recognise and you start thanking people for doing a
great job and thanking people for living the values that you want.
You sound like you're an advocate of putting employee engagement at the very heart of someone's
business model.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's what we've done in our business, you know, we've been 10 years old.
We started the business with no VC capital, we started like, you know, on a couple of
credit cards.
And if I'm honest, we had no choice other than to engage our staff, because we certainly
couldn't pay them a large amount of money to turn up.
So we had to engage our staff, we hired great people, we built, you know, we built a business
around them, we made sure that they had a very open and honest, transparent culture.
And our business results over the last 10 years, we've become the biggest global provider
in HR of our type.
They are testament to what employee engagement does for your business.
So let's talk about your company Reward Gateway.
What exactly do you bring to the table?
What do you do and what do you do differently to the competition?
So we work with companies of all sizes, normally 100 staff up, but actually some of our clients
have got as few as 25, 30 staff and we work with companies right up to 150,000 in size
all around the world.
And we help them bring their employee benefits, their employee recognition and their employee
communications all together into a central place, where employees can be inspired by
the CEO's blog and the leadership team blog, be connected to what the company is doing
and trying to do.
They can see their colleagues and their peers around the business, thank them for doing
a great job, a load of stuff on peer-to-peer recognition, and they can access the employee
benefits and rewards and programs that the company has put into place as part of building
that bridge.
So we bring all that together into a hub online and on tablet and on mobile that employees
can use or brand as the employer.
Okay, so that's the theory, that's how it sort of works.
Can you give me some examples of that actually in practice of where you've actually been
working with organizations to help them?
Yeah, that's a great example actually, a very recent example for Homeserve, the plumbing
insurance company in the UK.
And Homeserve had a difficult year a couple of years back with the largest ever fine levied
by the financial services authority, and the fine was all in reflection of how they treat
their customers.
And the Homeserve recognized that they needed to really reset their culture and put their
customer right at the forefront of their culture.
This was a big deal for Homeserve, it wasn't, the fine was enormous and they knew that they
couldn't carry on trading the way they were.
And we put a program in place for them, which included employee benefits, restated their
culture and values and allowed staff and managers to thank each other by sending a simple e-card
whenever they saw those values delivered.
And they're now sending two and a half thousand e-cards every month to each other.
So we've kind of created this whole culture of looking to find people doing a good job,
which is quite the opposite to what often happens at work, people feel that their boss
and their company is there to catch them doing a bad job, because actually if you look to
find people doing a good job, when you point out that you've seen it, you get amazing things
to happen.
You're making it all sound quite innovative and quite new.
So let's take this a little bit further forward.
Where do you see this whole process being in, say, five, ten years time?
What are the trends when it comes to employee engagement?
I think there's some really interesting stuff going on with how we think about and talk
about millennials in the workplace.
And a lot of people still talk about millennials, like they landed off another planet, that
they're not human.
But of course, they're just young people, and we were all young once.
I think our millennial generation growing up is a bit different.
It's grown up in a social media world, and it's grown up with their life and their performance
being very, very visible.
And I was reading an article about the big accountancy firms and their struggle to recruit
millennials at the moment.
And apparently it's all down, their own research is it's all down to the freedom that the big
accountancy firms haven't got a clear and valuable enough mission, and they haven't
got a mission that millennials want to join to.
So I think we'll see our technology shift much more to embrace more social media.
So we're working on things where the hub that we create for employers connects automatically
to Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat.
That's really, really important.
And I think we have to move the conversation to connect with employees and talk to them
on their terms.
So I think those years of very stuffy corporate IT departments, the stuffy internal communications
departments, dictating how things would be done, they'll have to break down, and we've
got to reach out to millennials and workers on the technology platforms and tools that
they want.
Well, it's a fascinating future, and I can see it's all becoming a lot more engaged with
our work.
Glenn Elliott from Reward Gateway, thank you very much indeed.
Thanks a lot.
