Creating A Culture of Engagement: The HR Leader’s New Strategic Role

The days start running together when you’re up at seven in the morning after a late night, but I enjoyed the session this morning quite a bit. as I’ve said before, I’m here for the leadership, strategic planing, and culture coverage, and that’s what the session by Tom Roth was all about.

Creating a culture of engagement: The HR leader’s new strategic role

The session kicked off by talking about customer engagement. I quickly snagged my guide to make sure I was in the right session, because I thought it was supposed to be about employee engagement. A short story later and I understood the intersection of the two. I’ll paraphrase the anecdote:

Company A is selling parts to Company B who is reselling those to Company C. Somewhere between B and C something is breaking the parts, because they are in good condition when they leave A. Instead of just saying to Company B, “That’s your problem; deal with it,” Company A put together a team of engineers from across all three organizations to find and solve the problem at their own expense.

Just like the #SHRM10 session on customer service, this short story embodies that extra effort needed to truly excel as either an individual or an organization.

Quick hits from the session

• There are five keys to employee engagement. They include the quality of the relationship with your manager, meaningful work, development opportunities, cooperation with coworkers, and the level of trust at work. Speaking of trust…
• High levels of distrust are causing a rift between employer/employee. Mr. Roth quoted some research showing the high level of distrust/disconnect between employees and employers. The gist of it? A high percentage of people don’t think leaders laid off workers due to economy, but they did to it due to ulterior motives.
• The real definition of culture. The stock definition of culture involves the shared beliefs and behaviors of a group. The business application of that is the set of behavioral patterns in the workplace that is encouraged by leadership. That gets us around those silly corporate values statements and places responsibility on leaders to encourage the behaviors that support their value system.
• What problems do executives see with engagement? Mr. Roth said that a major issue for the C-suite is the lack of consistency in how organizational leaders are approaching engagement. Another problem is that they want to work on engaging employees, but they don’t know how to make it happen.
• Tell your own story. One of the exercises we did in the session required us to think of the person in our lives who embodies the “ideal” leader. We then had to share the qualities about that person that make them such a powerful figure in our eyes.
• What sort of culture do effective leaders create? Leaders establish a culture that places emphasis on the elements of opportunity, personal accountability, validation, inclusion, and community.

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