Know Values Alignment to Ensure Employee Engagement

Imagine you have invited friends over for dinner. What you will serve depends on two things:

1. what your guests enjoy, based on their allergies, dietary preferences, palate, etc. and

2. what you can make, based on your cooking skills, budget, time, etc.

Knowing these two things is the start to defining and ultimately delivering a satisfying experience for you and your guests. After all, knowledge is great, but applied knowledge is power.

Leverage Insights to Upgrade Engagement

When it comes to a successful engagement and retention strategy, it’s no different from your dinner party. Knowing what your employees value and what you can offer is the key. Specifically, here are two things most companies fail to do that will improve your employee engagement:

1. Base your retention strategy on what your employees value versus going on (and on) about your corporate values as others do and

2. Base your retention strategy on knowledge and data, rather than legacy, trends and guesswork like everyone else.

While we understand the four drivers of employee engagement, the myths, explicit or implied by Maslow’s and Anthony Robbins and every other happiness framework, are 1) that there is a ranked order of what we value, 2) that everyone’s ranking is the same and 3) that what we value does not change.

The fact is everyone priorities safety & certainty, contribution & purpose, growth & significance, and connection & belonging differently. One team member may need safety and connection far more than contribution, while another might feel the opposite. Some employees will have one or more needs fulfilled by other areas of their life, such as their family, community, etc., and won’t look to the workplace to meet those needs.

And our needs change as major life events occur. Here are some examples you may have witnessed:

• Someone has a child, elderly parents to care for, or goes back to school, increasing their need for work/life balance.

• A colleague scarred by a recent layoff or a startup employee constantly worrying about the next round of funding will have a greater need for safety than they did before these experiences.

• After reporting to a manager they hate, an employee will give far more weight to working for someone they like. It’s stunning how most of us don’t realize how important a good relationship with our boss is until we’ve experienced the agony of a difficult working relationship. You’ve probably experienced that yourself.

To increase your team engagement, you have to know, based on data not guesswork, what each of your colleagues values. Then you can develop a winning engagement and retention strategy. You will quickly realize that this bespoke approach, you being engaged and taking care to deliver what your team members prioritize, is very much worth it. After all, engagement is a two-way street.

To understand your team members’ priorities, you can develop a method in-house or leverage our platform, designed to do exactly that. Yes, no more guesswork!

Our system requires less than five minutes to deliver Values Alignment Data. You get a detailed report and a debriefing session. Leveraging this data will give you answers to the following critical questions:

1. What does each team member value?

2. What are the most important values across the team?

3. Who is least satisfied and therefore at highest risk of quitting?

4. What can you do to engage and retain those who are least satisfied, considering your specific business environment?

5. Which current incentives and business practices are a waste of time and money?

For any given team, from scrappy startups to multinationals to non-profits, what the data reveals is truly fascinating. With these insights in hand, our clients immediately move from assuming to knowing what specific team members value and what actions to prioritize. Once they see the data, they can’t unsee it. With guidance tailored to your specific team, the right moves become obvious.

Having good data is transformative. Which is why after every debriefing where a leader first sees the data, they ask “Can I use this in hiring?” Of course you can. Why speculate when you can be certain.

Long term engagement depends not just on understanding what your existing team members value; you must discern what your potential employees value, too. There is no point in bringing on someone who will be disappointed, then disengaged, then (in all likelihood) departing, leaving you to restart the expensive and draining hiring and training process yet again.

What I Have Learned from The Data

We cannot assume from industry or company size, that we will know the answers to the questions above on what a team values. It’s easy to think that bankers want growth, nonprofit workers want contribution. Wrong. Each team is unique and will answer our five-minute survey questions differently.

Another surprise: not everyone prizes growth! It’s almost a fact ingrained in our collective unconsciousness, that people want to get ahead. Looking at the dataset, you see that this is simply not true. It’s also not the case that Gen-whatever is more ambitious than other generations. People of all ages, at various stages in life, with evolving circumstances, have differing needs. Many give growth less weight than other, more pressing, values.

My biggest takeaway from many years of crunching numbers is that crunching numbers is the way to go. Without data, it’s a stab in the dark as to what’s going on below a team’s surface. As one client put it, “it felt like we switched on a light and discovered what was hidden.”

Shifting to Data-Driven Leadership

So far we have discussed how to affect three of the four drivers of long-term engagement (safety & certainty, contribution & purpose and growth & significance) with tools most companies already have. We emphasized that leaders gain an edge by not only addressing these needs generally, but by getting to know, with data versus guesswork, exactly which of these needs their team members hold dear. This allows managers to craft and implement a customized, powerful retention strategy that will measurably reduce employee turnover.

Ultimately, we all have the same goal. Whether you’re leveraging data from our platform or another source, we want leaders and organizations to save time, money and frustration by creating a better work environment. It’s a win-win for employers and employees.

So you have a choice to make. Are you the type of leader who resists the unknown in favor of sticking with the familiar, or are you prepared to try something new and base your opinion on the results. In the words of the poet Robert Frost, I invite you to take the road “less traveled by” and experience for yourself the power of data-driven retention strategies.

Curious how you can improve your team engagement? I invite you to click the button below to setup a call.

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