The Four Levels of Enterprise Transformation

LINKING ENGAGEMENT AND ALIGNMENT TO OPTIMIZE
VALUE
It’s All in The Analysis
By Stanley Labovitz, CEO and Jennifer Labovitz, Director of Communications
All rights Reserved 2012©
SurveyTelligence
Powered by InfoTool, Inc.
www.surveytelligence.com
1(866) 616-5552
A
INTRODUCTION
This white paper is a guide for CEOs who want to optimize
workforce effectiveness and increase value for stakeholders. If you
are not 100% committed to that goal, read no further! STOP HERE
and go watch the new Batman movie!
Good communication,
customized survey design,
and excellent
analysis/feedback tools can
align and optimize the value
of any organization.
My motivation is writing this is to share what we’ve learned over 12
years, as a consulting company, in developing and applying
technology, alignment, and engagement tools to the goal that every
CEO seeks: optimized workforce performance and profitability. It’s a
big story and I’m not sure that I can get it all across in this short
paper. Perhaps I’ll write a book on the subject in the future. But
that’s another project.
As explained below, there are four keys to optimization. The most
important of them is the availability of a diagnostic tool with the
power to capture assessment data, analyze it, correlate it with
results, and slice and dice the data in ways to allow decision makers
like you to “see” every pocket of misalignment and employee
disengagement, even down to the smallest workgroup.
The ability to see what is going on at any or every level through a
lens of engagement/alignment will tell you exactly where to direct
your attention and intervention—and where to leave people alone!
Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool like that?
As we like to say, “If you can find it, you can fix it”.
www.surveytelligence.com
1(866)616-5552
It’s All in The Analysis
THE BUSINESS RULES
A CEO's individual ability to maximize profitability using technology, and an
alignment/engagement tool is subject to three business rules:
1. If it’s not enterprise-wide transformation, it’s not transformation
2. If the CEO is not 100% committed, forget about it!
3. Plan to spend six months implementing change from the top down and the
bottom up--and involve everybody!
For success, engagement/alignment must be treated both as a business strategy
and a corporate value. That means that the CEO must be visible and vocal in
leading the charge!
TWO POWERFUL CONCEPTS
I subscribe to the Google auto search engine. It sends me blogs and articles published on these key words:
engagement and alignment. I get zillions of these every day. I can’t delete them fast enough. Engagement and
alignment have become the hot business blog topics.
The advertised outcomes for organizations that adopt engagement/alignment seem impressive. I read lots of
flamboyant claims of huge advances in revenue and profitability, great reductions in personnel turnover, and so forth.
The claims are extraordinary to the point of being suspect. I am keeping an open mind on these claims in spite of my
skepticism. Nevertheless, I do see rapid, positive change when engagement and alignment concepts are integrated
and effectively implemented.
Alignment had its origins in research studies done at Harvard Business School back in the 1960s. Those studies found
that aligned organizations outperformed their rivals on every important measure. In retrospect we now see that that
aligned organizations also operated with the foundations of good employee engagement. The two seem to travel
together.
Not too much was published about alignment prior to The Power of Alignment, co-written by my brother, Dr. George
Labovitz, and Victor Rosansky (John Wiley & Sons, 1997). The concepts in that book, however, did not catch on like
wild fire at the time. Like fine wines, they needed to ferment before reaching their ultimate refinement.
Alignment did indeed ferment. George and Victor’s new book, Rapid Realignment (McGraw Hill, 2012) advances the
alignment concept, make it more actionable, and explains it in the fast paced world of contemporary business. This
new book delivers a step-by-step action plan for quickly integrating people, processes and strategy for unbeatable
performance. And engagement is a big part of it. Engaged employees and alignment go together like peanut butter
and jelly—an unbeatable natural combo. That book is a MUST read for every CEO.
If your survey process does not align your
organization’s vision to success, then
somewhere along the way you have chosen
the wrong survey process.
ENGAGEMENT AND ALIGNMENT
If you’re a student of organizational change, an HR professional, a consultant, a corporate executive or a manager,
you have used, or least recognizes the words engagement and alignment.
Though many people use them as buzzwords or without precision, these two words provide the pathway to
corporate optimization and transformation. Organizations can be transformed to cope with today’s change and
uncertainties when they successfully embrace engagement and alignment principles.
But what do these words mean? We need to agree on what these terms mean in order to have an intelligent
discussion here. So here we go.
WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT?
Of the many definitions of engagement floating around today, we embrace the Conference Board’s:
A heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization,
that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work.
Engaged employees demonstrate loyalty, commitment, and a sense of ownership for their work. They are the
people who will sweep the floor after 5:00 p.m. even though it’s not his or her job. These are the kind of
employees that every CEO needs in order to optimize performance. In this YOUTUBE video on the psychology of
engagement, Dr. Eric Svendsen says it much better than I:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8TZ4LAlxFQA#t=187s
Each of us has seen the TV commercial of the bank teller who runs down the street to return something to a
customer. Each of us has had a similar experience with a clerk who sold us a pair of shoes, or an airline ticket agent
who went the extra mile to help us. I had a personal experience with such a person. While on a honeymoon 38
years ago, a wonderful Pan American ticket agent upgraded our two tickets to first class tickets. She wanted to
make our trip special. Suffice it to say that I was a loyal fan of Pan Am until the day they went out of business. That
ticket agent was a customer-centric, engaged employee in an era before the term had entered the business
vocabulary. And I remember her after 38 years.
As this example makes clear, engagement is not a new concept. It is, however, a business practice that needs to be
ingrained as a business value! It is a business behavior that managers can (and must) encourage, reward and
cultivate within their organizations. Imagine what your organization would be like if its entire workforce was like
my Pan Am ticket agent!
But engagement is only half of the story.
WHAT IS ALIGNMENT?
Alignment is the other half of the high performance story. As described by Dr. George Labovitz and
Victor Rosansky in their first book, alignment “provides a way of linking strategy and people and
integrating them with customers and process improvements all at the same time! In aligned
organizations, every employee—from top to bottom—understands the company’s strategy and his or
her role in it. People understand customer needs and design their work processes to meet those
needs. They work seamlessly together across departments to give customers what they want and
how they want it.
Alignment is the essence of good organizational business practices. It is also the essence of good
management. As Labovitz and Rosansky put it: “Alignment is not about the management of quality,
it’s about the quality of management.”
Once you achieve alignment, everyone will understand what he or she can do to make your strategy a
success. People will understand how to redesign and improve work processes to make them faster,
less costly, and more satisfying to customers. Customers will be delighted and will reward you with
purchases and loyalty.
INTEGRATION
The true power of engagement and alignment are realized when they are working together: when
they are integrated. Integration is what optimizes corporate performance! Over the past 12 years of
consulting work and research we have seen that highly aligned organizations have highly engaged
employees. What comes first? The latest evidence suggests that having an engaged workforce will
fast track high levels of alignment.
This is the model of the sequence to optimization:
MEASUREMENT
Measurement is the key to integration. It is the most powerful instrument in every value
value-building
building CEOs toolkit. A
measurement system with built-in
in analysis capability can tell you the degree to which your employees are engaged
and can identify points of misalignment. Those insights enable accurate, effective and corrective decision-making
decision
and action. Measurement att each departmental level creates accountability, leading to sustainable cultural change:
the key to optimization.
The following four steps constitute the pathway to building an engaged workforce that is aligned with business
strategy, and made successful through an effective measurement and implementation plan.
FOUR STEPS OF ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION
Step 1: Survey Intelligence-The
Intelligence
harvesting
of meaningful information in a meaningful
way
Step 2: Diagnostic AnalysisAnalysis Creating value
from billons of collected data bytes
Step 3: Alignment Analysis-Developing
Analysis
best ROI action activities for each
workgroup
Step 4: ImplementationImplementation Transforming the
business culture.
STEP 1: SURVEY INTELLIGENCE
Survey Intelligence involves the entire survey management system, including assurance of an 80%-90%
response rate, a pre-survey communication strategy, videos, participation incentives, email management,
and other activities right up to collecting the survey data. At its core is a solid, customized survey
instrument aims to collect the most relevant data and that includes a variety of dependent variables for
correlation analysis. “If you don’t collect the right data, you will in all likelihood get the wrong results!”
Vision is the starting point for building the survey instrument: A future business strategy is the usual CEO’s
vision – the goal. To get a handle on the CEO’s vision, we begin with a question: “Where do you want to be
in the immediate future?” Try this approach:
Ask the senior team to think one year into the future—a future in which your organization is wildly
successful. Ask each executive to write a description of what the organization had accomplished and how it
had done it. Once you’ve identified the most commonly cited success factors from the “what and how,” you
will know how to build your measurement systems. This is alignment. But is the workforce willing to
execute? Is It engaged?
Identify the engagement drivers: What are people’s emotions, habits, ambitions, fears, etc.? Engagement
drivers provide the analyst with the needs of the entire workforce, not of only a few. There are no shortcuts
in determining these. Focus groups are narrow, biased opinions of a few. Generic polling surveys are also
shortcuts: but people are not generic! Leadership surveys alone are shortcuts; leaders require different
skills for each unique culture!
Customization is critical. No two organizations are alike. If you’re looking to transform your enterprise
toward greatness, you need to look at your organization, not the generic traits of others.
Customization of survey questions creates value, direction and control for all three of your key stakeholders:
executives, managers of each workgroup, and employees (your most important stakeholders). Each
stakeholder will be able to answer three questions: How do I get to where I need to be? How do I align my
daily work ethos to the business vision? and How can I contribute to making this organization a great place
to work?
You must also customize your communication strategy in order to get your people mentally and emotionally
ready for transformation. People need to know that this process is not another “flavor of the month”
activity. They must know that change is coming. That awareness begins the cultural shift.
We use a 5-phase approach in this Survey Intelligence level:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Understand the Vision
The Business Vision Survey--Customized
Demographic Architecture
Prelaunch communication Strategy
Survey Management
1. Understanding the Vision: “Show me the money
money,”” a well known line used by Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire, happens
to be the vision voiced by CEO’s in every board room. It’s a real life drama. To get there, everyone needs to know
what’s expected and what needs to happen in your organization to get there. We ask: “Where would you like to be in
the next year?” It’s as simple as that. Clarity around the vision statement is the key to understanding
understand your path.
2. The Customized Business Vision Survey is the path to get
getting there: Survey
urvey results must answer the critical question,
“What do you need to learn, what you need to do to get there.” SurveyTelligence experts use any of three
brainstorming tools: Structure Tree Analysis, Force Field Analysis and Contingency Diagrams to get to the “roots” of
the key drivers for the survey construction. Our Business Vision Survey has three dimensions: Engagement,
Alignment, and Organizational Excellence. All must be unique to your organization. What do your people need to
move forward, where are your potential barriers, who are your best leaders, and what does your culture look like?
Customized Survey Intelligence seeks answers related to your organization.
3. Demographic Architecture: The power of our InfoTool diagnostic engine is that it can actually see into every “nook
and cranny” and within each workgroup. The more granular the demographics, the better the analysis. “Do female
employees in our Houston office feel that they understand our strategy?” InfoTool
ool will give you the answer.
Additionally, cross tabs, aggregation and unlimited slicing of data enables extraordinary analysis.
4. Prelaunch Communication Strategy: The most overlooked feature in most survey processes
es is prelaunch
communication. Participants,, already over
over-surveyed, must be made to feel that their input will make a difference; that
their voices will be heard and have an impact
impact. “What’s in it for me?” Pre-survey
survey communication should engage
employee support and inspire honest responding. Ineffective pre-survey messaging can only lead to poor results.
5. Survey Management: Real
eal time survey statistics, a help desk, ease of the survey experience, and manager
encouragement are also components of good survey intelligence.
When your survey diagnostic function
functions like an in-depth
depth market study, you will understand
what makes your entire organization tick
STEP 2: THE DIAGNOSTIC ENGINE
A diagnostic engine should be easy to understand, statistically rich, and have robust analysis capabilities. It will have
built-in correlation analysis, unlimited cross-tab analysis, aggregation, alignment measurements, workgroup
performance variation analysis, and more. It will generate reports that provide precise, ROI actions for each
workgroup, along with automated solutions for each work group.
A top-notch diagnostic engine provides:
•
•
•
•
•
Decision making assurances
Firsthand knowledge of the organization
The location of disconnects in and between groups
Action step priorities for each workgroup
Instant delivery of ROI key actions for each leader
Your diagnostic tool should tell you what the problems are, where they’re located, and how you can fix them!
STEP 3: ALIGNMENT ANALYSIS
“Alignment is the essence of management.”
Step 3 is where Alignment Analysis takes place. It determines the best, most effective activities to be taken, and by
whom. It’s where each department is examined, each organizational body part is x-rayed, and a process to align the
people and the business takes form.
Aligning the organization and its people with strategy and customers is just good business. In an aligned organization,
every employee—from the executive suite to the loading dock—understands the strategy and goals of the business,
knows what actions to take, and is fully engaged with customers and their needs.
The goals of Alignment Analysis are to:
• Assess efficiency of key strategic work processes
• Improve the culture through each level of leadership
• Design and deploy plans to “close the gaps” between workgroups and departments
STEP 4: IMPLEMENTATION
The real essence of optimization is how effectively leadership implements the transformation“Leaders need to break the gridlock in an existing culture and energize people to move forward in the right
direction!”
Effective implementation is the most fundamental and THE most critical element of
enterprise transformation
transformation--and the most difficult to accomplish.
accomplish The most successful
implementation of change happens at all the levels of leadership at the same time –
most important
importantly, at the local departmental level. That’s where the money is made;
made
it’s where customers are satisfied or dissatisfied!
The diagnostic engine you select MUST provide each manager with his or her unique
set of steps for achieving alignment with business strategy and with customers.
customers That
is the key of enterprise transformation
transformation,, and leadership must make it happen.
Leaders need
to break the
gridlock in an
existing culture
and energize
people to
move forward
in the right
direction!
AFTER THE RESULTS ARE IN: THE CEO LEVEL
The
he most insightful data will do little good if executives and managers ignore them
or fail to respond to them through proper implementation. Let turn next to that
issue, beginning at the CEO level.
1. Unless the CEO treats engagement and alignment as company values, your
probabili
probability of success will drop by 50% or more. Every communication from the
CEO’s office, every publication
publication, must live and breathe engagement and alignment.
2. The CEO needs coaching to identify the steps that will better optimize the
business. He or she should have a complete analysis of the current state of
organizational optimization.
3. The CEO should receive a privately delivered report contain the scores he/she
received from direct reports as to their CEO’s leadership capability.
4.. The CEO should meet with the entire senior team to discuss their levels of
responsibility, with plans for goals and accountability. Each
ach senior leader should
then receive an assessment of their personal leadership and the scores of their
department
departments.
5. Each senior lleader should communicates monthly with the
he CEO on the steps
being tak
taken to implement engagement and alignment within his or her workgroup.
6. Report deployment should continue downward, with each department
supervisor receiving his own reports based on areas of responsibility, with upward
status reporting required.
7. The senior leadership must tell employees what actions THEY are taking to
improve alignment and engagement. The workforce must see that their CEO and
other top lleaders are “walking the talk.”
7. All communications must be correlated to the purpose of the survey, or a
business mission, and linked to the survey outcome measures.
8. Each leader should receive w
weekly articles that describe good leadership
practices.
AFTER THE RESULTS ARE IN: THE MANAGER LEVEL
Managers are the key to implementation success. They impact engagement and alignment at the value chain level, the
level that interacts with customers. The “bottom up” part of transformation is led by these managers. Here are my
suggestions for involving these managers once the diagnosis is complete.
1. Train the Trainer: This 2-day certification program trains internal staff members (usually HR professionals) to
analyze the data results, plot ROI actions for each individual manager, coach managers on their behavioral
influences on the workforce, and create accountability to ensure managers don’t stray from the path.
2. Each manager is coached by a trainer using targeted reports from the survey engine as to their own unique culture.
Since the report presents automated action plans for each department, a target and goal system must be
documented in writing by the certified trainer. With repeat visits, and knowing that the survey will be redone and
the scores scrutinized by the CEO, accountability will follow. Accountability breeds sustainability.
3. Managers, like their subordinates, must be engaged. Send weekly articles to each manager about good leadership
practices.
4. Every manager of every workgroup should use the data to identify and correct weaknesses in their own behaviors
and those of their departments. The data should guide them as they streamline production, align the work of the
group to the strategy of the business, and help people to understand how what they do every day contributes to
customer satisfaction.
Implementation is the key to transformation and optimization. Talk is cheap. So stop talking and start
doing!
Implementation is not only hard work, it’s essential to success. As such it should be handled with the same level of
concern that you give to your strategy and other board-level issues.
Good Luck Optimizing!
2640 Lake Shore Drive, West Palm Beach, FL 33404 | 866.616.5552 | Cell: 508.400.4094
www.surveytelligence.com | [email protected]