Employee-Centric Engagement for 2018

If you are looking to upgrade, update or improve your employee engagement program in 2018, consider doing something radically new. 

Put the employee in the driver's seat. 

Why?  

The person in charge of employee engagement is the employee. 

We've been experimenting the last few years with a new approach to employee engagement that we call employee-centric engagement, and we are discovering that it is a much-needed add on to traditional employee engagement programs, and this approach does not eliminate the traditional work in engagement, but it enhances it in a new way that puts that employee at the center.

The idea came from some work that I did many years ago in the area of productivity gainsharing.  Through a series of studies I found that even though much attention was given to sharing wealth and calculating formulas to share the gains, it seemed like the real benefit from the programs was not coming from the money but from having employees in charge of generating ideas, validating ideas and presenting ideas for productivity improvement.

We took those ideas (which are core to many other programs used over the years) and combined them with the work we had been doing at eePulse on energy pulsing. The result was a unique model for putting employees and a team of ambassadors in charge of the energy pulsing process, and using the individual employee reflection, brainstorming and ideation tools - along with root cause analysis - to help move from learning to idea generation to idea implementation to strong ROI from change.

Managers are in the coaching role instead of struggling with interpretation of bits of data from surveys.

Employees work with ambassadors by reflecting on their own data, in their own energy pulsing reports. The employees and managers find ideas and do the work necessary to present a limited number of ideas to managers. They all work together on implementation.

The whole process engages everyone - managers no longer feel the survey is a secret performance appraisal method.  Employees feel very engaged.  Employees are learning from their own data. And ambassadors, who are people interested in learning more about management, thrive by being a role that helps everyone.

2018 - it's the year to put the employee in the middle of employee engagement.