Mission

To make analytical human capital research accessible, comprehensible and to bring it

closer to practice.

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Bridging Research and Practice •We seek to transfer knowledge by bridging academic research and business practice

•We provide businesses with unbiased, expert advice

•We ensure rigor in methods, validity in measures, and reliability of results

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Our Activities

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Inspiration for Action

• Case studies

• How I did it stories

• Latest thought leadership

• Summaries of leading academic research

Knowledge Co-creation

• Network meetings and conferences

• Corporate seminars

• Executive briefings

Practical Application

• Research projects with companies

• HR analytics needs assessments

• Research “spotlights” highlighting the latest research on a given topic

Trend-spotting report Why this report?

•Engagement data are not used in analytics

•There are a number of myths surrounding engagement surveys and the use of their results

Spring 2015

•Literature review

•Interviews with companies (9), academic experts (3) and survey providers (4)

•Survey (130) and public data sets (ORBIS)

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The content Why measure engagement? (p.4)

◦ ”Yes, we do!” ◦ Why do companies care about engagement? ◦ Do companies regularly conduct employee engagement surveys? ◦ How long have companies been working with employee engagement surveys? ◦ Do-it-yourself or external providers? ◦ ”No, we don’t” ◦ Nice-to-know: External providers

The use of the results (p.29) ◦ Actors ◦ Actions

Take aways (p.35) ◦ Measuring engagement ◦ Breaking through the myths ◦ ”How I did it” - case

Appendices (p. 43) ◦ A1: Methodology ◦ A2: Literature review ◦ A3: Interview guide ◦ A4: Questionnaire

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Agenda for today 13.00 - 13.45 - Dana Minbaeva

13.45 - 14.00 – Break

14.00 - 14.45 – Thomas Møller Jeppesen, LEGO Group

14.45 - 15.30 - Peter V.W. Hartmann, Mærsk Drilling

15.30 - 16.00 - Reception and networking

LinkedIn Group: “Human Capital Analytics Group”

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The use 75% of the companies in our sample conduct employee engagement surveys.

The majority of these companies conduct an employee engagement survey every year.

66% of those measuring engagement have done so for more than five years.

Two-thirds of the companies that measure engagement find the survey useful or very useful.

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Why do we care about engagement? There are two main aims for conducting employee engagement surveys: ◦ to improve business outcomes and

◦ to provide a signal to the whole organization that “engagement matters”

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DYI or external provider?

All of the providers offer full-service solutions.

The reports are usually provided in terms of averages at the team level.

None of the external providers we interviewed return the raw, individual-level data.

Most of the external providers charge extra fees for analyzing individual-level data.

Do not distinguish between anonymity and confidentiality (see footnote 3, p. 12)

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28%

27%

12%

12%

10%

4%

3%

3%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%

Other

Ennova

Rambøll

Enalyzer

IBM Kenexa

Intenz

Fact Factory

Hay Group

EXTERNAL PROVIDERS

See p. 15

What do you do with the results?

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94%

93%

93%

87%

73%

63%

47%

46%

40%

39%

23%

6%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Distribute to team managers

Compare data to prior years

Distribute to top management

Encourage discussions in the teams

Develop action plans for overall company

Use data for internal benchmarking

Use findings for strategic decision making

Predict future engagement problems

Link them to KPI and dashboards

Conduct statistical analyses on the raw data

Use data for external benchmarking

Other

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE RESULTS OF THE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SURVEY?

Passive measure of status quo

Active working with the results

The usefullness Actors

◦ Top management

◦ Line managers and team leaders

◦ HR department and HR business partners

The usefullness Actions: the top three that correlate (p < 0.05) with revenue (year 2014, source: ORBIS) in descending order are: ◦ Use for internal benchmarking (correlation coefficient:

0.006),

◦ Use for strategic decision making (correlation coefficient: 0.015) and

◦ Conduct statistical analyses on the raw data (correlation coefficient: 0.018).

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Distribute to team managers; compare data to prior years; distribute to top management; encourage discussions in the teams; develop action plans for overall company; use for strategic decision making

"Creating a

discourse": Use for internal benchmarking; predict future engagement problems; link data to KPI and dashboards; conduct statistical analyses on the raw data; use for benchmarking against competitors.

"Using data for

analytics":

The usefullness Actions

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Those companies with the highest performance (revenue, last year available) are those companies that not only extensively use the results of engagement surveys

as inputs in analytics but are also very good (above the mean) in creating discourse about dialogue and cooperation.

Takeaways Measure engagement

Manage the process ◦ Define the purpose ◦ Measure it right

◦ Ask the right questions,

◦ Ask them in the right way (e.g., simple formations, simple language),

◦ Use multiple questions for increased accuracy, and

◦ Pilot, test, and validate.

Put it to work

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“We clearly saw the big differences in employee mood … and learnt from what creates more stress among our people. This is interesting for future comparisons on how our employee engagement is affected … Before we started measuring employee engagement in real-time 7 months ago we were curious about what would make our employees press the red button. Now we know!”

- Katharina Brinkmann, - HR Officer at Unilever Kleve,

If poorly implemented - it will misfire!

Engagement scores: ◦ a judgement tool (with the purpose of obtaining

information)?

◦ a diagnostic tool (with the purpose of generating knowledge through feedback)?

Example: ◦ ”…As engagement scores were linked to compensation,

managers shut down and failed to embrace employee feedback. All they cared about was how to ensure a better score the next year.”

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Combine engagement results with other measures of organizational and business processes

Henrik Gjesing Antvor, Senior Specialist in Analytics at Vestas Wind Systems A/S: ◦ “An understanding of the fact that even though engagement

is important for driving discretionary effort, reducing absenteeism, and boosting retention, it is not enough to ensure business success..”

Thomas Rasmussen, VP of HR Data and Analytics at Shell ◦ "For most companies, engagement is a means to an end and

not actually about driving engagement – it is about driving the outcomes in terms of financial, operational, and safety results via human capital".

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Poor organization of engagement data can be very costly.

When formal, centralized coordination of data collection is lacking, such problems as data duplication or wrong entries can occur.

Another costly mistake is a failure to document changes in the organization (e.g., business-unit reorganizations). As organizational changes can modify the relationships under study, a failure to model them, biases analytics-based decision-making processes.

See more on www.cbs.dk/hc-analytics under ”Research insights” : Five costly mistakes

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Tell a story The results of an employee engagement survey should be presented in a clear and understandable manner.

Thomas Rasmussen and David Ulrich write in their article on “How HR analytics avoids being management fad”:

◦ “If you cannot tell your story, including implications and recommendations in one slide (regardless of study complexity and amount of data used) then the odds of getting executive buy-in are slim”

Benchmarking is rarely informative or actionable but …

Employee engagement surveys work best when they are integrated with other qualitative approaches, such as interviews, focus groups, archival data analyses, and direct observations

You then need to use analytics to "illuminate" your story. As the Scottish novelist Andrew Lang wrote in 1937:

◦ ‘‘I shall try not to use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts, for support rather than for illumination”

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Breaking through the myths Myth 1: “We cannot get individual-level data because of the anonymity requirement”.

Myth 2: “We must have sophisticated analytical skills and special software to work with the results of employee engagement surveys”.

Myth 3. We cannot rely on the results of engagement surveys, as employee engagement is not a solid indicator of performance.

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Manage employee engagement rather than simply measure it, and do

so by supporting your managerial intuition with

solid evidence.

For more information Contact Us Human Capital Analytics Group Copenhagen Business School Kilevej 14, Office 2.74a 2000 Frederiksberg E-mail: hc-analytics@cbs.dk www.cbs.dk/hc-analytics LinkedIn Group: “Human Capital Analytics Group”

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