We’re seeing a trend in a title that is becoming more common with organizations we talk with: Employee Engagement Director.
This is exciting to us because, at Snowfly, we’re all about employee engagement. We know that an engaged employee is someone who cares about your mission and vision. They care about their work, the customers, the team, culture… everything you care about. They want what’s best for the organization and will work in ways an unengaged employee might not.
Of course, Employee Engagement Director (or, Director of Employee Engagement, or VP, or anything to do with Culture) is not new. You can find plenty of people with this title on LinkedIn. This goes beyond the focus of an HR leader, who has so many responsibilities, and really puts an emphasis on this fuzzy notion of employee engagement.
Excelling as an Employee Engagement Director can feel hard. There are some very critical elements you need in place.
Recruiter Leadership at Every Level
Every leader and manager needs to think about employee engagement. Sure, they need to take care of their team’s mission, whether that is better products, more sales, accurate accounting, or whatever the team’s mission is. But employee engagement is not a job for one person, if with a director or VP title.
Employee engagement needs to be part of the DNA, part of the entire culture. You can’t have one leader talking about it, and what they are doing to improve engagement, while other leaders treat their employees poorly or don’t create the environment employees need, deserve, or expect. This has to be a coordinated effort across the organization. If your boss is great but your friend’s boss is a jerk, you’ll hear about their bad work environment. Words like “toxic” may be thrown around, which will impact how you think about your organization. This can impact everyone’s engagement, as well as the employer brand and retention.
Every leader needs to be onboard with the idea of employee engagement, and the culture you are building.
Employee Engagement Directors Need Metrics
One of the best HR directors I worked with broke the stereotypes of HR Directors. She was one of the most strategic, long-term, visionary leaders I’ve ever worked with. She spent some time with me one afternoon talking about some of her strategies, her vision, what drove her, and why she was creating the programs she was creating.
And she backed everything up with numbers and metrics.
I was blown away. I have talked with a lot of organizational leaders but she stood out. After meeting with her I had no doubt in her vision, nor in her ability to execute on her vision.
You probably have a vision, as an Employee Engagement Director. I invite you to get serious about numbers and metrics for one simple reason: Many of the people you have to sell your vision to, from organizational executives to every worker, can be persuaded by metrics. When you come prepared with knowledge about industry trends, and can measure where your organization is at against those trends, you instill confidence in others. It’s hard to argue with real, and good, numbers.
When you propose a new program, and have an educated estimate how the program will impact your metrics, you show your decisions and vision is not based on emotions or whims, rather it’s all part of a strategic plan you have created.
There’s a lot of talk about making data-based decisions, and your role as Employee Engagement Director isn’t exempt from this!
Employee Engagement Directors Need Tools
In order to effectively deliver, manage, and track these metrics, and your programs, you’ll need tools. We’ve seen organizations manage their incentives and rewards programs with file cabinets or spreadsheets. This may be okay for a while, with a small team or a very simple program, but these programs can very easily get out of hand. Managing them manually could become a mess, which, when they start to fail, causes problems with employees.
A big part of employee engagement is trust: your employees need to trust you and the systems you bring to them.
Snowfly has tools to help with many aspects of your employee engagement. We have automated incentives and reward systems that will knock your socks off, even if your needs are very complex. They work 24×7 and provide you the reports you need to know what’s going on.
We also have employee engagement surveys that can help you measure sentiment at the individual level. You can create whatever surveys you need, whether they are text-based (to get real thoughts and ideas from your team) or numeric (for easy reporting), or a healthy mix of the two, and deliver them to your team. These can be anonymous, or not. You can send these surveys as often as you need (perhaps every quarter or six months), and then track trends.
Those are just two examples of tools an Employee Engagement Director should use. Whether you are looking for tools to deliver better experiences, and build a stronger culture, or tools to measure and monitor, we can help.
Employee Engagement Can’t Be an Afterthought
There are articles now about The Great Resignation, in which we are seeing many people resign, quit, and otherwise leave their employer in shocking numbers. While some organization executives wring their hands, wondering how this could have happened, and what they could do to get employees back, others are much more strategic.
Employee engagement is not new. It’s been around forever. But it’s time to make this a significant part of your strategy moving forward. I think one of the great lessons from The Great Resignation is that employees, at every level, matter. We need to do better, and create better environments.
The Employee Engagement Director can be one of the most important leaders at your organization, to help ensure you have the workforce you need for years to come.
If this is interesting to you, let us know! We’d love to chat with you about your needs and challenges, and hear what you are doing well! Click the link below and let’s schedule a call!
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