Tag Archives: employee engagement

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8 Steps to Great Employee Focus Groups

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Are your employees fully engaged? Are you interested in getting to the point where you can answer “Yes!” to that question without hesitating? If so, you need to follow along with me in this series on employee engagement. Today, we will look at steps to hosting great employee focus groups.

employee focus groups

Employee Engagement

As I said in my last couple of posts, I have seen a lot of material on employee engagement lately. The more I have seen on this topic, the more I have realized how much our organization needs to improve. I assume many of you have the same needs.

I have taken the various sources of the material I have seen or heard and I have condensed into a fairly simple action plan that I am going to follow over the next several months. I am going to explain my action plan in this series and then I am going to implement it, keeping you informed of my progress as I go.

You will hear about the wins and losses, the good, the bad, and the ugly! Hopefully, this process will help you implement similar employee engagement efforts in your own business.

Step Two: Employee Focus Groups

The goal of this step is to sit face-to-face with every employee and get their honest feedback on how you might work to improve the workplace. Make sure to consider all of the factors described below in making this step successful.

Great Material

The ideas for this step came from a conversation with Michael Hyatt and several other commenters on his blog. You can read the two posts (and the comments on each) Here and Here.

Keep in mind, as I described earlier, I have not yet executed the following steps in my employee engagement plan. I am telling you about them before I implement them, but they have been used successfully by others I trust and respect. I will follow up with the results in a future post.

Hosting Employee Focus Groups

Here are the eight steps:

1. Make the setting an informal one. Make sure you have food and hold the gathering in a comfortable environment. If possible, meet somewhere other than where other meetings take place. If that is not possible, find other ways to soften the environment.

2. Make the employees feel safe. Managers should not be present. Depending on your structure, you may want to add a meeting or two of only managers. Regardless, the employees in each meeting need to feel safe, free from repercussions from their comments. They need to know they will not be shot for telling the truth.

3. Keep it simple. Don’t go in with pages of questions! Michael Hyatt recommended using the four questions below.

  • What does your ideal Saturday (day off) look like?
  • What do you like about our company that you hope never changes?
  • Where could we improve?
  • If you were the CEO for a day, what is one of the first things you would change?

4. Take notes. Everyone knows you cannot possibly remember all of their suggestions. Take pen and paper and show them you are sincere about getting every last suggestion or idea down on paper. Ask clarifying questions as you do so.

5. Review your notes with them. At the end of the meeting, hit the highlights of what you have written down. Show them that you have truly been listening. Make sure you correctly interpreted their comments. Add any necessary clarifications at this time.

6. Quickly implement as many ideas as you can. There is nothing you can say that will prove your sincerity better than implementing ideas you were given in this meeting. Show them that you are genuinely interested in their needs and you will earn their hearts!

7. Communicate the implemented ideas across the company. Even if you don’t implement something from everyone, when someone in another department hears about something you implemented from another department, they will still feel like they were heard.

8. Make this an ongoing process, not a one-time thing! Everyone needs to know this is not just a one-time idea you had. They need to know this is part of how you do business from now on. Don’t allow these meetings to get stale over time. Freshen them up by mixing up how you execute it each time, but just make sure you continue to get in front of them and listen!

Have you had any experience with employee focus groups?

Do you see how this process could help with employee engagement in your company?

What are you going to do next?

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Setting The Stage For Employee Engagement

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As I said in my last post, I have been running across a lot of material on employee engagement lately. The best definition I can find for employment engagement is this:

An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests (Wikipedia)

The more I have seen on this topic, the more I have realized how much our organization needs to improve. That means there are likely others of you thinking the same thing.

employee engagement

Must Start At The Top

Obviously, that improvement has to start at the top if it is going to be successful. This is not because I am the best person for the project, but because if my support is not behind it, then it will not last.

Follow Along With My Action Plan

As a result of this realization, I have taken the various sources of the material I have seen or heard and I have condensed into a fairly simple action plan that I am going to follow over the next several months.

Rather than waiting until I go through the whole process before I report to you, I am instead going to tell you about my action plan ahead of time. This way, you can hear about the progress as it happens.

You will hear about the wins and losses, the good, the bad, and the ugly! Hopefully, this process will help you implement similar employee engagement efforts in your own business.

Step One: Setting the Stage

In this step, the goal is to educate the employees about the need for good, honest communication between them and the ownership of the company. Without this preparation, any efforts to improve the workplace will most likely be misdirected and ineffective.

Setting the Stage

This past Friday, I went ahead and took the first step in my plan. In this step, I set the stage for the upcoming focus I will be putting on employee engagement in our organization. As I normally do every month, I went to each of our eleven departments over the course of a couple of days to give a devotional.

Simple Story For Illustration

I started with a simple story about a church that wanted to help a missionary in India. After, collecting hundreds of bedsheets, the church congregation spent hours and hours tearing the bedsheets into thin strips to be used as bandages. They then shipped the bandages to the missionary to give out.

When the missionary in India presented the bandages to his people in India, one of the ladies held up a strip and exclaimed, “If we sow these strips together, we can have some really nice bedsheets!”

Inviting Participation

I asked the group, “Who was at fault?” Without hesitation, everyone agreed the pastor should have asked for specific needs rather than assuming a need for bandages.

We talked about when we make an effort to help others, we cannot just assume we know what they need. We must ask them what they need. We also have to make it easy (and safe) for them to tell us.

Adding A Twist

Next, I added one fact to the story that I had intentionally left out the first time I told it. I went on to tell them that the church pastor had in fact asked the missionary how his church could specifically help his people in India. Instead of offering suggestions, the missionary simply told the pastor that anything he and his church decided to give would be fine with those in India. He said he was just thankful for the help.

I asked, “Now, who is at fault?” Of course they all agreed that the missionary was now the one at fault. We discussed how it was unfair for the missionary to give so little information about the specific needs of his people when asked. We all agreed that if he had simply asked for bedsheets, he would have saved a lot of time and frustration on both sides.

Parallels to Employee Engagement

From there, I went on to draw the parallels to our organization. I explained that I would be coming around to their departments over the next several weeks to solicit some feedback from them on improving their workplace environment.

I explained how critical it will be for them to give me straight and honest feedback. I pointed back to the wasted time spent tearing and then sowing the bedsheets. If they were truly interested in an improved workplace, then it would be essential that they give thoughtful suggestions and ideas. I emphasized how their willingness to participate would determine the success of our efforts.

In my next post, I will outline my plan for the face-to-face meetings throughout the organization. Stay tuned!

Have you seen the benefits of employee engagement?

What have you done to improve it?

What more could you do?

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How To Create Employee Engagement

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I have heard it said that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. I would tend to agree with this statement. Jesus even said He would rather us be hot or cold, rather than lukewarm. If that is the case, I think there is similar application to the workplace regarding employee engagement.

employee engagement

Employee Engagement vs. Apathy

An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests (Wikipedia). An extremely negative, disengaged employee likely will not make it very long in their job, but an apathetic employee usually stays around longer and therefore is a drag on productivity, morale, and profitability. As a result, apathetic (disengaged) employees serve to more severely reduce the impact we strive for as a Christian business.

How Do You Get Them Engaged?

If we can all agree that the best employee is an engaged employee, then the next logical step is to figure out how to get all of them engaged. If we could solve the puzzle of employee engagement, then I think we could go far in creating exponential growth in our impact on eternity.

Recent Influences

Recently, this topic has been in the front of my mind for several reasons. I have had several different sources influence me toward a focus on employee engagement. First, as I mentioned in my latest series, I had a great conversation with Jim Reese, CEO of Atlanta Mission. In addition to the advice I shared in that series of posts, Mr. Reese also brought up employee engagement as a critical component of success.

Next, I read a recent post by Michael Hyatt in which he talked about changing organizational culture. Through a series of comments on that post, I learned a couple of tips about achieving employee engagement that I will share with you.

After that, I was listening to an older podcast by Andy Stanley on the way to the airport last week. In this podcast, Andy talked about how his church maintains such an engaged staff. I will share some of his methods as well.

My Focus On Employee Engagement

As a result of all of these inputs, it is obvious to me that I need to be concentrating on employee engagement in our organization, right? So this is what I am going to do. I am NOT going to wait to post about all of this until I have implemented all of these tips and methods, measured the results, and declared victory.

My Plan

Instead, I am going to give it all to you up front over the next several posts. I am also going to start implementing these ideas in our business, keeping you aware of the progress as I go. These progress reports will include the successes and failures, the pretty and the ugly! I will do my best to relay information to you that I believe will best help you do it better than we do.

Then, after all of it is implemented, I will also give you regular status reports as to the measured progress in our actual employee engagement scores going forward. I am not yet sure what this will look like, but we will find out together!

How engaged do you think your employees are right now?

What do you do to keep them engaged?

What opportunities do you have to improve?