Building bridges: nurturing employer and employee engagement

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the People Podcast by Partners End. A platform dedicated to delving deep into the realms of workplace well-being and culture, where we uncover the latest trends, strategies and insights to empower you in navigating these ever-changing landscapes. I'm your host, Anne Cochran, and I'm excited to bring to life the experience we have at Partners End of working with some of the very best people leaders and HR professionals from across the UK. This supplemented with expert insight from my guests. Whether you're a HR specialist seeking to stay ahead of the curve, a business owner looking at ways to engage with employees, or simply someone curious about how to get the most from your team, this podcast is for you. Let's dive into our first episode. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everybody, to the People's Podcast by Partners End. Delighted to be joined by two guests today, Danny Sedu and Jonathan Rumor. Today's episode is going to focus on employee engagement, a term that is a really wide scope of meaning. A clearer view of what employee engagement means, and what good looks like, can really help to improve the connection between employee and employer. Engage staff are typically more productive, loyal, and work with their employers to achieve mutual goals. Let's dive in and introduce my first guest, Danny Sedu. Welcome to the podcast, Danny. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself, please? Rumor has it you've been rather busy of late. I have. Thank you very much, Dan, and it's a pleasure to be on this podcast. When it was Danny Sardou, I'm head of people in culture for WaveMaker. I've been in the People's Space for about 20 years now, or a massive Arsenal fan. And I've just written my first book. I'm also delighted to have Jonathan Rumor with us, a founder of YouLife. Jonathan, please do so as a little bit about yourself, and you're journey safe far with YouLife. Yeah, sure. Thank you. My name is Jonathan. As you mentioned, the co-founder of YouLife and YouLife is a global financial services company on a mission to inspire millions of people to live their best lives every day. So we inspire and reward people for looking after their wellbeing. My own personal journey, South African, in London now for 10 plus years. No football association, though, I don't have an affiliation, which is causing problems for my son now, who just turned seven and starting to become a football fanatic. And he's leaning towards Arsenal, I must say. Although when I spoke to my CEO about it, he just said, "Please literally anyone except for Arsenal." He said, "I don't care which, just anyone except for Arsenal." So my son will make his own decisions, but at the moment, sorry, Sammy, when you listen to this podcast, I apologize in advance. You know, it's only so much you can do for your kids, like you have to let them on their own eventually. (laughing) - He will go to the right team, I can feel it. Brilliant, thank you for the intros, Chaps. In my experience, employee engagement can mean so many different things. So I'd love to kick off with hearing your views and what employee engagement means to you. Danny, your right, employee engagement can be very broad. A component for me that's very important is how much your people lean into the organization and its culture. What the organization is doing, I suppose in terms of its purpose and drive, and also how much people lean into the organization and do things with the organization outside of their day job. You have a spectrum of people who come into work, kind of just do their nine to five go home, and that's it, which is absolutely fine. Versus people who lean in more, who have very strong relationships within the organization and company, they do extra-curricular things, care about what the company is doing, and make time to support the company outside of their day job. I think there's obviously that all the way to the people who don't do much and in between, so there's a bit of a spectrum, especially in my field, what you're hoping for is that you create an organization where your people are engaged, and there is this kind of we, not me factor when it comes to the culture. Yeah, we, not me factor, that's a really good way of describing that, love that. What's your take, Jonathan? I actually agree a lot with what Danny was saying there in many ways, and I'm hoping this isn't one of those podcast panels where literally every speaker just goes, I agree with everything that the previous speaker said. So we'll find something to argue about, don't worry. But I think for me, slightly different wording, but slightly different emphasis is around partnership, that last part that Danny mentioned, there is around the partnership where employee and employer are working together, achieve certain outcomes together. Business outcomes, great personal outcomes as well. It's kind of a reflection of how employee benefits have changed over the last few years, and the way that work has changed over the last few decades as well. Because if you look historically, work was very much a patriarchal system where you had your boss, it was very hierarchical, and then the boss spoke to this one, and this one, and this one, and the son of a way down, and you effectively probably would have been there for life. So it was very much like a parent to child relationship. And the employee benefits in the way that companies engaged was very much reflective of that as well. So the main thing would have been your pension, you'll stay here forever, you'll get a gold watch when you've been here for 40 years, and then you'll have your pension and you'll die. And I think that the way that work has changed is that people often have multiple careers within their career now, and they change. So we've moved more from a parental approach to more of a partnership approach. Let's work together for the next two years, three years, five years. I'll get the best out of you. You get the best out of me. We'll both achieve something together and move on happily from there. So I think that employee engagement is around that partnership and recognizing that it might not have to be forever, but let's make the best of it together. So a collaborative partnership, Jonathan, rather than a transactional one where you kind of clock in, clock out, and that's your day done. Yes. Tell me a little bit about your own experience of employee engagement. Any examples where you've seen some really strong engagement either skills or strategies that have really improved engagement or maybe some examples of where you haven't seen the results that you've wanted, danning any examples from you good or bad. So in the different companies I've worked in, where I've seen really good employee engagement, one of the critical factors to that has been the quality of the internal comms, the strategy around internal comms and what that looks like. Where I've seen it not works so well is where that hasn't been so great. We have worked in organizations where the internal comms has been heavily email-led. It gets drowned. People don't know what to focus on. There's no kind of timing or kind of strategy to a comms that goes out. They don't think about what is the purpose of the comms channels that they have. I don't think they see internal comms as the importance that they should be putting on it. And the impact it should have. For me, it's a very cultural thing. And this might be controversial. Where I've seen internal comms function struggle is where it's sat under marketing. And it's seen as a marketing function, not as a people and culture function. I feel internal comms is very much a people and culture function and when that's been seen as that, the attitude behind it and the approach to it has been very much around engaging our employees in the right way to form that. I love the word Jonathan, he's partnership between the company and the people to drive inclusive culture, great ways of working, belonging, all that fun stuff. Yeah, internal comms is, I think, has been something that's been really critical. That's where I've seen it not work. So where it's been really good, the way it hasn't worked really well. Great, communication, absolutely essential. And I guess there are so many different ways to now communicate with your teams and your employees. It's not an easy challenge, Danny, right? Definitely, definitely not an easy challenge. Especially, I think it's become free COVID. We had certain comms channels. There was certain ways we communicated. I think now that post COVID in this high working world, we find ourselves in where most organizations are not back in the office five days a week, your internal comms has to have much more channels to it and be more flexible and more adaptable to people's working situation. Brilliant, thank you, Danny. Makes complete sense, Jonathan. I'd love to get you a view on the good and bad that you've seen of engagement. Yeah, we see lots. And I think majority of companies have good intentions and sometimes they just don't know what to do. There are a few companies who are there who actually don't care. And that's very interesting. And they don't tend to ever become customers of ours, but it was very much also in the early days when you'd go out and you'd talk, this is the benefit of employee engagement. This is the benefit of employee wellbeing. And occasionally you would get someone just say, pay the messatteria, it's enough. It's very interesting, but heart, that's very, very rare. So I think most companies have good intentions. I think where a lot of companies go wrong is they focus on function over feeling. So there's a great meme which you'll often see on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever else it is where it says, your company's internal software and you just see this page with 4,000 text boxes and it's gray and instructions and it's the most overly complicated thing in the entire world. And then it says Google and you just see like one search bar and it's clean and it's easy to use. So I think that companies often spend too much time focusing on functional outcomes. This is what's going to be the best way to get the function done as opposed to thinking about, how does this actually gonna make my employees feel? Are they gonna get a good feeling by using this? Are they gonna get a good feeling? Are they gonna get benefit from doing this? Yes, the work needs to be done. However, can we do it in such a way that there's actually a positivity that's associated with it? So the best organizations have seen who could have been engaging their staff focus on that emotional connection as well. So yes, we have to get to a functional outcome but how do we do it in such a way that employees actually feel like they're being brought along? And it's actually not just ruining their day to have to use that piece of software to actually being seen as an improvement and the same thing applies to everything. So I think the best companies focus on feelings alongside function. I would absolutely have to agree. with that, right? We're not arguing yet, which is a good thing. We'll get there, don't worry. Even if I have to fake it at the end. I completely agree with you. I think companies have started to realize that you need to have a combination of function and feeling. We can call it the 2F, so I'll give that to you. Function and feeling, because I'm going to use this a lot, but I think COVID has added impact on this. I think the reason why that is added impact on this is because when we were going through lockdown and people were working from home, people had a chance to really reflect on what was important to them. Also, when you're working from your home, people were forming more personal connections with their workplace because they're working from the most personal place in their lives. I should know people so much better at working from their homes because you saw more of their kind of personal life and what was going on. As a result of that, especially in the people engagement space, if you don't have that connection, that emotional feeling connection, you're not going to bring people in like you used to. That's one of the challenges companies are facing with engaging with their employees. They're just making it functional and not having that feeling as well. I think COVID has really amplified that. People want that more personal connection of especially what's happened over the last few years. Function and feeling, the 2F, it's a little take we're there for the listeners. Love the insight. That's really good. Thank you. We touched here on the pandemic and the change of the world of work, looking a little bit further into remote working and that shift that we've seen. How has that shift towards working from home hybrid working impacted employee engagement? Has it been a positive thing, Danny? I should probably controversial to say it's been positive and negative. I think it's been positive because it's allowed people to work around their personal circumstances and to have a better balance between work and their personal life. It's tough to combine your personal life work life. If you're always in the office five days a week with working in a hybrid way, you get to see your family more, you get to be closer to the heartbeat of your life and what you're doing. Until work around that, for people who are parents, they can drop their kids off in the morning, pick them up from school. There's more of that connection with their personal life, which is a good thing. Companies who are offering that people will be more engaged because they're being allowed to balance their work and their personal life a bit better. The thing that's probably a negative from it is it's making it harder to connect with people in the workplace or to connect with your colleagues. When you're working five days a week from the office, it was easier to kind of get to know your colleagues because you were with them five days a week and you were seeing them every day. Now it is more challenging. You have to make the constructive effort to kind of come in and see people and have that connection and to form those bonds in relationships. Also, that collaborative working across functional teams is more difficult and more challenging. Also creating that physical culture in the office is more challenging. It's great that yes, in one hand, there's more of that personal kind of balance, being more adaptable to one's personal lifestyle. The human connection, that collaborative working and those skills you form from kind of working with people, it is a bit more challenging, a bit harder. We're definitely finding it from a kind of generational perspective because in my role, I look after talent and we have what we call early careers and those are people who have zero to three years work experience in total. Some of the younger generation are struggling to build up those interpersonal skills because of hybrid working. So I'd say there's a positive and a negative. Thank you, Danny. Any tips on the negatives or the challenges that have come with that? In terms of how to overcome those challenges, you mean? Yes. I would say that leaders are really key to this. I think leaders and managers have to make a constructive effort to find reasons to bring teams together, but we'll deliver good outputs. I don't just bring people together for the sake of bringing people together, but actually bringing people for a valid reason that actually needs collaboration needs togetherness. Things like problem solving, blue sky thinking, having those kind of things and doing more things around team building and away days to bring people together, people need to make a more conservative effort because there's a real challenge that we will lose some of that kind of interpersonal skills and kind of collaborative ways of working and forming relationships to be able to influence and provide really good services. If we don't kind of come together more? Sure. Thank you, Danny. And the point that I hear there is, you know, bring people together when there's a really good reason or purpose for doing so. Don't do it for the sake of it. That can be a bit of a trap, can to do organizing meetings. Well, that goes against them engaging with our people. So that's one of the things I've seen in our organisations where they bring people together just because they feel they need to and tick box. Jonathan, what about your take on remote working? How has it worked for you and the team at ULIFE? Personally, I love it. I spent most of my day in my little office here with my two dogs on the floor, usually sitting in front of the heater. So personally, from my perspective, I do enjoy working from home most of the time. I think that the caveats are around. There's again, similar to what Danny was saying, we'll have to talk politics soon and then or eventually find something to disagree on. But I think the advice for myself in terms of I like working from home is something very different to what I actually gave to my younger brother who's quite a lot younger than me is 25 starting a career. And we were looking at a job spec together and he said, no, I don't want to apply for this one because it requires you to be in the office five days a week. I was like, that's the exact job you should be applying for right now. You're just starting your career. You need to be in the office. You need to be learning. You need to be meeting people. Anything that's remote only, you should not be applying to right now at that specific stage in your career. So I think when you're very much at the early stage and it's about learning and it's about understanding and getting to know the business and the way that the world works, there's very little you can do to replace face to face and being with the team. I also find generally transactional work who is far better from home. You get stuff done that there's fewer interruptions, but anything that's creative or you want to do something that's a little bit more unique face to face is definitely better. But I think for us certainly at ULIFE we've taken quite a flexible approach and then each team will really set the cadence for themselves. So certain teams, the personalities or the work just means that being together in person is actually far more important and other teams are thriving from having nearly permanent work from home. So I think it's a bit flexible team-wise as well. So giving teams the autonomy to decide how to best work and collaborate depending on projects, personnel and the makeup of that team Jonathan is what I hear? Yes. Danny, potentially an opportunity for you to disagree. What's your take? Engagement, is it more effective to carry out communications to improve engagement virtually or in person? I think you need both. I'm a massive believer in a multi-channel approach to a lot of things. I don't think one site fits all. I think we need to cater to people. I think people like choice. When it comes to engagement you need to consider and be as inclusive as possible. So I think having both and having a campaign in a strategy where you have both and it's kind of doesn't contradict one another or we'll channel sell each other to kind of get to a common goal. I think is the way forward. The best people engagement I've seen post-COVID have been that kind of virtual and in person but done in a way that kind of works and there's a real synergy. I think if you do one or the other then you put yourself at a disadvantage. If you just do in person you're going to miss people who for that period or for can't get to impressive for whatever reason and if you just do virtual then you won't get to people who prefer to do it in person. So I think you need both. Okay very much a hybrid approach then to capture and engage with as many of the employees as you can do. We've touched on leaders and line managers and and the importance that this these positions have on driving engagement and connecting teams. Jonathan just just how important are business leaders and line managers and helping a business connect with this employees. Ultimately everything starts from the people who set the example and usually within a business that's going to be the leaders the managers etc. And as you know Danny spoke about at the beginning around setting culture and people in culture culture is really the sum of what you do not what you say it's really what you do so it is all about setting the example and when leaders do that then people tend to follow and I think that really is is absolutely critical at the end of the day. I know sometimes that you know you can make it fun as well and thinking about some of the rollouts that we've done where you do almost like a challenge your boss. Walking jewels and you know once once the boss comes in and says you know what I'm going to participate in this I'm going to make it fun you can all challenge me and we'll we'll have a fun walking competition day it gives everybody else permission to get involved and then to follow. So ultimately you have to set the example otherwise it's do what I say and not what I do and they've never lost as well. No, that doesn't work at that approach anymore does it? We've seen here a big move away from that type of approach being successful I think what's your take Danny? He's somehow really nicely by everything you know for me usually most things start from our leaders or senior leaders because they're the ones who should be setting the example you know with all shadow of a leader concept you asked me a question earlier around where have I seen companies do people engage with really well versus ones that haven't and I said one of the factors is internal comms one of the other critical factors to people engagement is the engagement of your senior leaders and how important they think engaging their people is and how easy if you find it to get that by and Danny. For me COVID was such a big thing and such an impactful thing that actually highlighted so many things so pre-COVID I remember in the organization I was working in it was more challenging to get our leaders to understand the importance of internal comms because you were in the office five days we can maybe they didn't understand the significance of the impact it was like well my guys are always in I can communicate with them whenever I need to when we went through COVID and actually you were working remotely and you couldn't see your people then it was like oh my god we need to engage with our people we need to be connected where are they and everybody started to stress out and feel really desperate in that sense and actually a really good people engagement function and actually a really good people engagement strategy and keeping people connected they saw the importance and the benefit of it during COVID and since we've come out of it. It's been a lot easier to because I think that hangover of COVID and understanding the importance of people engagement and feeling connected has kind of stemmed out. So it's much easier now and I'm hoping that continues on to the foreseeable future because if leaders do not in an organisation see the importance of engagement with their people and people engagement then it won't have the impact it's meant to. Jonathan Mentsch, some people leaders don't see the importance of it or have seen as a tick-boggling exercise historically. So it's interesting I'm just reflecting on something in the conversation we've had before and there was two things that came to mind from experiences we've had which I think are worth sharing because I think there's nuggets of a real value there for a lot of people and the first is around how do you engage with people and in the beginning we very much as you life started with you know it's app and it's mobile and you've got to be there you've got to be in the person's hand you've got to be you know you've got to be there and I think to a large degree that still holds but I was also very important lesson by one of our very earliest customers who was the antithesis of a tech business. It's a manufacturing company in North East Wales it took hours on a train to get there and you know arriving in this little town and waiting for a taxi and you go for a 25 minute taxi ride and it costed £75 or something like it was the furthest thing away from what a London shortage based you know VC back business could be and we sat in just outside of the warehouse in the little office talking about how they engaging there with their staff and the specific area we're talking around was was the EAP the employee assistance program none of this staff had emails none of them you know they know loud phones in in the warehouse like how do you actually tell people about this and she said we put it at the back of the bathroom stall doors the posters about the EAP and I okay that's random she said no because it makes a lot of sense when somebody's struggling at work they don't want to tell anyone they need a bit of space and time on their own so where do they go they go and sit in the stall in the bathroom so it is the single best place to have the EAP message is on the back of the toilet door stall and it was like the sepiphany for me is it's not about the medium it's about being where people are when they need it and it was such a brilliant lesson to be told to that stage of our business when we were just getting going is that it's not about the way you think people communicate it's about being where they need you at the right time so that was a very important lesson and the second thing is around the limitations of internal comms so for us as well when we roll out generally we often rely on the internal comms of a company but we ran into this issue that if we rely on a company's internal comms we can never do better than them it's engaging their staff because we go to them and say what's your email open rate now go actually brilliant 35% for our newsletter and we're like wow 35% so 65% of staff don't open the email you don't talk to them at all you know that was a problem for us because we wanted to get to 100% every time so one of the things that's worked for us is to avoid the top down and to find ways of getting colleagues to talk to each other so there's very clever ways of you can go about that so I think one of the things that you always have to remember is employee comms is going to be limited to usually the number of people who open email so you have to find ways of getting peer-to-peer communications and that was a real big step for us at working with large enterprises is finding ways around internal comms. Love that Jonathan great example. You're minding files? You're going to go actually Jonathan because this is really useful for me working obviously inside an organisation and you being a service provider. How have you encouraged organisations to do more of that kind of peer-to-peer communication and engagement especially in a hybrid world that we find ourselves in? From the very simple perspective we took a lot of the things that are in daily apps that everyone has anyway like refer a friend. Start simple so in the ULIFAP there's a big button that says refer a colleague and when you refer a colleague you get rewarded for it it's very very simple to start so you know we had a few people I remember the story at where we were rolling out at co-op. Now obviously it's a very very big organisation they've got 60,000 people and you know we I think we hit 30 40% down rate rate relatively quickly the majority of which came through this refer a colleague because there were a few enterprising people who realized they could actually probably make more money by referring colleagues than they could from working for a few hours. One guy in particular did very well and when we spoke to the HR team they were like don't tell me I don't want to know I don't want to know because then I'm going to have to deal with it just leave the guy you know you can use those mechanics then there's other things that we do as well is through competition so how do you get people to compete with each other and competition healthy competition I should say can breed positive outcomes unhealthy competition is is just unhealthy so it's just around creating experiences that people want to share with each other. Thank you both and it leads quite nicely onto my next question one of the things that we do at Partners and and one of the ways to be supports our clients driving engagement is by creating health and wellbeing strategies personally I've seen this come to life and make a real difference as soon as an employee has a health and wellbeing challenge if the employer is seen to be that support mechanism and really kind of put their arm around the employee it can make a huge difference and I'd love to get your take on that guys I've seen it happen but what's your view does health and wellbeing support driving positive engagements yeah of course it does and it's not necessarily about that the health and wellbeing it's it's the fact that the company's there to help you when you need help I think that's really what it comes down to is that it's human it's human you know you go to someone and say I need help and they turn around and say I'm here to help you I know you're having a tough time this is what we can do for you this is how you can look after yourself you breathe a sigh of relief when I know that staff have come to me to talk about look I'm having this difficult situation cannot put in lead for half a day to go do this I'm like of course you can just look after yourself I want you to be well I want you to have a good experience because number one we're humans and I want you to look after yourself and number two then hopefully you come back and we we continue working together so I think it's just that human element at the end of the day where you it's not employer employee it's we humans together looking after each other love that it's it's feeling it's emotion connection isn't it because somebody cares what's your take Danny I think the other thing is to be brutally honest is people expect it now there is an expectation that companies care about their people and their well-being and their health and if you don't as a company you don't attract or retain good talent that's like a world we have now we're now in and I like that and it's good that people are expecting more from their workplace and from the organizations they spend 50% of their time in it's down to the organization it's their choice that if they don't see it as being important then they will lose good people and not retain the best talent organizations survival and success is critical on keeping the best people in and making sure they have a good experience you know I definitely see it from that kind of side you know being in house as a people impressionally people expect that it's that important people expected and undiatedly from what I see Danny more and more businesses are leaning in and wanting to support with health and well-being which has to be a good thing well the other thing as well is that organizations are starting to realise if they expect their people to perform at their best level and be the best version of themselves if companies don't help their people with that it will be a hindrance and they won't get the best performance of other people anyway so it's counter-intuitive if they don't lean in and support diversity and inclusion for me this is an absolutely essential ingredient of any businesses people strategy from what I see I do see more and more businesses having a clear strategy and wanting to ensure their scene is as leaders in this space how does promoting diversity inclusion contribute towards higher levels of employee engagement what have you seen happen in that space Danny? it's a massive part of my remit so I would literally just I just came up for call a moment of guys talking to our director of DNI one of our they bring agencies to part of our network because we were talking about international women's there that happened recently and it's obviously currently rammed down right now people want to work in an inclusive working environment people want to work in an environment where they can be their true self and they belong and they don't have to be different people want to come into work knowing that they can be who they are who they you know who they truly are be able to kind of be accepted when people feel that they then will give the best version of themselves to their work they'll be committed they'll be engaged they will lean into things and they're more likely to do more outside of their day job as a result of it and they won't just come in and make it a nine to five o'clock out it's really key and important and I think organizations need to understand that it's not a tick box exercise not something they just need to be doing to make themselves look good is actually the best way of getting people to perform and to deliver and like you just said a moment ago it makes business sense as well as it's the right thing to do but what about yourself Jonathan how are you life promoting inclusivity in the workplace it's clearly fundamental to get people to feel comfortable where they are and you know for us our mission as a business is to inspire people to live their best lives every day and it's very hard for someone to live their best life if they're feeling either executed or misunderstood so I think for us really it is about that it's about how do you meet people where they're at how do you make sure that they feel that they're empowered to live their best life outside of work and in every way really it's just about making sure that people can be themselves and perform brilliant thank you I have a challenge for you so a topic which is very high on many people leaders agenda right now as ESG another crucial piece of an engagement strategy I believe. Our own ESG strategy partners and is linked to the UN's list of sustainable development goals. As a bit of fun to wrap up this session, what I'd like each of you to do is throw as many words as possible at to me that are linked to one of these goals. It's an ESG word association challenge if you will. So if you're not going to debate, we can define who the winner is by whoever delivers the most words. So I'm going to give you one of the UN goals. If you can then let me know is many words that come to mind linked to that golf that would be fantastic. So Danny, for yourself, the UN development goal that I'd like you to consider is climate action. 20 seconds to fire as many words that come into your mind linked to climate action. Renewable pollution sustainable recyclable man. This is hard. Collaboration, baby. Brilliant. Thank you. Jonathan, the sustainable development goal I have for you is probably a little bit more in your wheelhouse. So I've maybe given you the advantage here. But the goal that I have for you is good health and well-being. Yeah, I have to go back and say because I know why you didn't give me the climate change one. I have to call it out because I told you in the prep call that I always get in trouble with climate change because I like to tell people as a proud South African who's now British and have been here for 14 years that climate change can only improve London. So yes, I think that's why you didn't give me that one. I mean, health and well-being, I'll just say one cheeky word and only one cheeky word which is your life and that's the end. Oh, love that. Right, drop. Great word to say. Danny, you would. And he is the winner of our first ever ESG word association challenge. Gents, thank you for your time. Thank you for your views today. Thank you. Hey, hello, it was fun. Thank you to both my guests. I really enjoyed today's session. Some great takeaways. Brilliant insight and experience shared. If you have any people conundrums or you would like a second opinion in your existing people strategy, please reach out to our sip partners and between ourselves and our expert network including today's guests, we can help you develop a people strategy that allows you to attract retained and develop the very best talents. Goodbye.