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Research has shown that employee engagement is the number one priority for CEOs. This is probably not surprising given the impact that engaged employees can have on an organization's bottom line. A Gallup study done in 2012 concluded that in the US alone, only about 13% of the employees were actively engaged. The study also found that yearly productivity losses in the US arising from employee disengagement were a whopping $500 billion dollars with worldwide estimates of productivity losses touching one trillion dollars. No wonder CEOs are pushing employee engagement up their priority lists. Source: Gallup 2012 Meta Analysis on Q12

However, there seems to be a serious disconnect betweeen CEO priorities and the way they are being tackled in the real world. Most organizations carry out a year-end survey if their employees are lucky or perhaps one in two years. The surveys tend to be fairly long and tedious with the result that the urge to finish does, more often than not, triumph over the need to give accurate feedback. In addition, the availability heuristic is in operation with the result that more recent events tends to dominate the feedback leading to a significant skew in the results obtained. Moreover, the time taken from conducting the survey to data analysis, report generation, trend identification and devising of action plans takes a good 3-4 months with the result that actions are taken a good 6-8 months after the issue had initially arisen. Managers are thus unable to be proactive in identifying issues and nipping them in the bud before they turn into crisis.

Let's pause for a moment to consider an analogous situation in sales. Can you imagine Sales leads only looking at their sales data at the end of every year and basing their actions for the next year on that? As incredible as that sounds, that is precisely what organizations are asking HR Leaders to do instead of obtaining feedback from employees on a more consistent basis. Josh Bersin from Deloitte has identified real-time employee engagement as one of the key disruptive HR technology trends in 2016. Given the rapid digitization of the world, a whole new breed of applications are coming up that use the digital technology to enable organizations to reach out to employees more often. These include but are not just limited to pulse surveys, textual feedback mechansims, peer to peer appreciation and anonymous manager feedback.

The surge in such applications is also driven by the millenial workforce that simply doesn't believe in waiting for a year to make their views known. Organizations are thus being forced to respond to their needs by providing them with avenues to express their opinions. While initial attempts utilized internal blogs and discussion boards, there is a growing realization that a more structured approach can reap greater benefits. The recent surge in large organizations giving up their performance appraisal systems ought to be seen in conjunction with the surge in newer approaches to employee engagement. Real-time solutions can enable both performance appraisal and employee feedback at the same time.

As is usual in the HR space, most of the innovation seems to be happening in the US with Indian organizations in particular playing catch-up. HR practices in most old-world Indian industries like manufacturing are stuck in a time warp. The new-age IT industries are better but only in a relative sense. However, the success of organizations like Google and LinkedIn in creating an engaged workforce is prompting our IT doyens to take a relook at their own engagement policies. They are re-examining the entire gamut of operations that deal with how they measure, track and get feedback from their workforce.

So what would my recommendations be for companies looking to transform their employee engagement approach? Here are ten of them:

Do this and I bet you, you will never go back to thinking about year-end surveys again.
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