At each Melcrum internal communication event, be it on change, engagement, or strategic communication, a question that’s almost always asked by the audience is: "If you had to go back and do it again, what would you do differently?" Often, we can learn a lot more from what goes wrong than what goes right. Of course, it’s not always easy or simple for practitioners to share this information, but when it is shared, it’s invaluable to our global community of professional communicators.

In the forthcoming issue of Strategic Communication Management, Jennifer Schulte
Global Engagement Director at Mars Inc. has been open enough to share with members one such example of “learning the hard way” in the area of measurement. Shulte and her team learned that managers had been offering incentives to their teams to give them high scores in the engagement survey. This behavior led to a shift in focus when conducting these kinds of surveys, from looking at just the survey scores, to now analyzing individual accountability.

Shulte explains more in her profile interview from the next issue of SCM:

“We use Gallup’s Q12 engagement survey for the purpose of providing data. The survey results show areas of strength and areas where we need to focus more effort to improve, with accountability at the lowest level possible – between a manager and their direct work team. Our ultimate goal is to become a world-class engagement organization, which means across the business our goal is to be at or above Gallup’s 80th percentile point from their database. That goal was set in 2004 and began to cascade down to individual manager performance objectives. Then we began to hear from teams where bad behavior was the result.

In order to get the right 'score', some managers began what we call “gaming the survey” (associates feeling forced to complete the survey, incentivized by managers to give high scores). What we know now, is that the quality of "follow through" (teams and managers deciding on the necessary actions and following through on those plans) is the lead indicator to high engagement scores. We’ve switched our focus for individual manager performance objectives to follow through (both a quantitative score and a qualitative measure), to focus individual accountability on the right behaviors versus just the survey score. This helps us capture more honest responses on the other survey items and focuses accountability on the item that's within a manager’s control.

Find out more about Jennifer Schulte's special engagement research role at Mars, including what she believes to be the top three most important characteristics an internal communicator must possess.

Until next time,

P.S You can hear more from Jennifer Shulte at Melcrum’s 6th Annual Engagement Conference in May, where she will be delivering a key note speech on “Engaging the disengaged employee: Can it be done?” Find out more information about presentations from about the event and book your place before 31st March to save £200 with our early bird offer.

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