Engaging to improve results at Bombardier Aerospace

The need to address the issue of employee engagement at Bombardier Aerospace began in earnest in 2001 when the aerospace industry took a nosedive. After years of growth, the company found itself facing downsizing, cutbacks and shortages. Given the relatively smooth sailing that had come before, it was a shock to employees and, after a series of layoffs became necessary, morale began to plummet.

“Bombardier Aerospace had enjoyed 10-15 years of uninterrupted growth,” says Lise St-Arnaud, director of internal communication at Bombardier. “Suddenly instead of hiring people we were laying people off – our employees weren’t used to that.”

Although marketplace conditions were likely to remain challenging it was clear that the best way for the company to move forward was to focus on what could be done inside the organization. This would mean rebuilding employee engagement following the layoffs, and launching a change strategy to enable employees to contribute more effectively to business results.

Defining engagement
Employee engagement now forms one of the company’s three business priorities. The goal, says St-Arnaud, is simple: to make sure people have the knowledge and understanding of business priorities to guide their decisions and actions, and the capability – in terms of skills, tools, processes and overall organizational culture – to contribute to those goals. This definition demands two primary areas of focus: building intellectual engagement through knowledge, and maintaining emotional engagement through organizational culture.

On the intellectual side, tough industry times made it apparent that a simple lack of business acumen was limiting employees’ ability to mobilize against new industry threats. “We realized that employees just didn’t really understand the challenges faced by the industry as a whole, or what they represented for us as an organization.”

On the emotional side, there was a need to restore employees’ commitment to the company after a period of downsizing and reorganization.

Emotional engagement
St-Arnaud distills emotional engagement down to four core factors, most of them the direct remit of leadership:

• Relationships: “The relationship between employees and their front-line manager is crucial, and it’s important that these relationships also extend up to the next level of senior management.”
• Credibility: The critical part of organizational information being perceived as credible, says St-Arnaud, is it being consistent across the organization. “If in a department team meeting, the manager explains a situation one way and a different manager in another department twists the same information slightly differently, employees will talk to each other afterwards and won’t know who to believe.
• Respect: “People have to feel they’re high up on the organization’s list of priorities. If they hear news about the company on the radio before they hear it at work, you lose their respect.”
• Putting people first: Respect, says St-Arnaud, should underpin all stakeholder relationships. “Put yourself in the shoes of different stakeholders and figure out how you can best co-ordinate things so that you meet the needs and requirements of each of them.”

Intellectual engagement
To address the issue of business acumen, assessments of the general caliber and credibility of formal communication media – conducted via employee surveys over 2003/4 – asked specific questions to investigate shortfalls in critical business communication, such as:

• Can you identify the company’s key business priorities?
• Do you feel your business unit/function is contributing to at least one of them?
• Do you feel able to contribute as individuals?
• Do your managers discuss the business priorities with you in meetings?
• Do you feel able to contribute to these meetings?

The research showed that although there was good communication within the upper levels of management, communication credibility and responsibility needed to be improved at the front line of management. This had a critical link to driving business acumen.

In the operations area, for example, employees hadn’t always been involved in quarterly meetings with their managers. When these meetings had taken place, however, the survey results provided solid proof that those who participated were more aware of the business priorities, and had a better understanding of how their business unit contributed and what they could do to influence business outcomes.

Leadership communication
The survey results threw up other interesting findings, particularly around the different roles of leaders in engaging employees during major change. “A number of external studies identify immediate supervisors as the first person employees want to hear news from, followed by senior managers and union representatives,” says St-Arnaud. “But in our case, our first survey after launching a new business strategy revealed that employees wanted news from senior managers in the first instance, immediate supervisors second, and union representatives featured quite far down the list. This suggests that when there’s a great deal of change going on, employees look to top management for clear direction, that’s where the credibility seems to be.”

But realistically, says St Arnaud, senior leaders being responsible for regular, two-way employee communication is not feasible. “We have 26,000 employees working across Northern Ireland, the US and Canada. One of our senior leaders has 12,000 people reporting to him. Even a town-hall meeting with 500 people is not an effective communication forum, bearing in mind that we want employees to be involved in communication, and we want them to provide us with their feedback, questions and ideas.”

Providing communication support
To help leaders and managers cascade business-critical information, the communication function provides a series of tools for use in weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings. For example:

• Quarterly results
Bombardier’s chief operating officer (COO) will initially share the quarterly results with top managers via a video-conference. He’ll run through a series of slides relating the results to the company’s key business priorities, and within this context talk about challenges, issues and areas of focus for the coming months. Managers get the chance for Q&A at the end of the session.
After the meeting the slides are sent to all senior managers so they can pull from the main document the information of most importance for their teams, focusing on the areas where they can make the most impact. Communication provides additional key messages to support the cascade process, and communication specialists located within various countries and business units are available to provide further support.

• Major events or announcements
Any major organizational announcement is carefully planned to make sure all messages are consistent, timely (delivered internally before or at the same time as any external announcements are made), distributed simultaneously (bearing in mind geographical time differences), and focused on the company’s strategy and business priorities.

A plan is drawn up by the communication function detailing when the announcement will be made to different audiences, and who is responsible for each element of communication. All senior managers involved – as well as union representatives – are given a chance to go over the plan and provide input before announcements are made.

Senior leaders are thoroughly briefed so they can share the new information and talk about how it fits with the overall business strategy, and what it means to employees given their specific area of focus. Key messages are emphasized, Q&As provided, and all information is aligned whether delivered by the intranet, managers, or external sources such as the media, thus delivering on emotional aspects of engagement such as consistency and credibility.

• Tracking the change
Regular research is allowing the company to track improvements in business knowledge, although at this stage, says St-Arnaud, it’s too early to point to dramatic changes. Parallel to employee research, however, managers have also been surveyed about their role in communication and this, says St-Arnaud, is where an interesting change in attitude can already be noted.

“It’s interesting that just a survey itself generates reflection that leads people in the right direction.” As an example, the communication team specifically addressed a survey question to management asking them, Have you communicated to your employees the last quarterly results, challenges, issues and areas of focus for the next financial period? A total of 47 percent of managers said they had. Those who answered “No” were asked to select from a list of possible reasons:

• I didn’t know I had to;
• I had other more important duties/ responsibilities;
• I haven’t found the time;
• I don’t consider it to be my role;
• I didn’t have the necessary information;
• I don’t know.

But when, further down, the survey asked, Do you plan to communicate the company’s priorities for the next fiscal year? the number of managers answering “Yes” suddenly jumped to 73 percent. “Just by asking the first question, we made managers realize that this is something they should be thinking about,” says St-Arnaud. “And in situations where managers weren’t actually aware of their responsibilities before, we’ve at least begun the process of addressing that.

“A survey is a powerful motivator – and when you ask people if they’re doing something they’re not, it sends a strong message that it’s an area of importance to the organization which they need to improve on.”

Addressing cultural issues
Another issue that has come under the spotlight as part of Bombardier’s engagement drive, is that of organizational culture. As part of leadership’s efforts to transform the culture and create a high-performance organization, a co-ordinating committee was formed in 2004, including members from strategy and planning, HR, communication and representatives from McKinsey & Co., under the leadership of the company’s COO.

As part of the wider cultural change program, in 2004, a representative group of employees were selected to help identify the company’s cultural attributes or deficiencies. One activity involved selecting 10 characteristics – from a potential list of 40 – that employees felt defined the current culture, as well as 10 characteristics they would like to see define the company’s culture (see Figure One, below). The responses highlighted gaps where the current cultural environment can be improved.

Figure 1: Gap between employees’ view of current and desired culture

“It threw up some interesting issues,” says St-Arnaud. “Things we perhaps knew instinctively, but having black-and-white evidence galvanized discussion among our senior leaders about where the company was headed culturally.” These findings formed the basis of a half-day workshop at the last Bombardier leadership seminar, where leaders discussed in detail what actions should be taken to develop a more desirable culture.

To maintain the momentum, internal communication is working closely with the company’s 12 senior leaders to identify what their role is in changing the culture. Later this year, the same project will move through the next layer of 100-125 leaders. “Engagement for us is all about culture change, and that doesn’t happen overnight,” says St-Arnaud. “We want to create ‘change agents’ but to do that, people have to understand what needs to be changed, know what their role is, and buy into it.”

The bureaucracy survey
Another example of how cultural issues are being tackled can be found in a “bureaucracy survey” designed to gauge how structure, systems and processes affect engagement (as opposed to mindset and behaviors). “We conducted a quick survey on our intranet, which went out to about half the employee population,” explains St-Arnaud. “We wanted to know, from a process-and-people point of view, what was preventing employees from contributing.”

The research found that most of the problem issues were corporate and functional – HR, IT and finance, in particular, were perceived to be responsible, rather than business units. Certain processes are now under review to address this. “If ‘corporate’ is asking employees to do something, yet it’s corporate red-tape that’s getting in the way of them actually doing it, that’s a communication shortfall that needs to be addressed.”

Measuring outcomes
With a change plan in place to improve both intellectual and emotional engagement, St-Arnaud believes Bombardier will see better business results later in 2005. “Before you can change as an organization, individuals need to understand the bigger picture and what’s expected of them. We’ve spent the last 18 months getting people to understand the business priorities. The next survey will tell us if this has made a difference.”
In terms of tangible business benefits, improved engagement at Bombardier will ultimately be measured by three quantifiable outcomes:

• Relationships with customers – is the company more customer friendly?
• Financial results – do people have a better understanding of business priorities and where to focus their attention and energy? And has this had an impact on financial performance?
• Business processes – are employees in a position to contribute to and constantly improve the way Bombardier conducts its business?

Each of these outcomes is tracked by measuring a number of key performance indicators that link back to the company’s business priorities. The communication function continues to measure the impact of involving managers more in the communication process, and measures are being introduced to make communication part of the management performance review process.

“The first phase of building engagement at Bombardier has been focused on building awareness,” says St-Arnaud. “The second phase is focused on taking action and changing the culture.”