By Darryl Stewart

I’m Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd at IBEX Payroll. We are the makers of Inclusion Community Living Careware.

It is all the rage these days to talk about employee engagement. If you’re wondering what exactly this term means, you’re not alone! Most leaders I talk to aren’t sure either. One definition I came across is simple and right to the point:

“Engagement is the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do and feel valued for doing it.”

The concept of employee engagement has always appealed to me. The idea that the people who work in an organization could be highly engaged was my dream for many years. I tried profit sharing, flex-time, catering to individual employee concerns about work space and environment and anything else I could think of to “make” people more engaged. But most would just not engage!

In retrospect, all my feeble attempts to engage people were way off base. I was totally missing the boat. Just adding a few benefits here and there is about as far as you can get from what it takes to get real employee engagement. In fact, my results from this approach were exactly the opposite of what I was after. Instead of liking their job more and engaging in serving clients with gusto, this type of superficial management approach made things worse. The more I catered to individual whims, the more it was expected and the more people seemed to think they were doing IBEX a favour by showing up to work each day to go through the motions.

However, through all these trying times, there was employee engagement happening at IBEX. It was just happening where I wasn’t looking. Like most leaders, I was focusing my energy on the underachievers, struggling to engage the un-engageable. I was focused on the wrong people, using flawed strategies while ignoring those who were highly motivated and eager to be engaged. No wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere. Today, the situation is much different and our employee engagement is much improved. It has literally taken years to get to where we are.

Here are some engagement tactics that have made a big difference at our organization, which can be applied to CL organizations like yours tomorrow at no cost.

Leadership – the change I want to see in the world begins with me
I learned that in order to engage everyone else, I had to be engaged first and remain engaged. In the past, my (delegation) motives often had more to do with wanting to make my job easier than improving our business or our cause. Once I realized that being the catalyst for employee engagement is MY PERMANENT ROLE, things got much, much easier. I stopped trying to find quick fixes and started making it part of everything I do, always.

Communication – say what you mean & mean what you say
From a company that once had a staff meeting once a month, IBEX now has over 160 meetings a month involving all Customer Support, Team Leaders, IT team, Inclusion Experts, Accounting and Production staff. At lesser intervals, we also have management and marketing meetings. While it sounds like a lot, most meetings are short, stand-up meetings that ensure we’re all on the same page and that everyone has the opportunity to give input where and when it matters most.

Coaching – begins with caring and listening better
I’ve learned that employees are more engaged when they feel that someone at work really cares about them. And because we all feel more engaged when we feel listened to, we started one-on-one coaching at IBEX. Every employee meets with their manager every six weeks for a one-on-one coaching session. The manager listens to what is going good and bad for the employee, delivers feedback and then the two review progress on current goals and set the employee’s future direction.

(Cultural) Fit
Because we (now) know what kind of people thrive in our very open IBEX culture, we carefully select people from Winnipeg--and around the world for that matter--for fit, not for job experience. Here’s another lesson I learned the hard way: the easiest way to have an engaged team is to hire highly motivated and engageable people! Personality profiles, multiple interviews and detailed orientation processes all help us in this regard.

A Heartfelt sense of mission
We have a clear mission at IBEX: to make the lives of working people easier. It’s how Inclusion for Community Living came about. Our mission statement was written by our team members in an inclusive process. We give life to that mission statement in a variety of ways that make it easy for our team members, their families and our clients to get involved. We do random acts of kindness. We spend hundreds of hours of company and personal time each year raising money for charities and doing community service. If someone on our team has a passion, we help fuel it. And when someone asks me what’s different about IBEX, this is often where I start.

Genuine caring
Our Employee Assistance Program provides paid time off and financial support for professional help with personal issues.To help us face and overcome personal and professional adversity, we also have a coaching program that ensures our team members are not alone, that they get the support they want and need and get back on the road of life they want to be on. Once we started to encourage a more nurturing culture we began seeing more random acts of kindness at work as well. It’s now common for one team member to express the need to leave early (a child’s school function, an ailing relative, to coach a kid’s team) and see the other team members pick up the slack. There is no policy on this and there doesn’t need to be; IBEX has become a more caring culture.

Orientation instead of confusion
On new herd members' first day at IBEX, they are welcomed by a pre-selected team member. Their computers and email accounts are setup and they receive greetings via email from other team members. Their ‘guide’ takes them through a personal orientation and they take their first steps on a long journey called “Getting to know IBEX and the IBEX culture”. The basic orientation takes about two weeks. There are no major exceptions to this process. We find that this type of orientation is one of the most important things we do. We also put up a big welcome sign in our lobby, but most people are so nervous on their first day that they don’t see it until they leave. So now our orientation also includes pointing out the sign to them. Not because we want to make them feel dumb, but because we really want them to feel welcome.

A final thought on how we hope to help Community Living Organizations like yours
While all this engagement stuff took me years to figure out and put in place, I love the result: staff turnover is down to almost zero and engagement is at an all time high. Interestingly enough, while our wages are competitive, our people tell me they stay for the culture, not the money or the balmy Winnipeg winter weather.

Our experience suggests that the key to employee engagement is not paying greater wages. It’s about paying greater attention to the balance of the employee satisfaction equation, which is good news for Community Living Organizations. Employee engagement starts with a lifelong commitment to tuning into your employee needs and taking a small step toward your goal every day.

Over the next few months, I’d like to share some other things we’ve learned at IBEX that you can apply to your Community Living Organization.

And I’d love to learn from you as well.

If you have an article or point of view that you think other CL organizations would benefit from, please send it to us and we’ll post it on our website and add a link to it in our next newsletter.

Sincerely,

Darryl Stewart

Further Reading... About IBEX

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