"Addressing Employee Engagement: A Leader Who Faced the Music Even though He Didn't

 Like the Tune"

Douglas Conant became President & CEO of the Campbell Soup Company nine years ago and since then, under his leadership the company has:

·        reversed its decline in market value

·        significantly improved its financial position

·        delivered top tier shareholder returns within the food industry

·        enhanced its relationship with its customers

·        and achieved world-class levels of Employee Engagement

When asked how he was able to so drastically improve the company's fortunes, Conant emphasizes that engaging the workforce was an integral part of his strategy. He shares that as employee engagement increased across the company it actually became easier for him to lead because employees became more self-governing and more accountable to one another.

However, the path was anything but smooth. Conant found that the company was not prepared to implement his initiatives and employees were skeptical of his employee engagement strategy. But he knew from past experience that employee engagement would work and that he had to lead the charge from the top. In fact, Conant felt as though he and the company had few other choices.

Today Campbell Soup:

·        annually measures employee engagement corporate-wide

·        trains its managers by providing practical, management techniques they can use to improve employee engagement

·        holds managers accountable for improving their team's level of engagement

·        and ties manager's merits, bonuses and promotions to those scores.

It's difficult for leaders like Conant to know:

·        how well frontline employees are performing

·        what frontline employees are capable of doing if they want to give discretionary effort

·        how front liners feel about the company, their jobs and, most importantly, how these employees feel about their relationship with their supervisor

Leaders are handicapped in that they:

·        are seldom provided this information

·        can't practically seek it directly from employees

·        know that making efforts to understand the perspective of frontline employees takes considerable time away from their executing the corporate strategy and running the business

Leaders do have access to quantities of performance data - productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, financials, waste, etc. But, unfortunately, these are indicators of past performance and, when reported, any action is an after-the-fact reaction. Whereas, employee engagement is a leading indicator of these business outcomes.

Research has proven - and common sense tells us - that negative, dissatisfied employees are less productive, care little about quality, often drive customers to the competition, increase the cost of doing business, etc. - all limiting what individual managers and the organization can accomplish. The business of business is behavior and employee engagement:

·        generates predictable employee reactions

·        creates employee energy and enthusiasm

·        delivers enhanced individual and company performance outcomes

Leaders like Douglas Conant know that by measuring employee engagement they will know:

·        whether employees are performing at their potential

·        where and how they can assist supervisors and managers in generating greater positive energy and discretionary effort

·        the financial, customer satisfaction, quality, etc. metrics they should anticipate

Every leader, manager and supervisor has an ongoing and significant impact on employee engagement! Measuring employee engagement is analogous to those managers going to the doctor - they don't want to hear any bad news but The Focus Group has consistently found that it's better for managers to know and be able to react than to not know.