Mark Bennett at Oracle and one of the contributors to the TalentedApps blog, recently published a great piece on employee engagement and how one organization, Zappos.com uses engagement to drive its business model. How does Zappos test employee engagement, Mark writes
*Zappos offers new employees in their call center the pay that they are owed + $1000 to quit. Why? Zappos wants to really know if the employee is truly engaged and this provides a relatively inexpensive way to find out sooner rather than later. In addition, the $1000 option can be (and has been) adjusted as needed (it has grown from $100 to $500 to $1000). This offers a clear, tangible demonstration of the level (and value) of employee engagement (which is typically thought of as very intangible) and how it can be arrived at through measurements like this vs. relying solely on surveys, etc.*
This is a great story to share in your organization as a true test of engagement. It is a small example, but a great one to think about and expand the horizons of how the business can truly understand the engagement of its talent today and how HR can "come to the table" with new, unique and transformative ideas around driving true business results. Knowledge Infusion works daily with organizations around the world helping solve business issues that engagement is often a key leverage point. There MUST be a way to measure engagement and do something about it, and Zappos has done just that.
In Mark's post, he also mentions how Zappos is using Web 2.0 technologies or Digital HR as we call it at Knowledge Infusion, to assist with employee engagement as well. A very good read.
Thanks Mark for sharing this great example.
Another infusion of knowledge....
Thanks for the shout out, Jason. Kris Dunn thinks Zappos is on to something ( http://www.hrcapitalist.com/2008/05/paying-people-t.html ), but is quite rightly concerned whether the offer is high enough to weed out those who aren't truly engaged, yet if they make the offer too high, it could cause them to lose the talent they might want to keep. To me, though, this is part of how markets work; at any given price, you don't get the exact same response from every individual. What you are after is enough unengaged folks taking the offer balanced with enough engaged folks staying. This mechanism allows them to make an adjustment in order to shift that more in the direction they want for a certain cost, and that's what I found really fascinating as a more tangible way to measure engagement.
Mark