Using Appreciative Inquiry to measure employee engagement
| Pages | 10-11 |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390780000948 |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
| Author | Cath Keers |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
10 Volume 6 Issue 2 January/February 2007
HR at WORK
,
Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in HR
Using Appreciative Inquiry to
measure employee engagement
M
odern businesses are all about
efficiency. Streamlining for lean
processes is increasingly
popular. Everything’s about the bottom
line and there’s a belief within business
that if you can’t reduce an initiative to
what it adds to the bottom line, then it
should be scrapped.
Avoid focusing on the negative
There are various ways you can relate
people strategy and HR initiatives back
to the bottom line – common ROI
measures include improving absenteeism
figures or retention. But, in many cases,
these measures focus on a negative
aspect of the working environment and
are seeking a tangible improvement.
This may well seem quite logical,
however, some evidence suggests that
focusing on the negative aspects of a
problem can amplify them. For example,
several studies have shown that
highlighting an absenteeism problem to
staff can actually cause more staff to
absent themselves. One study1revealed
that absenteeism increased when the
figure was publicized to the workforce.
Can’t solve, can’t measure?
While in some circumstances a problem-
focused approach will be appropriate, if
there’s no problem, this method won’t
necessarily deliver the results you need.
Similarly, if businesses focus solely on
change programs and interventions that
can be measured in concrete terms
there’s a real danger that the “baby
could be thrown out with the bath
water” (dispose of the good parts of the
business as well as the bad parts of
something when trying to improve it).
What makes a person productive isn’t
always easily reduced to facts and
figures. Intangibles, such as workplace
culture, have a huge impact on
employee satisfaction and productivity.
Building on a successful culture
At O2, a mobile communications
provider, the challenge wasn’t about
solving a problem, but how best to
approach an opportunity to make a
good place an even better place to work,
fine-tuning an already successful
company and taking it one step further
to increase its competitiveness. As a
result, in 2005, senior management at O2
decided to take a different approach to
improving the workplace culture.
Instead of focusing on negatives, the
company decided to focus on positives,
using an exploratory technique called
Appreciative Inquiry (AI), introduced to
O2 by Ashridge Consulting. By asking
employees to think about what they
liked about working at O2, the
employees were reminded of the positive
aspects of their jobs.
The process involved mass employee-
consultation using a viral approach. The
initiative started with just 10 employees
from across the company, all of whom
were chosen by their line managers as
being well connected within the
workforce. These employees then went
out on an informal basis among their
colleagues and asked them about their
experience of working at O2.
From the people that had been
approached, a proportion were recruited
to continue investigating – this
technique was used to gather
information in a non-intrusive manner.
Initially, a total of 200 people were
interviewed over a 4-5 month period.
The output of these interviews was
analyzed and the information clustered
around the following key themes:
1. Making a difference: O2 employees
are consistently proud of their work
and how it contributes directly to the
business.
2. Great relationships: O2 people feel
valued by their colleagues, managers
and customers.
3. Managing with a human touch: At
O2 the managers aren’t sectioned
O2 provides mobile communications
services across the UK, Germany and
Ireland and was recently acquired by
Telefónica. O2 has more than 10,000
employees across the UK and as part of
the Telefónica Group, is the second largest
wireless network provider in the world.
O2
Focusing on the positives and introducing initiatives around those themes helped to improve employee
satisfaction at O2 UK, a mobile communications company, says its customer director,Cath Keers.
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