Thanks for the comments, and additional insights – spot on. I remember when I was consulting with business leaders around the result of our annual employee engagement survey they could not care less about the results – until it got tied into their KPIs and bonus scheme. More often than not, most of them nodded politely and then shoved it down to their HR-manager, with a clear directive to “do better next time”.

You really need various perspectives in order to successfully manage a business, including the so-called soft and hard aspects. I found a useful tool for that in the Balanced Scorecard, which can integrate financial with non-financial metrics.

As mentioned in tip 4, I find there is also significant value in looking over the wall to other disciplines, and in “teaming up” in order to address the business agenda. In the past, we successfully experimented with working across finance, sales, marketing and HR in order to build (and prove) the business case for employee engagement – and that tends to get noticed by senior management.

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Far too many HR/comms pros look on engagement, diversity etc. as ends in themselves when, actually, they are nothing more than delivery mechanisms – a means to improve business performance.

Take a business whose competitive advantage is centred on innovation and product leadership, for example. Whether employees’ happiness went up a percentage point in the latest survey is a matter of supreme indifference to the C-suite.

What they care about is whether or not that engaged state has helped contributed to the development of superior products and/or accelerated the speed with which they have been brought to market.

Thanks – much appreciated ! For the next phase, the objective is to make sure the blog continues to go up in both quality as well as relevance …

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“Social Networking: What Works ?” http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6187.html
“Do Friends Influence Purchases In A Social Network ?” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-123.pdf

Thanks Richard !

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