Transforming Employee Morale – a case study

Background:
Twelve months ago 70 people in a localization department in a multinational IT company based in Dublin completed an internal employee survey in which the majority said they would not recommend their department and employer as a place to work.
Average tenure was above five years, the department had seen its numbers reduced from 110 to 70 in the space of a year and the leader of the department described the culture at the time as “stale”.

The same internal employee survey, 12 months later in April 2009, and 75% of the department say they would highly recommend their department and employer to a friend. The department is “buzzing”.

What happened in twelve months? What is the business impact and how can you apply the lessons to your department or organization?

What happened?
Dynamic Leadership Development (DLD) began working with the leader and the management team in June 2008, just after the poor scores from the survey were published.

There are many aspects and components to the extraordinary turnaround in employee satisfaction but to summarise a few key success factors:

The Leader’s vision – the leader had a vision of a new culture within his department but more importantly his commitment to that vision was crucial. Hiring an external consultant such as DLD was an early signal of this commitment to the vision.

The Guiding Coalition – an early insight was the need for the full management team to be given the opportunity to become more involved, more of a decision maker and hence more engaged. There was no longer just one internal champion but seventeen, as managers and supervisors were brought into the coalition of change.

Discovering people’s strengths and passions – in a series of one to ones with all management and staff, DLD created an inventory of everyone’s strengths and passions, as well as their views on the current and desired culture. They were asked whether they were currently experiencing a “career best” in their role and, if not, what was missing for them. These interviews ensured all staff contributed to the key initiatives required to build the new culture.

Being in the middle of something – by knowing people’s strengths and passions it became easier to identify the right people to drive the right initiatives and hence employees at all levels began to be ‘in the middle of something’. As one person framed it, “we inverted the pyramid” so that the base began to lead and take action as opposed to just the management team.

So what?
Research in Sear’s in the mid 90s demonstrated that a 5% increase in employee satisfaction resulted in a 1.3% increase in customer satisfaction which in turn resulted in a 0.05% increase in revenue. Happy employees treat customers better who in turn buy more from you.

With headcount and resources limited, now is a period when organizations need to maximize the productivity of all existing staff. Tom Rath of Strengthfinder stated that people who get to ulitize their strengths are 20% more productive.

The improved employee morale and productivity in the localization department has resulted in it being asked to only make very moderate cuts in staff numbers over the last 12 months compared to other groups because it is now considered a vibrant productive department.

Are you interested in learning more and seeing the possible applications to your organisation?

A 90 minute workshop has been created by Dynamic Leadership Development to provide you with more detail and insight on this case study plus allow you and your team to start to identify direct comparisons and applications to your organisation.

Call Colm Murphy on +353868304033, email at info@dynamicleadership.ie or visit us at www.dynamicleadership.ie.