Employee Experience v Employee Engagement

The reason we haven't moved the needle on engagement is surveys are a very flat document of a very three-dimensional thing that we're trying to measure. I think engagement is an outcome. I don't think it's the thing that we can go after to hunt down and make better. I think that employee engagement is something that happens at the end of having a really great experience. So that flips me over to employee experience, which is what are the experiences? What are the touchpoints that we have with employees in businesses small to large?

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Dana Wasson, OD Consultant and author of Talk the Walk: Designing a Clear Path to a World Class Employee Experience

Carlos: Welcome back to Teaming With Ideas. I am your host and resident contrarian, Carlos Valdes-Dapena. Today we are privileged to have in our company for conversation, Dana Wasson.

First of all, let me say I've known Dana for 15 to 20 years. Dana has been a consultant for as long as I've known her, and I think that makes up the bulk of her career, external consulting. We met when I was working at Mars, Incorporated in my early days. I first got to know Dana as a graphic facilitator, but she is so much more than that. So, Dana, tell us a bit about yourself.

Dana: Thank you, Carlos. I am a trained OD consultant for all of what that means. I really love working in the space of strategic planning and change management. More recently in the last five years or so, I have gotten attached to the employee engagement / employee experience space.

I am a native Californian. I moved to Colorado a couple of years ago, just to have a change of scenery. I'm an abstract artist on the side, my side gig or side hustle, I guess they call it now. And I really just love the work I do.

I am really missing people these days as we are mostly online. So really, really missing the interaction I have with people, but feeling lucky we have tools like Zoom to be able to do at least some interactive work with groups. It keeps me connected.

Carlos: Dana, I think you did a TEDx talk, right? Can you tell us about that?

Dana: Yes, I did. I did a TEDx talk. It was a bucket list item I got to knock off in 2019. It was called “Messages to My Younger Self”. It was kind of a reflection of all the things I would love to go back and tell myself if I could and would be able to do.

Carlos: So just as a point of clarity, you mentioned you're an OD consultant. I am too. And for those who aren't familiar with that abbreviation, it stands for organization development.  Both Dana and I are interested in helping organizations, and the people in teams within them, be the best they can be. Do you think that's an accurate description of what OD is, Dana?

Dana: Yeah, pretty good. I always like to just start diving into the specialties within it, but you're absolutely right. Great summary.

Carlos: I want to talk a little bit about your history if I could. You were, among your many talents and among the many things you practiced as an OD consultant, a graphic facilitator. I've learned that not everybody knows what that is. Can you tell us a bit about that and how it helps teams,? And then we'll move on to discuss employee experience and engagement.

Dana; Sure. And Carlos, you probably gave me one of the best definitions of how it helps groups because you and I were working together on a meeting.  I'll back up a little bit and then talk about that meeting in specific.

Graphic facilitation is the ability to capture in words and pictures what people are saying live, as they're saying it. There are two modes that people work in that capacity. One is kind of in a silent, more observing role, meaning they're not actively facilitating the meeting themselves. That's more of a graphic capture, graphic recording role. But it's an important role because it helps the group, the team, whoever you're working with, see what they are saying, and sometimes work out some issues and problems that they have. Because sometimes when we put it on the wall, it's not about you or me, it's about what we've put up on the wall.

Then there's the active graphic facilitation, which not a lot of people can do, which is to actually work with the group and facilitate while capturing on a big piece of paper. That takes a bit more skill because your focus is split. You're working with the group and you're kind of managing the paper.

I don't know a whole lot of people who know how to do that. I have also learned on Zoom it’s pretty much impossible to do that because you really can't split your attention with a technology in front of you and something that you're writing on, whether it's a pad or piece of paper or whatever. That's what those two roles are, the active and more passive role. It's not really passive. I just mean you're passive, not working with the group. It's a great way to engage groups in what their conversation is, and their discussions and deliberations and things.

As you remember, Carlos, we worked together with a team and the visual is what really helped the team understand what was going on with them. We were doing that historical perspective, remember? And it showed that, just in context, this team had been working together and I was visually capturing the different projects or outcomes that the team had had. Along the same piece of paper, if you will, we talked about what team members had joined or left and it became very, very visually obvious,

Carlos: I think we created a 5-year timeline moving from left to right, so that you were capturing these moments, events, coming and goings in a sequence on the wall.

Dana: You're exactly right. It was a retrospective, it wasn't a forward strategic plan, it was what had happened. It was so very interesting for the team to visually see that when they had more people join the team, a lot more output happened as a result. Sounds dead obvious as we talk about it sitting here right now, but it wasn't that obvious to the team because they had been enmeshed in it. And when they saw it, they really acknowledged what had happened with the team.

Carlos: The thing that stuck with me from that, Dana, is the power of graphic facilitation. It wasn't just people joining the team. It was when people left the team. They sometimes left because… they were fired. Let's just keep it simple. They left because they were told to leave, and new people were brought in. And that six-month stretch of time where there was a big turnover and new people came in with new skills and new approaches, that's when the big change in the function started to happen. And it was really clear from looking at that timeline you created.

Dana: It was a great partnership that you and I had because you had much more context of the team, and I was more neutral in capturing kind of the process and what had happened as the team told the story. But the power was having the two of us together, which is often what happens when a graphic facilitator works with an internal facilitator. The story becomes more powerful because you know more than I do. In a neutral sense, I'm capturing things that maybe as an internal person, you wouldn't necessarily note.

Carlos: Just as kind of a button on this: I think the power of using visuals of any kind comes through in graphics facilitation, but you don't need a graphic recorder or facilitator to use visuals with your teams. I'm a big fan of having people draw pictures, having people create their own timeline. I step back and let the team do it themselves and then see what they notice. It's very powerful. And while I think you've had great impact doing it, I think your work in this space of the employee experience is probably more far reaching, right? So, for those of us who are managing teams, just remember use visuals when you can. Stop the over-talking. Stop the PowerPoint slides with a million words and bullet points. Get graphical.

Dana: To that point, I think this is the brilliance of David Sibbet and The Grove Consultants who actually founded the whole field of graphic facilitation. He created a set of templates because people were very intimidated when he would create his visuals, because they were very complex and frankly, very overwhelming to people who had never done or seen it.

What he did is he stepped back, and he said, “I want to make this more accessible. I want to make this for the people” if you will. He took some of his frameworks and made them into templates that he sold. It made it much more available to people because it meant that there was a frame that was really pretty and sexy on the wall. When you unrolled it, you already had a wow factor. Then either somebody in the team or the whole team together could fill in the templates, and it became their artwork as opposed to some magical facilitator that comes in with a magic wand and does all sorts of pretty pictures. To your point, it becomes exactly that. It becomes theirs, and the nastiness and all of what contributes to a really great visual that has content that's useful, is owned by the people who made it, not by some third party.

I've really exploited that in the last 20 years, creating my own templates. At Mars, for example, years and years ago, with the presidents group, when the family moved out of day-to-day management and turned it in over to the hired folks, if you will, I created templates for that presidents group to work with to create their business strategies. 

It doesn't matter what level you are in an organization. There's something about a blank piece of paper that has a framework that makes you want to fill it. They really got into it. And instead of handing them blank flip charts and having them come back and comparing apples to squirrels to clouds, we actually were able to compare apples to apples to apples because they had had the framework, all the same, in their breakout groups. We saved a whole lot of time, to be honest, when we had that framework.

Carlos: I see. So if I'm understanding, you're saying they went off, these groups of company presidents, (Mars has many, many businesses within it) for some stretch of time, you sent them off into separate rooms, but all with the same templates.

Dana: Yes, exactly.

Carlos: So, they come back, talking about the same stuff in the same way. Again, I'm still learning how to do this well as a guy who facilitates teams, how to use graphics instead of words, but the power of it is undeniable. So, thank you for taking a few minutes, Dana.

I know you're so excited about the work you're doing today and your most recent book. I just find that people benefit from the knowledge of what graphic facilitation is and how you can use graphics to bring your team together and have them be more effective.

Employee experience. I spent years at Mars, Incorporated, a family-owned company to this day.  What Dana mentioned a moment ago, when the family stepped back and they brought in professional managers, that was a really big deal for Mars, still owned by the family, but generally managed by very experienced business professionals. I worked with engagement at Mars, specifically the Gallup engagement process. It was great. I think it got managers and teams working better together. I think engagement and experience are the same thing. Dana, what do you think about that?

Dana: You did throw out the provocative question because I couldn't agree less. It was one of the key points so that I put up front in my book. You know, the reason we haven't moved the needle on engagement is surveys are a very flat document of a very three-dimensional thing that we're trying to measure.

I think engagement is an outcome. I don't think it's the thing that we can go after to hunt down and make better. I think that employee engagement is something that happens at the end of having a really great experience. So that flips me over to employee experience, which is what are the experiences? What are the touchpoints that we have with employees in businesses small to large? For example, my editor, who took charge of my book, read the book. She has a very small firm and said, “Wow, I'm going to take some of these ideas and use it with my team” and I thought that was really great because I'd worked only with multinationals big companies. So, to hear the things that I was saying were applicable to a small company, it was really heartening to me.

Carlos: I want to add something, Dana. We haven't moved the needle on engagement. Let me be clear for our brilliant listeners, what that means. Gallup regularly does studies of engagement at companies using their methodology and tools. The number of highly engaged people has not changed, the number of people in the middle, somewhat engaged, but not really has not moved - 20 years of work on engagement and Gallup admits it has yielded little.

Dana: Exactly. My book is called Talk The Walk, because it's really about how do we actually start doing something different and then be able to talk about it so other people can do it, too. My book is loaded with graphics, not surprising. It's very tricky to write a book about engagement because you've got to have everything engaging, right? So, the title has to be engaging; the look of the book has to be engaging; the inside of the book, it has to read, “engage”, the whole thing. So the employee experience is really about, what are all the touchpoints that we have with our employees? From the very first time that they contact us about wanting to work at our companies, to the hiring process throughout; to the onboarding, to what equipment we give them when they start their job and throughout their job. How do we communicate with them? How do we recognize them? All the way over to when they are actually walking out the door, whether they're retiring or they're going to another company, how is that departure handled, so people still feel engaged and still walk out the door saying, “I would still recommend this company to any friend of mine”?

Carlos: Is this the same as what people talk about as an employee value proposition?

Dana: It's a little bit, because I think that employee value proposition is really more geared towards the very front end. So, what's the value proposition?  What's our employee branding that we have that we want to use to attract new talent? Whereas, I think of employee experiences, all of those touchpoints, and what are the ways that we can change our volume, tone, bass, treble, whatever, on those different touchpoints so we can make it a better experience? We can always improve those different experiences.

Carlos: One of the things I know about engagement is it tends to be most affected by what happens at the level of the team. So, a company may have a marvelous employee value proposition. But my experience with those in my group / team is what really shapes my engagement. By the way, that's true for the way Gallup approaches it, it’s also true for another approach I studied when I was working for IBM. They talk about climate, the climate of a team, how that affects individuals and how the manager shapes it; very similar, in my view. Should we be saying to managers, “you’re largely responsible for employee experience”?

Dana: I totally get where you're getting tripped up.  There's a great quote. Could've been Gallup. I can't remember who said it, but it's people join companies, but leave managers. To your very point, the manager has the direct contact with somebody from day-to-day, they control their schedule, their work product, their bonuses. You could have joined Google because you thought it was the greatest company around and it's your dream job. But if you have a crummy manager, that's going to affect your experience more than the name, Google, on your free t-shirt you got at your orientation. There's only so much Google product that's going to make up for a crummy job and a crummy manager.

I absolutely agree with that. I think it is the manager's job, not to create engagement, but to really look at that experience that the employee is having, not necessarily exclusively individually, but holistically as well, and see how they can make that a better experience.

When engagement surveys first came out, remember we came out of satisfaction surveys and kind of morphed into this engagement survey, and it became the assumption that HR was going to be responsible for it. HR doesn't have that daily contact with a Carlos like the direct manager does. HR can administer a survey, distribute the results. Maybe you have a process for how the manager talks with their team about results, because I know at least for Gallup, Gallup's results are team-based.  In other words, Carlos, you get to have, as a manager, your team's results. And I know at least at Mars, you're responsible for figuring out how you can arrange those scores if the scores are mediocre, let's just say.

If I had my way, I would just eliminate employee engagement surveys. I just really don’t like them.

Carlos: Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. I'm an OD guy! If I don't have surveys, I'm lost! What are you saying??

Dana: I know it's crazy, huh? Well, I'm going to save you a little bit of money. I'm thinking that you could just have some regular conversations with your team about how it's going. There's a conversation point to say, let's check in: How are we doing as a team? How's recognition going? What could we improve? What's going well? - these types of conversations. But I get that I'm really pushing against the establishment. People like spending money. So, go ahead, have your survey, but then have a very productive conversation afterwards to turn it from a two-dimensional survey that may or may not ask the questions that are on your team's mind, into more of a conversation, more of a robust three-dimensional discussion about what are the answers to this mean.

For example, the process I put together was Beiersdorf actually.

Carlos: What is Beiersdorf?.

Dana: Beiersdorf is a multinational company. The product that we most know is NIV-ea, we say, in this country. NivEa is how they say it in the entire rest of the world. They produce beauty healthcare products, personal care products. No food.

With Beiersdorf we developed a process so that they would take the results that they got from their engagement survey - could have been a Gallup Q 12, I can't remember. There's a specific process. There was a before, during and after process. So, they would meet with the HR director, go over the results, kind of digest as a manager by themselves, because sometimes there was some bad feedback, right? This is what their survey is supposed to give you. The good, the bad and the ugly. They would digest that with the HR manager, get out, maybe their frustrations or, “Gosh, darn. I wish that Mannie wasn't on my team. He's a problem”, blah, blah, blah. Have that conversation with the HR person rather than a team, and then come up with a strategy for how you're going to debrief the team around the results, and then how we're going to move forward.

It was a really, really good process because it allowed the team leader, if you will, to get that out and then put a plan together. Given the results and the team and whatever other dynamics, did they want to have assigned facilitator, meaning do they want some help from HR to have that conversation, or did they feel like they could handle it themselves?

Then we distributed the results to the team ahead of this meeting, which was a four-hour meeting. So, it wasn't like an all-day thing. Not offsite. And they gave specific questions for the team to think about like, what do you remember was going on when we took the survey? Another one of my pet peeves about surveys is often they're distributed and sent out say February and March, we don't get the results till September, October for all the reasons of tabulating and all of that. Well, I mean, here's a great example of a year that February's results of a survey in October are going to be completely irrelevant. This is a landmark year, but in most companies the difference in six months can be astronomical. There can be a lot of changes that could have happened, so the results don't necessarily tie to what's happening today.

So, we set that context of having that conversation and then talk about, going forward, what are the areas that we want to change. And the leader commits to making some changes as well. It's really good for the team to have that conversation together and for the leader to acknowledge some things that they could do differently to make a more engaging experience for the employee.

Did you notice I got engagement and experience in the same sentence?

Carlos: Well done! A couple of things. One, for those who might be listening to this not in 2020, the reason I think we're talking about the month of February is it was before the pandemic shutdown happened, people were feeling very differently from how they might be feeling in September or October when we're still dealing with a shutdown.

Dana: What I call it as BC.

Carlos: Yes, before COVID-19. I want to go back to the HR point for a second. You said on the one hand, HR is not responsible for levels of engagement or they're not the ones who own employees’ experience, managers have the bigger influence. And yet we brought HR into this process. Can you talk a little bit about why you would recommend that or why that worked in the case of Beiersdorf?

Dana: Well, because HR is response well for people, they have the greatest knowledge of people and people and how they work. And maybe in specific cases, people who are considered to be problematic employees, for example, or stellar employees. They have, hopefully, a more high level view, a 10,000’ high view of the team itself. They can offer more suggestions from a holistic standpoint, as opposed to Carlos, the manager, is looking at your project team. So, you're kind of on the ground with them.

Carlos: Okay. So, they have a level of detachment from what's going on.  They can have an objectivity, for example.

Dana: Exactly. Not to discount HR’s role at all, I think they have a really important role, but it's more consultative than it is directly making a difference.

Carlos: So, we are not shifting ownership from the manager to HR, we're simply saying HR helped me be objective by bringing their objectivity. Okay. I got it.

You just talked about Beiersdorf. Can you share with our brilliant listeners a story of a team you worked with where it either went exceptionally well, or where you think you might've learned something because it didn't go so well?

Dana: I'm really happy to say the process that I designed often started bad, like you're thinking, Oh gosh, where's this gonna go? And it does actually land pretty well. There've been some close calls. We did one, in fact, Carlos you may have been there. It was in Ohio, it was a Mars project, and it was a really big group because we were doing a train-the-trainer of facilitators for the process, as well as doing the whole site. It was exhausting because it was a really, really big group.

We gathered data from employees about what's working and not working, and obviously the not working tends to be the bigger bucket rather than the what's working, which is fine because that's what we're there to hear. How do we unravel some of the things that are not working? And then we bring together our employees, a smaller subset of the whole to say, “Okay, here's all the data, we're going to trust you, your colleagues are going to trust you to pull out what are the biggest issues, and then what are some solutions? It was very empowering and it's really, really heartening to watch the people step up and take on that big role of being responsible for coming up with solutions that aren't self-serving but are more globally serving. So that's fantastic.

So anyway, we're doing this meeting and as facilitators, we stay in touch and see what's going on, because there's a leadership group and then there's an employee group. What was coming out of the employee group was, “We want more pay.” Well, that's typically off the table because that's not really something that even the highest level of the organization can control automatically. It's not like I can sprinkle over and say, “Everybody gets 200 more dollars.” We try to keep that out of the equation and try to do more doable things.

Well, this was not going off the equation. The plant manager was starting to panic a bit and somehow, we landed that plane, and it was all okay. We just had to be very specific to the employees and say, “We're just going to be straight up with you at this point. We're not going to monkey around with this. This is not going to be possible, so come up with other things that we can do that will make a difference. But changing the pay: we're not going to be able to bump everybody's salary.” There's an important point in there, which is don't promise something you can't deliver.

Carlos: In our field, the rule of thumb is you let people speak. They need to feel heard, even if it's about something that we have no control over. Yeah. I remember that extremely well. I remember the process and how uncomfortable it was. And it’s important to say how much of an employee experience has to do, in all the studies that have been done, has to do with compensation.

Dana: Yeah, it's very little. It's up to a ceiling and then it's really not about compensation. It's about all the other things that surround our day-to-day work environment.

In fact, there's a great company covered in Inc Magazine, I think it's based in Seattle actually, and Dan Price, CEO / founder of Gravity Payments, started everybody in the company at $70,000. He said, I'm just going to take this off the table as a factor. And I'm going to have everybody at the salary. And then all the other things that contribute to a great employee experience we can work on, but I want to have everybody at this base-level salary so this just doesn't become a thing that we talk about.

Carlos: That's an interesting organization-wide approach.

Let's bring it home. What one or two pieces of simple wisdom might you share with managers? Sort of saying, “Okay, I get it. Employee experience is important, and I get that I have a major role to play in shaping that experience.” What are a couple of big ideas you want to make sure that people take away?

And first of all, everybody, go buy Dana's book. Talk the Walk - Go buy the book. Lots of good stuff in there.

But what can we tell them right now, before they buy the book, that you think would be immediately useful?

Conversations are more valuable than surveys for a team

Dana: I think one thing I would say is I've already made my opinions about surveys pretty clear, and I recognize that as a manager in a company, you may not have any control whether there are surveys or not. Make the best of it. Take that data and turn it into a three-dimensional conversation.

So, take the data, sit with your team, sit with your group of people that you work with and say, “What do you think about this? What are the things that really stand out for you that are right? And what are the things that we missed? What are some of the things that we can improve?” When I've talked to managers about this, they get very anxious and I say it’s OK to be uncomfortable. That makes you human. And I think if we've learned anything from this crazy year of COVID it’s that being human is pretty much part of the experience. Everybody's now used to a child running through, or a dog jumping on somebody's lap or whatever, screaming or crying. It could be from the employee themselves. I think the uncomfortableness of the conversation will dissipate, because people will become more comfortable and aware that the manager's genuinely interested in them and their ideas.

And back to the point you made earlier, that's really what people want is they want to feel acknowledged and heard and feel like they are actually contributing to making a difference. No matter how uncomfortable it might seem or feel, and the fear that you might have about what will come out, trust me, it will be so much better afterwards when you allow that valve to be released for people.

Use Visuals

The second point is, going back to what we were talking about earlier, don't be afraid to use visuals put up big pieces of paper even are better than a flip chart. People really are so sick of flip charts. Some way to capture it because it makes people feel like they're being heard.

Carlos: Or a virtual whiteboard because we're all working apart. You got a couple of apps out there, like Miro that allow you to do virtual whiteboards in amazing ways.

Dana: Yes. Great, great point. Miro or Mural, the confusing two titles of the whiteboard products that are out there. Those are great.

So much of what people say often falls by the wayside, and when people see you don't have to be a stellar graphic facilitator to do this, when people see that you are listening to their words and you’re capturing them… The first time I ever did this was with a group of very frustrated maintenance people. And when they saw me write on the board what they were saying - and it was all frustration and anger and pent up hostility about things that had happened place- I could viscerally feel the energy in the room calm down. It’s so hard to explain, but it was amazing when I wrote it down, people felt, “Oh my gosh, I got heard!” When I've done the engagement sessions and we do this over and over and over with employees, people will come up to us afterwards. We're using a template, capturing their words as they say them, not translating or changing them. People will come up and say, “Thank you so much for listening”! And one person said, I'll never forget, he said, “I have held that in for 30 years. Today is the first day I can go out on my job and not feel frustrated”. It almost brings tears to your eyes or at least chills on your bones.

Carlos: It does. That's a beautiful, simple understanding, right? It doesn't take a lot to help people feel engaged. And listening, not just listening, but affirming that listening, whether it's writing down the words or jotting in your note book, letting people see that you are taking to heart, they may not agree with you, but they are taken to heart what you have to say.

Go Talk the Walk

What a wonderful conversation. You are a wellspring of knowledge and experience. Again, I encourage everybody listening to go out and get ahold of that book. It's so practical. I think I said in a review, I wrote it that it's like a mini-MBA because Dana covers so many aspects of how a business operates and how you can use those aspects of the business to affect the experience of employees. So I encourage you all take a look at Dana Wasson's book.

Dana: Thank you. And I think Carlos, I think one of my favorite words or phrases for this year is the importance of leaders exhibiting compassionate listening - it kind of sums up all of what we were just talking about. It's just this idea of compassionate listening. We all need it.

Carlos: Thank you, Dana Wasson, for being with us today.

And to my brilliant listeners, thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Teaming With Ideas.