Gregory Owen and Sharon Riehl are essential to the day-to-day operations of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) team. As director of human resources (HR) and employee engagement manager, respectively, they provide support to every group (not to mention every individual) in EI2. They spoke with us on a range of topics, from hiring trends to building employee cohesion in a remote workplace – and the lesser-known factors that make a job truly appealing to applicants.
What is employee engagement and what’s its relationship to HR?
Sharon Riehl: Employee engagement is all about building connection, commitment, and purpose. EI2’s commitment to creating meaningful work is a driver of employee engagement. Most organizations have employee engagement as a part of their HR function, but employee engagement has to happen in every space where employees reside. Engagement is not literally an HR program – it’s much broader and includes all aspects of the culture, how we do work, and how we interact with one another.
Similarly, well-being is not an HR program either, but to nurture well-being, we give people tools, resources, information, and knowledge so they can make decisions and form habits that benefit them. Each one of us has the opportunity to drive engagement in the workplace and in how we interact and treat one another.
What are some ways that EI2 invests in employee engagement?
Riehl: One example is the work that we have done in building a strengths-based culture. Gallup research has shown people who focus on using their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Understanding your strengths and the strengths of others not only helps us in our work but also in interacting with and strengthening our relationships with others.
The Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, which is being launched across Georgia Tech from September 24 to October 8, will help us understand and benchmark the level of employee engagement throughout EI2. It’s a very short, less than 10-minute, confidential survey that gives every member of EI2 the opportunity to share their thoughts on workplace satisfaction, recognition, and belonging. The results of the survey will be key in generating dialogue and developing specific target areas of engagement to focus our efforts on. It’s really important that everyone participates, so no voice is left out.
Gregory Owen: Employee engagement is an organizational ongoing initiative. What Sharon does is help facilitate that and help us go in that direction, but it doesn’t happen unless employees embrace it. We give them opportunities to do that and help nudge the program in the right direction. But if only the HR department is doing it, it’s not effective.
It sounds like you’re describing more of a two-way street.
Riehl: Yes. HR can also provide tools and resources to help leaders, because leaders have a big impact on engagement – and they can tailor that engagement to the specific personalities of their team members.
Let’s take recognition, for example. We’ve been handing out Spotlight Awards to recognize two people at each of the monthly employee events, but not everybody likes to be recognized in the same way.
I’m always careful to reach out to people and say, “Hey, would you like to be recognized during the employee meeting?” Because there are some people who will say, “Do not do that. I will run out of the room and hide and not want to come back to work if you recognize me that way.”
So, it’s important to understand the individual nuances of what keeps different people engaged, because employee engagement is not a “one size fits all” approach. Engagement is a multidimensional construct, and part of doing employee surveys is to try to find out the areas where we are doing well and those where we are doing not so well – and then ask ourselves, how can we better address the gaps that we might discover?
Two of our values at Georgia Tech are to “cultivate well-being” and to “lead by example.” In that context, what is the larger importance of employee engagement for employers who want to do it effectively?
Owen: We view employee engagement as an umbrella term that encompasses many different techniques, many different programs, many different interactions that we set up, because one key aspect of the approach is preventing employees from being disengaged – and what I mean by that is they don’t feel a sense of purpose or connection with their organization.
If we get off on the right foot, and we’re making sure they feel engaged in their first week, six months, year … well, there’s a lot that has to happen for them to feel end up feeling disengaged. It means something has happened that really threw them off the rails, so to speak.
You can’t just assume that just because you’ve set people off in the right path in their first six months or a year that they’re just going to continue to be engaged. You need to circle back with them. You need to reengage them.
We recruit people all the time and we try to bring in the best talent possible. But after you do that, you have to re-recruit them every year or two. You need to make sure that you’re still helping them capture that feeling they had when they first came, and that they’re still enjoying their job.
What are some of the factors EI2 has been navigating since the office went fully remote/hybrid and what should employers in general consider as they change or adapt these policies?
Owen: Well, from the standpoints of both efficiency and office relationships, there have been several pros and cons to this still relatively new working arrangement. We have been able to streamline a lot of the ways that we communicate. Using Microsoft Teams for voice and video has definitely been helpful to our relationships in terms of efficiency.
But at the same time, we’re missing out on those face-to-face encounters that happen when we’re physically in the office – the term “water cooler talk” comes to mind. Some of those aspects of office life are really valuable, and you can’t replace those interactions with an online environment.
Riehl: At the last quarterly meeting, which was held online and in person, there was a panel discussion where we learned a lot about some of our fellow employees. For the people who attended live, there was a meet-and-greet event afterward. I sat at a table with people I had never met and we talked for about an hour – we all know each other as people now.
People enjoy learning about their colleagues’ interests and lives outside of work. It’s a way of building connections and familiarity, and the more that we can keep cultivating that kind of environment, the better off we are.
How has recruitment been affected by the growing phenomenon of remote work?
Owen: I think our ability to recruit and retain has actually been improved by being able to offer more flexible work arrangements. When we recruited our employees before the pandemic, half our organization was expected to come into the office.
Some people really don’t like spending 30 minutes – or sometimes over an hour – in the car every day. Now we’ve been able to advertise our jobs saying, “This is a flexible role where a good portion of work can be done from home,” and I think people have really appreciated that.
What else can employers do to attract people?
Owen: There’s a common misconception that pay is the No. 1 thing, that everybody’s motivated by money. That’s actually not true. You do need to be able to find the amount of pay that an employee is comfortable with, so they are not overly concerned with their finances – and it has to correlate with the talents and the skills they bring to the organization. That way they can focus on their work. But don’t always assume that pay is the No. 1 thing that people are most concerned about.
What are some of those other factors?
Riehl: Of course, people aren’t going to work somewhere if they can’t afford to live on the salary. But what drives most people today in selecting where they go to work – and where they stay at work – is the question: “Is this a workplace where I can fully contribute and where I’m appreciated for what I bring?” There needs to be a sense of purpose. We all need to have a sense of connection or belonging about where we work, whether it’s about the work itself or the people or both. It’s not just a plug-and-play. People are expecting more from the place where they spend so much of their time.
Owen: Sharon and I definitely see eye-to-eye in terms of our understanding of motivation and what all we need in order to succeed. One of my one of my favorite books is Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Reading that book provided one of the shifts I had toward understanding that pay is not necessarily something that’s always at the top of the list.
The three main tenets in that book are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. At EI2 we try to provide people with opportunities in all those three areas, and I think we do a great job with it, because we’ve had people in our organization that have started off as staff members and have gone on to build entire programs based on their expertise.
Do you see any generational trends in terms of employees’ priorities?
Riehl: I hesitate to label people based on a generation group, because there are variations in any demographic you look at. But one thing I will say is that the younger generations who have come in the workforce during the pandemic have really transformed what employee expectations are. During the Great Resignation that happened at that time, people were rethinking what’s most important in life. If you were working in a job where your whole life was work, a lot of people decided, “I don’t want to do that anymore.”
What are employers looking for now that’s different from, say, five years ago?
Owen: You can recruit skills, you can recruit expertise – those things that people bring to the table in terms of knowledge. But in a remote environment, it’s harder to determine whether people have soft skills, the ability to interact positively with teammates and to communicate effectively on a regular basis.
When we interview people, we really look for those kinds of things. In fact, for certain leadership positions, we’ve been making sure we have some face-to-face interaction with those candidates. Soft skills have become much more important, and they can be harder to identify in a remote environment.
How does employee engagement fit with the broader mission of EI2?
Riehl: We’re always asking ourselves what type of a culture we want to be creating here. There are certain principles that we uphold at EI2. We have meaningful work, which also aligns with purpose; we cultivate well-being; and we’re a mission-driven organization. That’s all part of the culture we’re supporting, and we really want to create a space where people feel that they can uniquely contribute to what we’re doing.
When the entire EI2 group went through our HR CliftonStrengths workshop, we found out how different we are from each other. We recognized once again that what one person needs will not be the same as what another person needs, and this understanding helps us interact and work more effectively with people, while respecting the individuality of each member of the team.
At the end of the day, people want to work at organizations where they feel their values are being honored. They’re looking for someplace where what they do and what they believe are aligned.