Mastering Employee Engagement: Uncovering the Untapped Beginnings and Endings

Jessie Osborne, VP Global Learning and Development,AML RightSource, and Kevin Kerl, CAO & EVP, People Operations, AML RightSource

Jessie Osborne, VP Global Learning and Development: What is one of the greatest mistakes organizations make when trying to master employee engagement? We think it’s that two of the greatest points in engagement aren’t considered, where it begins and where it ends.

Employee engagement is a summary of experiences and like all experiences, it has a life cycle. Somewhere along the way it starts and eventually, it ends. Too often organizations only plan for the height of employee engagement, which leads to misalignment, unmanaged expectations and often… disappointed employees and leaders.

When I was in the interview process with AML RightSource, I was having a discussion with Kevin Kerl, CAO and EVP of People Operations. In that conversation Kevin was sharing his background with me and I was learning that my soon to be boss and department leader, isn’t a traditional People Ops leader. In fact, he was an engineer by trade and his career was full of working with diverse workforce populations in a variety of industries. Specializing in learning and development, I’ve worked under the HR/People Ops umbrella for 15 years, and none of my department leaders have ever approached talent and engagement from the point of view Kevin has- which was music to my ears.

Kevin had a vision for understanding the benchmarks of human behavior that can be predicted through data in the hiring process. He believed that was the start of engaging employees. Kevin’s vision aligned with mine. I look at employees as my customers and consumers of the business. You have to know what motivates your consumer, along with what satisfies their wants and needs to keep consuming. Pizza parties, bean-bag chairs, foosball tables, onboarding swag… they don’t move the needle on engaging an adult employee who is looking to start their career.

We know this, because we’ve built the predictive index to understand the behaviors our business needs to be successful and what our people want from their career with us. The art of employee engagement comes in aligning those two concepts.

“Pizza parties, bean-bag chairs, foosball tables, onboarding swag… they don’t move the needle on engaging an adult employee who is looking to start their career.”

Kevin Kerl, CAO & EVP, People Operations: It must be stated that all hiring and training programs are never going to be 100% accurate. We aim to increase the odds of our employees being highly engaged in their work, thus leading to hire production and quality resulting in extremely high client satisfaction levels. As a managed service provider, our goal must start with the client, but pulling that back to understanding the candidates we hire and their success helps connect the dots. We use pre-hire assessments to analyze the cognitive and behavioral attributes of each candidate. This is cross-referenced against performance for those we hire and helps us continuously analyze benchmarking for our pre-hire assessments. Understanding attributes helps us predict a person’s engagement on the job. When you pull it down to the basic level, we use data to make sure people will enjoy their job and thus be more productive and engaged. Our current system removes bias in the hiring process, increases the production of team members, decreases attrition, and improves career progression.

Jessie: After we’ve sourced and trained engaged employees, we do what we can to either increase or preserve that engagement, by providing our teams easy on-ramps and variety to how they develop. Engagement and development is not a simple recipe. Our programming and philosophy toward learning and career growth, acknowledges just how diverse our employee’s needs are. We offer development pathways through every stage of the employee life cycle to meet those needs. From early leadership development with Emerge, to a deepened human approach to manager training w/ Ignite, and uniting our technical learning programs with power skills like feedback in our Equip program. To complete all of our development programs would take 36 consecutive months. That’s three years’ worth of engagement, for employees who want to build meaningful skill sets for a fulfilling career.  Save your pizza parties, invest in what your employees want and want your business needs.

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