Employee Engagement Consulting

Employee engagement consulting is the work of finding and removing the reasons people are disengaged, rather than running activity designed to raise a score. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including American Express and Bayernwerk, part of E.ON. We treat the engagement survey as a symptom report, not as the problem statement.

• Since 1999employee engagement and internal brand work
• Über 200veröffentlichte Fallstudien
• 10 Niederlassungenauf vier Kontinenten
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche: Das Beste aus den Bereichen Beratung, Strategie und Innovation

Wenn Unternehmen uns beauftragen

Engagement work is usually bought by a CHRO, a chief people officer or a business unit leader who already has the survey data and no agreed account of what it is reporting on. The trigger is almost never the annual cycle.

• The score moved and nothing else did. A year of recognition, communication and manager training produced a lift that has already started to fall back.
• After a restructuring. Repeated reorganizations have made the company a less attractive place to work than it used to be, and people can name the moment it changed. This was Bayernwerk.
• When a new way of working has to reach everyone. A strategy has been approved that only matters if thousands of people change how they make daily decisions. This was American Express.
• When the survey has been run for years and acted on once. The instrument is now itself a source of cynicism, because asking again without visible change is read, correctly, as a decision not to act.
• When the disengagement is concentrated. One function, one site or one level is well below the rest, which points at a local cause rather than a cultural one.

Why engagement programs raise the score and change nothing

An engagement score is a downstream measure. It reflects conditions created elsewhere in the company, mostly by decisions nobody thought of as engagement decisions. Three of them do most of the work.

• The work itself. People are engaged by work whose purpose they can see and disengaged by work that looks pointless from inside it. No amount of recognition activity compensates for the second case.
• Friction. Every approval that adds a week, every tool that asks for information the company already holds, every report nobody reads. These accumulate, and the accumulated effect reads on a survey as attitude.
• Permission. People who can see a better way and are not allowed to act on it disengage faster than people who cannot see one. That is a governance problem being measured as a mood.

Programs that address recognition and communication while leaving those three untouched buy a temporary improvement and spend credibility to do it. Our own writing on this covers the imperatives that actually move engagement and what the future of employee experience asks of employers.

What our employee engagement consulting services include

1. Diagnosing what the survey is reporting on

We start from the results you already have and work backwards to the decisions that produced them, rather than fielding another instrument.

• The specific conditions behind the lowest-scoring areas, traced to the policy, process or structure that created each one
• Wo es bei der normalen Arbeit zu Reibungsverlusten kommt – abgeleitet aus dem, was die Mitarbeiter tatsächlich tun, und nicht aus der Prozessdokumentation
• Where people can see improvements they are not permitted to make

2. Removing rather than adding

Most engagement plans add initiatives to a workload that is part of the problem. The first list we write is a list of things to stop.

• Approval steps, reporting requirements and tools that add work without adding value
• The systems people already route around, which is the clearest available signal of what is not working
• Besprechungen und Abläufe, die weiterbestehen, weil niemand die Befugnis hat, sie zu beenden

3. Moving decision rights to where the information is

Visibility and permission are separate conditions, and engagement work usually treats them as one. The quadrant that produces the worst results is not the one where people cannot see the problem.

4. Participatory activation rather than a communications cascade

Engagement follows from being involved in a decision that mattered, not from being told about one. At Bayernwerk we ran workshops, group activities and shared meals, and more than 500 participants developed over 2000 ideas for next steps through the intranet, internal newsletters and in-person sessions.

• Workshop series that ask employees to co-create quick wins and longer-term measures, not to react to a finished plan
• A champion network that carries the change into daily work, of the kind we built with over 800 champions at American Express
• Tools, playbooks and action learning so the new way of working arrives inside the workflow rather than beside it

5. A feedback route that visibly changes something

A channel that collects input and produces no observable change lowers engagement rather than raising it. We design the return path first: what gets decided, by whom, by when, and how people find out.

• A short list of commitments with named owners and dates, published to the people who raised them
• Communication of outcomes through the channels employees already use
• A measurement model built on what was removed and what moved, with the score as one input rather than the target

How an employee engagement assignment works

1. Diagnose. Interviews, a read of the survey data you already hold, and a map of where friction and permission sit in normal work. The output is a causal account, not another dataset.
2. Decide. What will be removed, which decision rights move, and the commercial reason for each. The output is a short list with owners attached.
3. Activate. A participatory rollout that involves employees at every level in defining the change, supported by workshops, tools and a champion network.
4. Embed. The governance, measurement and process changes that keep the new way of working in place after we leave, plus a feedback route that demonstrably produces decisions.

Employee engagement results

Bayernwerk: Nach jahrelanger Umstrukturierung wurde die Arbeitskultur bei 3.000 Mitarbeitern neu gestaltet

Repeated restructurings inside the E.ON group had left Bayernwerk, which supplies electricity, gas and heat to 41% of the population of Bavaria, with uncertainty and dissatisfaction among its 3000 employees and a damaged reputation as an employer. Vivaldi ran an employee engagement program built on co-creation: a workshop series, group activities and communal meals, with more than 500 participants contributing over 2000 ideas for next steps through the intranet and internal newsletters.

The company vision was activated with all 3000 employees. Of those surveyed afterwards, 96% said the initiative paid off and 86% rated the workshops as good or very good, and participants rated their understanding of the brand vision four points higher on a 1 to 10 scale after the workshop than before it. The work was later recognized with the QUEB Employer Branding Award. Read the full story: transforming work culture at Bayernwerk.

American Express: a new way of working carried by more than 800 champions

American Express asked us to embed a customer-first mindset in how every employee worked, as a multi-year change rather than a campaign. We ran a needs assessment, observed how employees actually spent their days, and translated the result into a philosophy, a playbook and a set of tools people could apply to their own work.

More than 800 champions were enrolled and engaged across levels and geographies, and more than 30 of them took part in a half-day session on teaching the philosophy to others. The program was extended into a second version and continues to add modules. Read the full story: creating a customer-first commercial system at American Express.

Employee engagement by industry

Those are the two sectors where we have published engagement work of our own. Broader culture programs in other industries sit on our cultural transformation consulting page.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for employee engagement

• We are a strategy firm, so engagement is tied to a commercial decision. The behaviors we work on exist because a business outcome depends on them, which is why the work survives a budget review.
• Participation is the method, not the communications plan. At Bayernwerk and American Express the people who had to live the change helped define it, and that is what made the change hold.
• We say what we do not do. We are not a survey vendor, an engagement platform or an HR systems implementer. We do not license software, run your listening infrastructure or administer your annual instrument. We work on the conditions the instrument is measuring, and on the decisions that would have to change. Where you need a platform, we will tell you so and we will not sell you one.

So bewerten Sie einen Berater für Mitarbeiterengagement

• Ask whether they will change the work or the sentiment. Activity aimed at the score without touching the causes produces a temporary improvement and a lasting credibility cost.
• Ask what they will remove. Engagement work that only adds initiatives is adding to the workload that is part of the problem.
• Ask how they treat the survey. As a diagnosis or as the target. A firm optimizing the instrument rather than the conditions will succeed at the first and fail at the second.
• Ask about decision rights. If nobody has examined what teams are allowed to decide, the largest single cause has not been looked at.
• Ask what happens to the feedback. A listening exercise that produces no visible change makes engagement worse, and it is the most common way these programs backfire.

Employee engagement consulting firm, engagement platform or HR consultancy?

Verwandte Arbeiten

Engagement is a symptom, so the right service depends on what is causing it.

• Change management consulting when a specific change has to be adopted, with an end state and a date. If that is your question, start there rather than here.
• Cultural transformation consulting when the causes are broad and behavioral rather than local and structural.
• Kulturstrategie wenn es darum geht, welche Kultur die Unternehmensstrategie tatsächlich erfordert, bevor irgendetwas umgesetzt wird.
• Growth culture when the organization has to run the current business and reinvent it at the same time.

Adjacent to this group, organizational design changes the structure that creates the friction, capability development builds what the organization can do, and customer-first training is the program behind the American Express work above. Further reading: Ella F. Washington on building stronger workplace cultures.

Diese Arbeit ist Teil unseres Geschäftsbereichs „People, Culture & Capabilities“ bei Vivaldi, dem Strategieberatungsunternehmen, das hinter dem „Demand Landscape“ und dem „ Interaction Field “ steht.

Employee engagement consulting in the US and worldwide

Our engagement work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Most programs are multi-market, and the complication is real: what reads as healthy candor in one country reads as disloyalty in another, so a single engagement instrument applied without translation produces its worst scores in the markets where people are most willing to say what they think. We work at the level of the decision rather than the gesture, which travels. German and Swiss engagements run from our Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Zurich offices, and the Bayernwerk program above was delivered in German.