Nationwide CEO Steve Rasmussen believes strongly in workplace engagement -- and he and his executive team have put that belief into practice. When Nationwide began working with Gallup to improve employee engagement in 2008, the company's overall ranking was low compared with other finance and insurance companies in Gallup's database. And its ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees was 2 to 1.
By 2012, Nationwide had improved its overall engagement ranking significantly, and its ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees had increased to 10 to 1. Nationwide was also seeing positive increases on many of its key performance metrics.
Achieving that kind of success takes more than belief. It takes hard work and commitment by leaders and all associates. In this conversation, Rasmussen explains how Nationwide does it.
Gallup Business Journal: You have observed that employees are either "patriots" or "mercenaries" in their jobs. Patriots totally identify with their company, and mercenaries are more likely to focus on personal outcomes. Are mercenaries disengaged?
Steve Rasmussen: I believe you want as many patriots as possible in your organization because they connect with the mission of the company. But even if associates have a mercenary view, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Mercenaries are still engaged in the organization's success and its purpose, and all associates work together to achieve a common goal.
Why is engagement important to Nationwide and to you?
Rasmussen: Successful organizations have people who feel like they belong to the mission and purpose of the organization. At Nationwide, there are many ways people feel like they belong, including working together to serve our members; contributing to our communities through programs such as Feeding America, Red Cross, and United Way; and supporting and collaborating with each other. Engagement is the culmination of that process. I don't view engagement as only a score.
What do you mean when you say engagement is not only a score?
Rasmussen: Engagement is a state of mind. People either are engaged or they're not. You can feel it. I can walk into any company, and I can tell you in 15 minutes whether people are engaged or not just by talking to them. Say hello to them -- you'll know how they feel.
We had been down the engagement path before, and it was "top of the house" -- metrics at the very top of the organization and nothing that was actionable. But engagement is a people-to-people issue, and the Gallup process, which begins at the individual manager level, creates an outlook of personal accountability from top to bottom in the organization.
How people think, act, and feel in the workplace is influenced by every manager, supervisor, and ultimately all associates. Our engagement program gives teams a chance to sit down and have important conversations: "What's our purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? How do we feel about it? What's getting in the way? How do we feel about working together as a team? How do we feel about supervision? How do we feel about the way we're being treated?"
Our engagement program also helps ferret out different styles of management and leadership. Styles can be incredibly different, but outcomes are the same -- they're either effective or ineffective. Ineffective managers aren't that way because they're bad people. They're ineffective because they haven't been trained to be good managers.
Some managers may never get it, but it's a small percentage. If they've been trained to manage and it's clear they are not effective, most of the time it's because they are in a job that does not play to their skills, strengths, or desires. This happens when we place them in a job because they were great individual contributors, but they didn't have the profile to be a good leader. Good managers are better at engaging teams, and engaged teams can succeed no matter what the business environment is like. Teams that aren't engaged don't do as well.
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