This edition first published 2018
© 2018 Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey.
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To the rebels, the misfits, the troublemakers.
Let's make the world a better place to work.
A group of companies has twice the stock market performance of their peers. They innovate more, deliver better customer service and have half the employee turnover. They rebel against the status quo by treating people differently, and they've been rewarded with productivity and bottom‐line results that leave other companies behind. They are the companies with the most engaged workforces—measured and tracked by numerous surveys and indexes, with the data proving the connection to real business results.
These companies have found a way to build an engaging culture—a culture where hard‐working people thrive in jobs with challenge and excitement. A culture where people regularly put their companies and their customers ahead of their own needs. These companies have been outperforming their peers for nearly 20 years.
Of all the things we do in modern business, the link between employee engagement and business results is one of the most clearly proven. Gallup, Great Place to Work, Best Companies and Glassdoor all analyze employee engagement and correlate it to stock market performance. Whichever data you look at, the results are the same— companies with engaged employees beat their competition.
The Gallup index alone has 30 million data points going back nearly two decades: They interview 500 American adults every day, collecting data on employee engagement 350 days of the year.1 The truth is, we proved the link between employee engagement and business performance years ago. Now it's time to act!
Yet, despite this robust evidence, the vast majority of companies are either doing nothing, or not enough, to engage their staff. The lack of progress causes consultants to invent new ways of saying the same thing: “Engagement is dead, long live employee experience,” “Forget engagement think about organizational health”—but actually it's all broadly the same thing.
The problem with employee engagement isn't what we're calling it. The problem is we're failing to make the necessary fundamental changes to our disengaging workplace practices.
The majority of our organizations are nothing without the collective output, ingenuity, choices and decisions of our staff. Company culture is simply the term that describes how you treat people and how you set the conditions in which they do their work. To fix company culture and allow people to choose engagement, we don't need fancy initiatives around the edges; we need to fundamentally change how we treat the people who work for us.
When the Harvard Business Review surveyed business leaders in 2014, 71% of them said employee engagement was critical to the success of their organizations, but only 24% of these same leaders said their workforces were highly engaged. This difference is what we call the engagement gap.
No matter how you gather, track or slice the data, the big picture is that almost three‐quarters of our employees simply don't care much about our companies, they don't care much about our customers, and they're not really working as well or as hard as they could be. We've written this book to help you change that. We've written this book to help you make the world a better place to work.
Just about every vendor in HR describes themselves as an employee engagement platform or product these days—even the payroll companies! You could easily be forgiven for thinking this is a new trend that's just started; an invention of new technology.
But the truth is that we've known for over 100 years that treating people better gets better business results. It's important to focus on those words, so let's repeat them: “Treating people better gets better business results.” We have disengaged employees because we lie to them; treat them as adversaries; and give them crappy jobs without autonomy, excitement or accountability. The Engagement Bridge™ model will help you understand the things that cause disengagement, and show you the tools and strategies to address them.
If you're reading this thinking that you've already done work on engagement and it didn't work, ask yourself: Did you really change how your organization treats people? Because if you only focused around the edges—installing a new intranet, a tool that helps staff know whose birthday it is, or something to count how many steps they walked—then nice as that is, it won't have been enough.
For our purposes, we've always believed in a results‐focused definition of engagement. We define someone as engaged when they:
You'll find that engaged employees build better, stronger and more resilient organizations. They do this in three ways:
It's easy to get happiness and engagement confused, and it's also common to think that a good employer creates an easy place to work. Neither is true.
You do not need employee engagement to have happy employees. I've found companies that have quite happy employees based on a combination of good working conditions, low ambition and low accountability for results. This tends to result in the best people leaving and an average group of people staying and finding meaning and self‐actualization outside of work. It's pretty dreadful for organizational performance, and you can guarantee those companies won't have the durable and resilient cultures needed to navigate the tough years ahead.
Engagement is something deeper, more meaningful for the employee and more valuable to the organization. With the pace of business accelerating by the day, we need engaged employees more than ever.
Technology is making the world move faster, and when the world goes faster, competition gets harder. Companies are innovating and changing at a rate previously unimagined. Product lifecycles are shorter, links between manufacturing and the customer are closer, and the demands for process improvement and process change have never been greater. We've never needed our staff on our side more than we do now.
Just look at the time taken for new products to reach 50 million users. Radio was invented at the start of the 20th century and it took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, but 100 years later, it took just four years for the iPod to reach the same size audience. It took just three years for the internet, a year for Facebook and a month for Angry Birds!
This speed generally makes better outcomes for the customer, but it also brings huge instability. With technology, new players with small, highly engaged teams can outmaneuver and outperform their larger, slower competitors—look what happened to Nokia, Polaroid, Blockbuster and Borders. Each of these companies failed because when the winds changed, they couldn't move fast enough, reorganize themselves quickly enough or stay connected to the customer closely enough. You could say they all failed because of a failure of their corporate cultures.
Great cultures are full of openness, honesty, courage, connection to the customer, and vast swathes of passionate, engaged employees—these are the cultures that enable companies to react and respond to fast‐changing markets and fast‐changing environments.
Employee engagement isn't something just for rich tech companies, and it isn't something just for companies that employ lots of young people, either. Everyone, regardless of age, deserves to have a job they love that makes them feel fulfilled, and every company needs its people on side more than ever.
When I worked for a major public company in the 1990s, despite the fact we were all shareholders (so you'd think we'd automatically be engaged), I never felt more distant from the ability or desire to make an impact.
But when I met Lei, who works at the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas, I heard a very different story. He had been running the roulette table for 25 years and told me that El Cortez was a good employer, a good company that treated him well. He was engaged, so he knew how to make the company successful.
“If I treat the customers well and smile and wish them luck, then they come back. I want that. There's a lot of other casinos on Fremont Street where customers can spend their money, and I want them to come here. This is a good job. I want to keep it, I want the casino to still be here.”
I've also seen that employee engagement can be developed in the harshest of conditions. In 2013, GM Holden, an Australian car company, announced that the entire manufacturing plant would close, marking the end of domestic car production in the country. But the exceptional efforts on engagement made by local leaders ensured that every key production and engagement metric improved, with every employee dedicated to ensuring that the last car that rolled off the production line would be their very best ever.
This shows that there is no industry you must be in, no sector you must be from, and no age or stage your company must be at—you can make employee engagement work for you and make a real difference.
And remember, the bar for success is remarkably low—most companies are pretty average, as the engagement stats show. If you can get even 20% better at two or three elements in the Engagement Bridge™, you'll really be able to see competitive advantage through your people.
Don't read too much into the order of chapters in this book. The truth is you need to understand the elements in the Bridge™ and then decide what is urgent and pressing for you.
To make things easier and provide inspiration, half of the book is dedicated to the case studies, or plays—this is a playbook, after all. Debra led on the plays and interviewed hundreds of companies in her research over the last two years. As well as the plays in this book, you can find dozens more on the book's website, rebelplaybook.com.
We've chosen plays from companies big and small, young and mature, with big budgets and with small budgets, and often no budgets. We found you don't have to be a VC‐fueled startup or a well‐funded corporation to get amazing results from your people. We've also chosen plays from all types of rebels—some taking small steps and others taking bigger steps into their “rebelution”—to make the point that there are lots of different ways to be a rebel.
Some of the things in this book may sound outlandish and you might think you could never do them at your company. It's important to remember that this is a Rebel Playbook. The status quo of how we treat people at work has failed and we need to get out of our comfort zones to make an impact. If some parts make you feel a little uncomfortable, that's OK—use it to power your own rebelution at work.
Don't despair if the overall task looks big and, for heaven's sake, don't give up. Employee engagement isn't binary: You're never done or not done. Instead, think of it as moving forward or moving backward. It's a journey that you never complete, but the most important thing to do is to get moving.
The Engagement Bridge™ is a model to help you think about the ways your organization influences the people who work for you. The goal is to help you create the conditions that will allow your people to engage with their jobs and your organization. We spent 10 years developing the model through our work with more than 2,000 companies worldwide, and you can use it to develop an employee engagement plan that works for you.
The distinction is key—the underpinning elements don't cross the divide—and you cannot engage your workforce with these elements alone. They are critically important and the absence of them can destroy completely any chances of engagement. If we're looking for what to blame for the lack of engagement improvement in the last 10 years, then top of my list would be the myth that a fancy office and some perks are all you need. They are useful, but only a step in your journey.
Imagine a bridge crossing over a running stream. You need to get your people over the water, and the elements on the bridge are like beams of wood to help you do this. You can bridge the stream with any one beam, but with only one, you can't get many people across at once and it's wobbly and unsafe. Add a second and things get better; add a third or a fourth and you're really getting somewhere.
But the banks of your stream are muddy and slippery, and you need a decent base or your beams can slide in and be washed away. That's where the underpinning elements come in—by acting as rocks. These rocks give you a stable base to build on. Without them, it's hard to even get started.
If you try to build a bridge with rocks alone, you'll fail. And if you build a bridge with too few beams of wood, it won't last, either. All of the pieces are valuable, and together they create a strong and enduring structure. How important or urgent each element is depends on your organization, your context, your situation.
| Connecting Elements—Beams | Underpinning Elements—Rocks |
| Open & Honest Communication Purpose, Mission & Values Leadership Management Job Design Learning Recognition |
Pay & Benefits Wellbeing Workspace |
Like bridging a stream, the whole Engagement Bridge™ doesn't have to be beautiful, complete and perfect before you can start to get people across it. Some organizations get great engagement with just a few—charities stand out as excelling on Mission and Purpose; people often go to work for them because they deeply believe in the cause—curing cancer or saving pandas. This can create great engagement just from Mission and Purpose alone, but if they work on some of the rest of the Bridge, they'll get an even more successful, effective and durable culture.
While we've thought carefully about the order and placement of elements in the Bridge™, it's important not to take the placings too literally. Although recognition appears at the top, it is not intended to be the “cherry on top.” For many companies, it is essential and, because it's also quite straightforward, many companies might actually start with it. Leadership and Management, which appear as smaller elements of the Bridge™, are not half as important as Purpose, Mission & Values—we show them on one line to indicate how interconnected they are.
Finally, you don't start at the top and work down or on the left and work across—you set your own direction and order. Our guidance is to start where you can make a quick impact—the enemy of progress is inertia.
While the Bridge™ has 10 elements, we think of them in five parts.
Creating a culture of open and honest communication is so important that we call it the foundation of the Engagement Bridge™. In fact, in all of the 2,000 companies we've worked with, we haven't found one that has had success in engagement and hasn't made a significant effort in this area.
The reason that open and honest communication is so important is that it is so closely linked to employee trust. Without trust, it's very hard to imagine an engaged culture where people voluntarily put the company, and its mission and purpose, first.
With a baseline of honesty and transparency established, having a clear direction and purpose plus a consistent way of behaving drives employee engagement. There is something deeply human about the need to feel part of something bigger than yourself—something that feels worthwhile, something that feels purposeful and worth the sacrifice of your time. Getting paid and creating money for shareholders simply isn't enough for the vast majority of people to feel this connection. They need more.
Ford wants to “go further to make our cars better, our employees happier and our planet a better place to be.” Atlassian wants “to unleash the potential in every team and help advance humanity through the power of software.” For Google, it's “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They're all different, but they all provide a sense of meaning and purpose for employees to get behind.
These are separate elements of the Bridge™, but we show them together on a single line to emphasize the link between them. To some extent, Leadership is what the company says it will do, while Management is what the company actually does. The CEO has to make sure that management keeps the promises that the leader makes.
If you have leaders who espouse great customer service, dedication to innovation and treating people fairly, but local management who don't feel connected, empowered or driven to deliver that, then you'll have an inauthentic culture. The same goes for process and procedures: If the wall says “Delight your customer,” but the process manual or computer is always saying “no,” then again, your culture is inauthentic and your staff will spot this in a second. That's why we present these elements together: because they are so closely intertwined.
These three elements are hyper‐connected because we know that the best‐designed jobs, the most successful and engaging roles, have recognition (and visibility) and learning (and development) built into them right from the start. A boring job where you have no meaningful output, no sense of achievement, and no one seeming to notice if you do it or not is not made better by sticking a recognition program and a subscription to an e‐learning platform on the side of it.
Fundamentally, to be able to be engaged, someone has to be in a job that has some degree of autonomy and accountability, and produces meaningful results that are seen and recognized. And any job will become disengaging if it does not develop and progress over time.
These final three elements are different because they are your underpinning elements—underpinning your engagement strategy. They are not the same as the connecting elements that run across, since you cannot engage your workforce with these elements alone.
They remain hugely important. If these elements in your strategy are lacking, then your bridge will be built on unstable ground; the complete absence of them will prevent progress on engagement completely. Pay, in particular, can be an enormous disengager of your people, especially if they perceive it as dealt with unfairly. With pressures on pay in many industries, getting this right can be a minefield.
Many organizations at the start of their employee engagement journeys choose to start with a simple new employee perk or benefit to act as an olive branch with the workforce. The key to success is to make sure you use this as a starting point and not an end in itself.
We're often asked how the Bridge™ links to culture or why company culture isn't an element of the Bridge™ itself. Company culture is the output of your collective actions (or inactions). The Bridge™ shows your inputs. You can change culture, but you only change it by making changes to the inputs—and they are the elements of the Bridge™.
Everything on the Bridge™ is something that you can control. You can choose to invest time and resources in any of the elements of the Bridge™, and that investment, if directed well, will improve the connection you have between your organization and your employees.
It's important to think about the culture you have and the culture you want as you start building your bridge and developing your organization. Directing a company's culture is about so much more than writing down company values.
There is no better place to start than here, and no better time to start than now. In the chapters that follow, we'll walk you through the 10 elements of the Engagement Bridge™ model, give you practical tips on how to get started and share the inspirational stories or “plays” of the rebel companies in this playbook. As you read, think about who will help you in your organization, who your fellow rebels will be and who can join you in your “rebelution.” Get them to read this book with you, get them to join you and help you.
And remember, the way we treat people at work has failed. It has resulted in a world where only 30% of people are engaged at work and half of us are looking for a new job.
If this book seems judgmental about the way we work at the moment, it's because we are failing and we have to change—we have to rebel against the status quo.
Let's get to it!