An Engaged Employee is a Productive One | BTalk Australia

Naomi Simson

(Episode 378; 16 minutes 03) Apparently it can takes six engaged employees to fix up the mess of one disengaged one. Naomi Simson says this is why you need to ensure that all your staff feel like they belong to the business. If that’s the case, how do you ensure that people are engaged in activities suited to them? The first step is to make sure each employee is working for a good manager, who understands people.

Naomi, who is the Chief Experience Officer at Red Balloon Days, was recently accused by a Queensland reader of her blog as leading a namby-pamby management revolution. Who is right? Leave your thoughts in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

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• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie, welcome to BTalk Australia. Today, employee engagement. Is it an effective way to boost earnings or is it just a part of that namby-pamby management revolution?

So why do we need to worry about whether our employees are happy and engaged? After all, we pay them to do the job. I mean, what more do they want? Can’t you waste a lot of time and money on all those trimmings that might make people happier but don’t necessarily do anything to the profitability of your business? I am being the devil’s advocate a little bit here because I know that Naomi Simson will agree with none of that. She is the founder and chief of Red Balloon Day, the online gift retailer. Now, you’re the chief Naomi, but the full title is chief experience officer, which some might say is a bit of marketing psycho babble. So what’s the idea behind the job title first of all?

Naomi Simson: Many people think that my job title is because Red Balloon is an experience gifting company — we give people experiences. But it actually comes from way back where as a marketer I saw that if people weren’t engaged with a particular organisation in their marketing messages, you’re just wasting your money. You know you can spend $5 million on advertising, but if there’s nobody there to answer the phone in the way that you want it to be answered, then it really is just a waste of money. So I said, when I’m running the show, I’m accountable for how people experience my business. Whether that’s my customers, my suppliers, my people, my associates, my distributors. It doesn’t matter who it is, I am accountable for how people experience the business. And that level of accountability drives everywhere in the organisation.

Dobbie: So this is a link between the brand of a company and the attitude within it, which would mean in a large business you’d expect the HR and marketing departments would be linked at the hip. But I’ve worked in big business, and you have as well, and they hardly ever talk to each other.

Simson: Yes, and we do see that disconnect. Marketing people are often very externally focused. That’s their role. Their job is to acquire new customers and keep the ones they’ve got very, very happy. But the missing piece is that often HR people are given this poison challis which is your job is to keep people engaged. It’s their job to provide them with job descriptions, performance reviews and all of these sorts of things. But there’s an absolute disconnect between who are we as an organisation, what do we stand for, what are our values? And that is encompassing all of the community, all of the stakeholders that support an organisation. So marketing and HR need to be working absolutely hand in hand. Some organisations have taken on what they might call an internal communications function. But it’s more than communications. You’ve got to have the sort of strategy that we are all marketers, we are all the brand, we are the voice of the company.

Dobbie: Now an engaged employee and a happy employee, are they the same thing? Or is there a difference here?

Simson: No, happiness and engagement are not the same thing. Engagement is about I know what I’m there to do, I can see that I make a difference and somebody noticed. And an engaged employee is furthering the cause of that organisation. They’re thinking about what they’re doing. They’re playing full out. They’re totally enraptured and involved with what they’re doing.

Now just somebody who’s defined as not engaged is somebody who literally comes to work, does what they’re told, doesn’t really think about it, does what they’re told and goes home again. So they’re just following instructions. So they’re sort of sleep walking. But a disengaged person is somebody who’s being paid by that organisation but they hate them. That employee hates their boss, hates the company they work for and will do anything to counteract all of the good work other people are doing. And the research shows that it takes six engaged employees to fix up the mess that one disengaged employee made. And it costs Australians billions and billions of dollars a year in those 17 percent of actively disengaged employees.

Dobbie: It’s interesting you used that hate word because there was a Gallup Poll recently that said 17 percent of employees hate their manager. Hate is such a strong word, isn’t it? And yet in the workplace there seems to be this intensity of emotion that perhaps doesn’t exist outside the workplace, except perhaps when we get behind the steering wheel of our car.

Simson: Yes or on the sporting field.

Dobbie: Yes.

Simson: But the reality is we spend a lot of time at work. It’s the vast majority of how we define ourselves. If you meet somebody new, usually the question is so where do you work, what do you do. And so we define ourselves by our role, so if we’re working for an organisation that we don’t respect, it has a great impact on us as individuals and how we see ourselves.

Dobbie: So do you think managers sometimes go wrong, I mean some managers obviously just say hey look, you work for me, I tell you what to do. And hopefully that’s what I think most of us see that as a bit of a dinosaur of an attitude. But then there’s some people go the other way don’t they and say well look I want to make sure everyone’s happy. But that’s wrong isn’t it? Because it is the engagement not the happiness that’s counting. You could be happy but not engaged.

Simson: We’re also talking about being productive and useful and innovative. I’m not running a kindergarten here, right? There’s no finger painting. I could get all the people here happy by doing finger painting and all of the other great things, but that’s not what it’s about. It is about being commercially focused on the outcome but honouring your people in that process. And they’re usually working in a role that they love and they’re interested in and that they can see the results of. It’s not about them coming along and just having party time with their colleagues. Now they all get along really well, that’s all fabulous. But that’s a by product.

What combines us is our vision, our vision combines us, we are one organisation. We are changing gifting in Australia forever. We want people to have fabulous gifts they get to share with their family and friends. And not one person in this organisation who can’t repeat that verbatim, but it comes from the heart because they see the difference they make to individuals. And we want people to go off and have fabulous experiences instead of more clutter from China or vases and things that sit and gather dust. Every single person here is united by that core vision. But the values of who we are, it’s how we do business that people align to as well. They like to know that all of their colleagues they can count on absolutely for our values. They can absolutely count on their generosity of knowledge, their leadership that they’ll do what they say they’re going to do, that they’re going to have fun and a sense of humour and not take themselves too seriously. They also know that they can count on their colleagues to be little dogs with big dog attitudes. But they’ll take it and be courageous and risk takers. So having those things means that it’s much easier to feel that you belong to something. You’re a part of something. You’re doing something because you’ve got the vision and the values. And my role as CEO is just to keep everybody aligned to that.

Dobbie: Do you know Naomi if ever I’m feeling low I think I’m just going to give you a call and you can just cheer me up. I think you could take anyone from a low to a high.

Simson: Well it is all possible. You know people say what are you on? Like I’m high. I had a woman come up to me after a speaking engagement and she said look, I have no idea what you were talking about, but I just want what you are on.

Dobbie: I was going to ask you that question, but I assumed it wasn’t legal so I thought I better not.

Simson: Yes, but I am who I am. And I do always see the good in things.

Dobbie: Now everybody has different values, of course, and different things that they would see as motivating them to be engaged. So how do you keep track of that? Because you can put a square peg in a round hole, can’t you? How in your organisation do you make sure that everyone’s engaged and there aren’t people who are sort of slotting into a role that doesn’t suit them for example?

Simson: We’ve been using the Gallup strengths finder to understand what people are innately great at. So knowing people’s strength and then managing people with their strengths. And there is a difference between leadership and management. And some people are sort of melding the two. I’m not a particularly good manager, but I’m pretty OK on the leadership thing. So I want to make sure that I’ve got great managers around me.

70 percent of employee engagement comes from somebody’s immediate manager. So they might love what the business does, absolutely love it, but if their immediate manager is inconsistent or they can’t trust them, there is no engagement there. So a manager’s role is to nurture the uniqueness of an individual for the good of the whole. So making sure that they are fulfilling on what makes them innately great. And we use the strengths finder to find that out. A leader’s role is to unite everyone towards the one vision, the one purpose, the one aspect. So a leader’s role is to unite and not necessarily look at the individual needs. So really having that clear understanding is great. I only have three direct reports. But I have really, really great managers in the organisation who are nurturing the individuals within this organisation.

And it is about individuals. It is about really loving and knowing your people, knowing how they take their coffee, knowing who’s important in their life, knowing their favourite movie to really know people.

Dobbie: Gee, that sounds like a lot of hard work.

Simson: But it’s a journey. I don’t want to say it as work because I’m just basically curious anyway and I do love people. This is a people game. Like I often say, managers who complain about their people should not be managers. Let them go off and be great practitioners. We have this thing in Australian management where if you’re going to be in a certain role you have to have a certain number of people reporting to you. Well, what if you actually don’t like people? Then don’t take that role.

Dobbie: It’s a big asset though isn’t it for what you’re talking about, for the manager who’s good with people. They also have to be an expert in their area as well. And isn’t that what tends to happen? People become managers because they know the industry, they understand the products that they’re selling, they’re not necessarily experienced at people management. And often it’s hard to get people who are experts in both areas.

Simson: Absolutely, and I suppose the biggest advantage of that would be anybody’s sales force, in the sense that you know you have a fabulous sales person who’s kicking goals. What’s the next career move for them? Put them into sales management.

Dobbie: That’s right.

Simson: And it’s the worst thing that you can do. So the person who’s running our corporate team, Matt, he’s a marketer and a manager. And not a sales guy. And he then manages our corporate team because they’re innately great at what they do. It’s the number one failure I think in businesses that we promote people to the level of incompetence rather than making sure that they got fabulously fulfilling and challenging roles where they’re using their strengths.

Dobbie: But however challenging and important that role is, people will obviously have ambition and they’ll look at their manager and say hey, I want that person’s job. What do you do if they’re just not right for stepping up to the next mark? Where does their career take them?

Simson: And it might be outside of the organisation. It might not be with you. And this is the other thing is, people talk a lot about retention and I’m very happy to have all the team around me who’s here. But in our growing pains, we had to let some people go because they were generalists and we then needed specialists. Or sometimes people have left us because we don’t have the next career move for them. But when we bring new people into the organisation, they also bring new ideas, new skills and new personality, and then we harness that and it’s all part of the journey. I don’t ever see Red Balloon as somebody’s destination. I see we’re part of the journey. We’re contributing to their journey as we go through. And we want them to have a good time on the way. I might be running a university here, you know Red Balloon University, but gosh, none of them go away without learning a few things on the way past.

Dobbie: Yes, I guess we have got a fairly fluid workforce these days haven’t we really? People are fairly transient in any organisation. So does that mean that if you’ve got a manager in an organisation that you’re running and that manager is not particularly popular with his staff, or you’ve got somebody who despite every attempt to try and make them engage, they continue to be dissatisfied, is the answer well just look, you’re the wrong person for this business. You’re just not the right person.

Simson: You’ve got to set them free. You really got to set them free on their journey because they’re not happy either. I shared those figures with one of my colleagues here and I talked about disengagement because the scary thing is 26 percent of those people who are actively disengaged are planning to spend their whole career with that employer.

Dobbie: Yes.

Simson: So they hate them and they’re spending their whole life with them. I shared those figures with my colleague and he said my father worked for British Rail for 45 years.

Dobbie: Oh dear.

Simson: And I don’t think he liked one day of it. I think that’s kind of sad and I think it’s almost the responsibility of an employer to say, hey, we’re not right for you, but there is a place. I had a gorgeous girl here, fabulous fun, party girl. She was on the phone to our customers. However, she was such a party girl that she would never arrive to work on time. We could never count on her and one of our values is you do what you say you’re going to do and she kept breaking these values. And I coached her and I coached her and I said in the end of the day I said I’m sorry I’m going to have to set you free. And she was like you can’t do that, I’m Miss Popular, everyone loves me. They will hate you if you get rid of me. So all this was said and I said look, I’m sorry sweetheart, I love you too, I think you’re great fun. But you need to know that we have to be able to count on you and we can’t count on you. And our customers need to be able to count on you. So I set her free.

She went off and got the best job. She’s now the warm up act in a television studio. So she goes and becomes Missus Party Girl for a job and it’s her perfect role. And she’s so happy because she wasn’t happy either. Doing what she was doing here wasn’t for her. So we have to be strong as leaders because it’s also in their best interest. And this is a thing that really you know all this new IR law and everything, I want Julia Gillard to come and hang around here for a while. We are in this century not last century and I think a lot of what they’re doing here is trying to drag us back into last century. And I’ve been accused of running a namby-pamby management revolution. Well, let me tell you, we’re getting by OK around here and I know that employee engagement directly contributes to the bottom line, every balloon.

Dobbie: Now I was just thinking that girl who was working for you who was always late and you mentioned British Rail. That would have been a perfect job because they’re always late. I mean she’d fit right in there I would’ve thought.

Simson: Yes, we could’ve packed her off there.

Dobbie: Always a delight to talk to you Naomi, I think we need to do this more often, don’t we?

Simson: Absolutely. There’s so much more I can share about the things that we’re learning and I’m quite happy to share with you. Because you know we try some things that don’t work, we try others and they do work. But we’re very excited, we’re getting ready for a fabulous Christmas gifting season and we’re hoping everybody has Red Balloon and helps us change gifting in Australia forever.

Dobbie: Right, OK. You have a great day Naomi, I’m sure you will. I’ve got no doubt about that at all. Let’s talk again soon.

Simson: Absolutely, thanks Phil, bye.

Dobbie: And Naomi Simson there. That’s one of those times when I’m not really sure that I was needed really. Did I ask any questions? I had one or two perhaps.