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Why your people may be satisfied but not engaged or productive

Understanding how people feel about the organisation they work for is helpful. Knowing how the people within your organisation feel about your mission and their personal goals, roles and responsibilities, will set you on the road to identifying appropriate actions that can improve company performance and avert potential retention issues.

​One of the traditional routes to gain these insights is to use an employee satisfaction survey. These are intended to identify what needs to be done to make employees feel more contented or to create a better work environment and company culture.

Does Satisfaction Tell You Anything About Engagement?

The challenge with satisfaction surveys is that satisfaction is not the same as engagement. People can be quite happy with their place of work without really being engaged. Yet, it is engagement that drives productivity and performance.

Another critical factor in organisational performance is the extent to which the commitment and enthusiasm of managers is shared by their teams. This is a key component of what we call the Organisational Climate. The disparity between the engagement levels of leaders and the relative engagement of their teams has been proven to be a strong indicator of performance.

Climate and Performance

The Performance Climate System tool identifies and evaluates differences in perception between leaders and teams. It measures this across six critical performance dimensions: goals, roles and process (transactional performance); and adaptability, connection and resilience (transformational performance). The insights provided highlight potential areas of conflict, disconnect, misalignment or miscommunication. The information gained from using the PCS enables leaders to know precisely where they need to focus more effort to improve performance.​

Does PCS Work?

PCS has been used by organisations for over 15 years.  In one example, by using PCS over a 3-year period, the customer services team of a global financial services business reduced staff turnover from 49% to less than 5% (Saving £1m), cut sickness and absenteeism from 12%, to 2% (saving £700k) and achieved a 12% improvement in customer satisfaction (74% to 83%). These gains were aligned with a 28% improvement in organisational climate.

If you want a tool that goes beyond assessing whether employees are satisfied to look at how engaged, committed and productive they are, contact the team at Performance Climate Systems.

Zac's Challenges:

Zac’s tech business is growing rapidly. He’s gone from being a developer with a good idea to now overseeing an ever-expanding team. Zac knows that in order for the business to grow successfully, it needs to stay true to its founding values and his staff need to feel valued and engaged. Zac wants to understand if he and his team are on the same page and he needs to do it quickly and cost effectively.

Zac's PCS Solution

Zac decides to use PCS Lite to get a quick temperature check of how his team are performing and what they think about the business. The PCS Lite report quickly surfaces the fact that his team have lost sight of the organisation’s purpose and goals. Zac realises that he needs to improve his on-boarding processes and help orientate the new team members better in the company culture and vision. 6 months later, Zac uses PCS Lite to check his new onboarding process is working; concludes that the growing team are much better aligned to his vision and are generally operating in a more positive working environment.

Annabel's Challenges:

It’s Annabel’s job to help the Partners in the firm manage their clients and ensure they’re consistently adding value. Recently, Annabel has been asked by one of the Partners to find a tool or framework that the consultants can use to benchmark new clients looking for team and leadership improvement programmes. It needs to be cost-effective, established and reputable and able to be branded with the firm’s own logo.

Annabel's PCS Solution

Annabel recommends PCS Pro to the Senior Partners as it provides an objective measurement of team and leadership climate against which the consultants can build performance improvement programmes. PCS has a good track record, academic validation, excellent training and customer service, so she’s confident that it’s the right tool for the firm’s consultants to use.

Sarah's Challenges:

Sarah has to keep across the multiple training and development needs in the organisation and do it within a tight budget. Recently, Sarah’s been asked to design a L&D programme that improves the staff retention rate and helps staff feel more engaged with the changes happening in the organisation, not least the shift to more flexible working.

Sarah's PCS Solution

Sarah uses PCS to measure how different teams across the organisation are performing and look at any patterns which suggest the need for organisation-wide, leader or team training. Sarah notices that all teams and leaders have a low climate score in the Processes segment. Sarah knows that allocating budget in this area will improve performance. She works with the Senior Management Team to review the organisation’s processes as they transition to more flexible working and designs a training programme to support staff in the transition. She’s helped staff to feel supported, acknowledged and engaged which ultimately drives performance. 

Jim's Challenges:

Jim’s client has a team that’s not performing as well other teams in the organisation. The team has a high staff turnover, sickness and the lack of cohesion is impacting the team’s wellbeing and performance. Jim needs to get to the bottom of why this is happening and design effective coaching interventions which can generate tangible results for his client.

Jim's PCS Solution

Jim uses PCS Pro to measure / benchmark how the team and leader are performing across the 6 segments critical to team performance – Goals, Roles, Processes, Adaptability, Connection and Resilience. He can immediately see the disparity in Goals, Processes and Connection between the leader’s perception and those of her team. He uses this information to build a coaching programme designed align team and leader. After 6 months, the team seems to be more settled and productive. Jim remeasures using PCS Pro – the results show the client the effectiveness of his coaching intervention.