Winning the Battle of Employee Engagement in the Automotive Industry
Below you will find the following:
- Current state of manager and employee engagement
- Why should I/we care?
- The relationship between leadership, culture, and employee engagement
- The leadership “Cascade Effect”
- The top 10 drivers of employee engagement
- 6 next steps to improve manager and employee engagement, including the importance of doing an annual employee engagement survey.
Current State of Manager and Employee Engagement (Gallup):
The research is overwhelming in showing that engagement, or the lack thereof, is at historic lows and that you can’t operate a high-performing organization without it. There are definite reasons why one organization performs better than another.
Why Should I/We Care?
Why should I [as the Leader] Care?
Its simple. You are the main leader who has been entrusted to lead people and deliver results. And, there is that selfish element where your rewards are typically tied to the performance of the organization.
You can’t do it all yourself. That is why you assembled a team. Without followers there are no leaders and the reality is a cohesive team will always achieve better results than a group of individuals.
Hence, the greater the cohesion of the team the greater the engagement…and the better the results…and the higher the rewards to you as the leader.
Why Should My Organization Care?
There are extrinsic benefits (outward, obvious, and measurable) and there are intrinsic benefits (how people feel). The intrinsic are obvious, but not generally what business people are willing to invest in. So, let’s focus on the extrinsic here:
Improving the people side of automotive retail is the last great return on investment available to dealers. The difference between a mediocre dealership and a great dealership is the strength of its people. (Adam Robinson, CEO of Hireology)
Employee disengagement is a store’s biggest expense leak, but often gets the least attention. According to the firm that does the annual NADA Workforce study, turnover alone costs the average dealership of 70 employees a whopping $500,000/year. Imagine the cost if you were truly able to quantify all of the costs of a disengaged, or not fully engaged, workforce.
The relationship between leadership, culture, and employee engagement
Culture is the by-product of the communication, actions, perceptions, and tangible elements (e.g. dress code, look and feel of the facilities, etc) within the organization. Leaders impact on all of these components and thats why they get what they create and what they allow.
Leaders live out their philosophies in their communications and 
actions, which results in perceptions and culture. The culture then either creates an attraction, which results in greater engagement, or a repulsion, which results in disengagement. Either way engagement is a measure of the discretionary effort put forth by the people.
Engaged employees do more because they want to. In essence they are volunteering their discretionary effort. Disengaged employees, on the other hand, only put forward the effort they must in order to keep their jobs. Research done by Liz Wiseman, and presented in her book Multipliers, shows that engaged employees are twice as productive as unengaged employees.
The leadership “Cascade Effect”
According to Gallup (Amy Adkins April 2, 2015):
Day in and day out, managers are tasked with engaging employees, but 51% of managers have essentially “checked out,” meaning they care little, if at all, about their job and company. And that attitude has dire consequences. A manager’s engagement — or lack thereof — affects his or her employees’ engagement, creating what Gallup calls the “cascade effect.” Essentially, employees’ engagement is directly influenced by their managers’ engagement — whose engagement is directly influenced by their managers’ engagement.
Gallup has studied engagement data from 190 diverse industries and has found that managers who are directly supervised by highly engaged leadership teams are 39% more likely to be engaged than managers who are supervised by actively disengaged leadership teams. And the link between engaged managers and engaged employees is even more powerful. Employees who are supervised by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by actively disengaged managers.
Managers have the greatest impact on employee engagement, which makes this finding very worrisome: A strikingly low percentage — just 35% — of U.S. managers are themselves engaged, while 51% are not engaged and 14% are actively disengaged.
By Gallup’s estimates, the “not engaged” group costs the U.S. $77 billion to $96 billion annually through their impact on those they manage. And when we factor in the impact of the “actively disengaged” group, those figures jump to $319 billion to $398 billion annually.
Gallup’s latest report, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, provides an in-depth look at how great managers inspire employees to become engaged — and examines the impact of engagement on vital business outcomes, such as profitability and productivity.
6 Steps to Improve Manager and Employee Engagement:
If you keep doing what you are doing you are going to keep getting what you are getting. Hence, it is time to do something different, especially if you want to avoid living the definition of insanity.
Marshall Goldsmith, considered to be America’s top executive coach, wrote an excellent book entitled What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There. He emphasizesAgain, the point is that you need to do something different if you want different results, especially if you want better results.
The reality is that leaders always get two things: what they create and what they allow. One of the hardest things for a leader to do is admit that what they have today is a result of their best efforts—some areas are in great shape and other areas need additional attention.
You are an automotive professional and your expertise is driving unit sales and gross. Very few automotive professionals have the time, nor the desire, to read and learn how to build greater employee engagement. Further, it is much more cost effective for a leader to bring in a resource [like me] to assist so that they can keep doing what they do best.
Here are the steps to take when you recognize that your employee engagement is not where you would like it to be:
Step 1: Accept that you can’t do it all yourself. One of the main reasons most leaders won’t take action is that they feel it is a negative statement on their leadership and an admittance of weakness. The opposite is actually the case. It takes a strong leader, with courage and humility, to ask for help, recognizing that is the only way to go further.
Step 2: Accept that employee engagement is not an exact science and may be hard to fully quantify. Intuitively you know that the expense leak of employee disengagement is costing your organization a lot of money. Don’t let the fact that you can’t quantify the cost deter you from taking action to stop the leaks. Rest assured that the cost early on and preventatively will be far less than the cost later and the lost performance in the meantime. In the same way, appreciate that it will take an investment in additional resources to improve leadership, culture, communication, and teamwork. The good news is that there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that such an investment has a huge ROI.
Step 3: Make the call and explore what options are available. Most automotive leaders put off calling somebody who can help partly because they are caught up in the whirlwind of daily operations and partly because they don’t know who to call. The key is doing something and getting the ball rolling. The longer you delay the more cost you endure.
Step 4: Start small and start at the top. You don’t need a program or anything that unnecessarily diverts the attention of your team away from their daily responsibilities. Too many leaders try to fix their people with programs, which are essentially just Band-Aids. Instead develop your leaders so they can provide better leadership and you will be amazed at how things come together through the Cascade Effect.
Step 5: Take time to assess the current state of your organization and then put together an appropriate plan/strategy that will address your biggest areas of opportunity. Don’t opt for a quick fix. In the area of employee engagement and culture there are no quick fixes.
It is important to get an accurate sense of how engaged your team currently is. Doing an employee engagement survey is a great way to get a baseline. One of the best employee engagement surveys is Gallup’s Q12.
Extensive research has been used to design questions that give an accurate assessment of employee engagement. Click here for more details.
Step 6: Commit, follow through, and be patient. What you have today did not suddenly appear. Developing leaders and shaping a better culture is a long-term strategy. You will see increasing results, but be patient and trust the process.
Let me know how I can assist:
The multiplier effect I help generate through your team will provide a significant ROI—estimates are that you will gain more than ten dollars in value for every dollar you spent on my coaching.
Don’t just take my word (you don’t know me well enough yet) read what my customers are saying at https://healthydealer.com/testimonials/
I’m willing to visit with you by phone (at no cost or obligation to you) to explore how I might be able to help.
If you would like to set-up a time to talk:
email me at hkmast@HealthyDEALER.com
or call/text 402.202.1053