Dive Brief:
- With employee engagement on HR leaders' minds, one employer, manufacturer Deere & Company, is taking the extraordinary step of conducting employee morale checks every two weeks, according to the Harvard Business Review.
- The article explores the idea that the innovative products or services employees produce (and that the company markets) are highly connected to motivated employees and, in the end, satisfied customers.
- Using the Agile software development concept for building hardware, employers like Deere are rooting out hidden customer needs that might be transformed into innovation (new products) and growth (sales). Deere surveys for employee motivation every two weeks and, according to HBR, is seeing some highly positive results.
Dive Insight:
More frequent check-ins with employees has been touted as one strategy to boost engagement, yet, as HBR notes, most employers do employee surveys every year or two, tops.
For Deere and other employers who need to keep engagement high for talent retention and product innovation, it means greatly increasing temperature-taking surveys so they can both build engagement and also head off any potential morale drops among workers.
According to HBR, Deere has found such check-ins critical because continuous improvement is baked into the company's product development cycle. Every two weeks, Deere's Advanced Marketing Group teams review the good, the bad and what needs to be done differently. HBR reports that Deere even has a “motivation metric,” which helps significantly reduce the time it takes to bring new products and new features to market.
It may not work for every employer, but with today's less expensive, easy to administer online survey tools, it might be something other companies can check into as they seek out improved engagement.