Building engagement for post-pandemic survival and growth in an SME

This Action Research (AR) project aimed to develop, implement, and demonstrate a system of two-way communication, linking to company aims and individual performance, that would increase employee engagement in a family-owned SME, leading to increased productivity and professionalism. From a research perspective the objective was to corroborate existing theories relating to engagement and related leadership approaches and integrate these into a combined theory for business growth, along with developing new hypotheses evolving from the Action Research. This objective became even more significant given the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. An additional objective was to understand the extent to which top-down management versus bottom-up was appropriate, or required, to drive change during challenging times.

The triple impacts of Brexit, Covid-19 and Ukraine/Russia conflict during the period of this project strengthened the need for a robust, but time-efficient, process to engage with employees, as a counterpoint to the personal and business pressures that a smaller team, dealing with more challenging business situations, faced.

This research has shown that well-structured conversations can enhance engagement and productivity (in the sense of doing the right things). It has also demonstrated that a balanced approach between top-down (to establish the process and give some guidance) and bottom-up (to shape tasks and identify improvement), with the balance modified to suit each case, works well in this family SME environment.

Two new findings have emerged from this work:

1. Even positive employee relations and regular two-way communication can miss the factors needed to ensure that engagement is engendered. This leads to the concept of engagement-focused communication, a “third level” of communication beyond task-based or social interactions.
2. Employees can be engaged, or believe themselves to be engaged, but not in a way that translates to useful outcomes. This leads to the concept of well-directed engagement.

In practical terms, these concepts have led to the development through this AR project of two approaches to address them:

1. Engagement-focused communication – this entails a short list of 10 topics, broadly in line with Saks’ (2006) antecedents of engagement, to which employees assign a score/ranking. This breaks down the “how are things?” question into bite-sized chunks, with associated discussion points, and then forms the basis of a conversation where the sole purpose is for the manager to understand, and where possible alleviate, any concerns.
2. Well-directed engagement – this involves employees developing, through further two-way discussion, what outcomes from their job are important, aligning them with the company aims, deciding what inputs they should be making to achieve these and identifying what gets in the way.