A former CEO wrote 10 to 20 handwritten notes to employees each day to recognize them as individuals and to highlight their value for specific contributions.

Examine Trust and Fairness

In the previous lectures on great examples, Professor Nishii shared three examples of companies that have taken steps to earn the trust of their employees:

· Campbell Soup Company: A former CEO wrote 10 to 20 handwritten notes to employees each day to recognize them as individuals and to highlight their value for specific contributions.

· GE Healthcare: Employees were invited to meet with patients that benefited from the lifesaving medical products they produced in their assembly-line work. The goal was to show the employees how they make an impact and to see firsthand how they have something meaningful to contribute.

· Deloitte Audit: The company touts values of inclusion, collaboration, high performance, and opportunity. The company says that inclusion fosters innovation and is central to its lasting success.

Now you will have a chance to further your understanding by doing your own rich exploration online about any one of these three examples selected by Professor Nishii.

Assignment Instructions:

· See word doc – See titled “Instruction Examine and Fairness” for detailed instructions

· See word doc – “ See “Worksheet – Examine Trust and Fairness” complete document per instructions

· See word doc – Lecture for Example of Engagements for additional information.

Now you will conduct your own original research on one of these companies using articles, the company website, and reviews on employment sites to find out how it is viewed by their employees and by job candidates.

· See what you can uncover about the company’s employment brand and their bottom line.

· Look for evidence to support the assertion that this company’s engagement efforts are influencing overall performance.

· Complete all sections of “ See “Worksheet – Examine Trust and Fairness”

· Give Comprehensive answers.

· No Plagiarism

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ILRDI001: Improving Engagement

Cornell University ILR School

Examine Trust and Fairness

In the course lectures on great examples, Professor Nishii shared three examples of companies that have taken steps to earn the trust of their employees:

· Campbell Soup Company: A former CEO wrote ten to twenty handwritten notes to employees each day to recognize them as individuals and to highlight their value for specific contributions.

· GE Healthcare: Employees were invited to meet with patients that benefitted from the lifesaving medical products they produced in their assembly line work. The goal was to show the employees how they make an impact and to see first-hand how they have something meaningful to contribute.

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Examples of Excellence

As you have seen, there are three key psychological dimensions that affect people's ability to fully engage in their work: psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability. Professor Nishii has selected some companies that she considers to be world-class examples in this regard. In the lecture below, she outlines each example and offers specific details for the ways in which the companies have taken steps to meet the conditions for engagement.

Psychological Meaningfulness and Safety: Campbell Soup Co.

Campbell Soup Company is a global food company headquartered in Camden, New Jersey, with annual sales of more than $8 billion.

Okay, so I want to give you some examples of companies that do a good job of driving engagement. One thing that we tend to see across companies that really are highly engaged and do a good job is that senior leadership really is involved in the process. And this one example that I like is of the former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company who used to write 10 to 20 handwritten notes to employees each day to celebrate their successes. And this is a really important thing that he did. Because by doing that he personally communicated to employees that the organization recognizes them as individuals and values their specific contributions. And this heightens for employees, the task significance, which is part of psychological meaningfulness. And it helps to connect what employees are doing to the organization's mission. And there are other ways too that this helped to enhance psychological meaningfulness. So these notes also helped increase employees' identification with the organization by making that link clear. By helping them to feel that they are a valued member of the organization. So valued that the CEO's going to take the time to write these notes. And the notes that he wrote provided feedback to employees about the kinds of behaviors that were really highly valued by the organization. And so it helped to specify for employees how to direct their psychological engagement into behavioral engagement. And also, it represents a type of rewarding interpersonal interaction, which is also a part of the dimension of psychological meaningfulness. There are other important things that the CEO did that I'll also tell you about. He also walked around the company every day for half an hour. And in the beginning, this was part of their health and wellness program. And he wanted to model the idea of health and balance. And this then would relate to the third dimension I spoke about, psychological availability. But he also really wanted to make himself accessible to employees and to engage in everyday, informal, casual, impromptu conversations with employees. And by doing that he signaled that it's important for people to interact with their colleagues. If the CEO can find time to do it, then everybody else can too. And it's a valuable thing for employees to do. And this, again, feeds into this dimension of psychological meaningfulness in that it influences the quality of the interactions that people have with their coworkers. 

He embodied kind of what I think of as the difference between organizational conversation and corporate communication. Corporate communication sounds very formal, right, it's more top down, whereas organizational communication or conversation, is really more of a two way thing, where employees feel that they have some input and they can add value. And when companies model this and they engage in this, they also help to really provide a strong foundation for trust, high trust relationships. And to help employees feel a strong strength of psychological safety, which is the second dimension. So in a couple simple things that he did, although he had to devote significant time to these things, he really did help to impact the culture for engagement at Campbell's Soup.

Psychological Meaningfulness: GE Healthcare (Medical)

GE Healthcare provides medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.

I'd like to just give you one more example related to psychological meaningfulness. And that has to do with helping to make the significance of jobs more salient for employees. But what that really means, what's most effective here, is to help employees see the significance of the work that they do for other people. And G. E. Medical did this for their employees that worked within the assembly line creating various medical products. And if you can imagine the work that's being done, there isn't a lot of variety in the work that's done on an assembly line. And variety is another one of those characteristics that tends to help increase the motivating potential of a job. So when variety is low, you really want to pay attention to the other characteristics of the job that can help to to promote motivation. And so what they did was they decided to bring employees from one of their plants, to meet the patients who had benefited from the medical devices that they had created. The patients whose lives were saved by these medical devices that were implanted into their bodies. And there's a video of them actually meeting. And you can just see on the faces of those employees. This looked like, "Wow, the work that I do really does make a difference." And you can bet that they went back to work the next day with a new level of energy and motivation about the work that they do.

Psychological Availability: Deloitte Audit

Deloitte Audit encompasses 9,000 professionals performing audit and accounting services; the company is part of Deloitte, LLP, which has more than 210,000 professionals at member firms delivering services in audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, tax, and related services in more than 150 countries and territories. Its revenues for 2014 were $34 billion.

Ok, so I'd like to talk a little bit about examples of how companies manage psychological availability. We've all heard a lot about the various work- life balance practices that companies offer. And those are all meant to help increase employee psychological availability. There's some things that are not as common that some companies are doing. I'll give you a few examples. So, Delloitte's audit business, they allow interested employees to take extended periods of time off during their non – peak seasons. Such as during the summer. And when employees do that they can still maintain their benefits. And this is a win -win situation for both the employees and for the company. Another thing that Deloitte does is at the very beginning of client engagements, they have the teams, as well as their leader, identify one small thing that would have a big impact on their work- life balance during the course of this client engagement. So examples of things that people have mentioned or things like, I'd like one night off during the busy season. I'd like an earlier start time so that I can go get my kids from school. I would like reduced travel. I would like to be able to do some of my work virtually. I'd like to be able to attend my morning yoga class no matter what, and that's important for my sanity. Or I'd like to be able to coach my child's soccer league in the afternoons one day a week. Whatever it is, the point is, people identify something that's important to them. And everybody does that. And then, the part I really like, is the team then works together to try to figure out how they're going to meet everybody's needs. And so that process of talking about it, accomplishes a lot of things besides just meeting employee's needs. It promotes this interaction where people get to know what's important to their coworkers, right? They arrive at a collective solution that helps to promote a sense of team identification. It's smart in so many ways. Another thing that some companies do is they have engagement coaches. And these engagement coaches, they're leaders that are trained to sit down with individual employees at the beginning of every project, or however they term it. They have these coaches sit down with employees, and have one on one conversations about their current and personal situations to try to see if there are any needs that the employee has that aren't being met, but could be met. So as you see, a lot of this requires the support of coworkers and the support of supervisors and some real, just human conversations about how things might be changed in order to help enhance employees psychological availability to really engage in their jobs.

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