With typically only 18 months to prove themselves, chief executives are now more than ever focused on hitting the financial metrics that translate into success by Wall Street's standards. Yet, 78 percent of CEOs realize that financial indicators alone are not an accurate reflection of a company's strengths and weaknesses; instead, CEOs are increasingly turning a curious eye toward "softer" metrics, such as employee engagement, according to a recent study by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Despite the realization that employee engagement seems to matter, the magnitude of its impact on the bottom line is still not making its way to the top of the CEO's agenda. Why are CEOs listening but not taking action? It appears that CEOs continue to devote considerable effort and resources toward designing the corporate strategy, yet they seem to be unaware of what forces can prevent it from being delivered successfully.

Not surprisingly, employee engagement is often the critical missing factor.

Instead of taking on the challenge of engaging the workforce, CEOs tend to leave this responsibility to their human resources department. Yet it seems clear that a much more effective alternative would be a role mandated by CEOs and embraced by their leaders for top down support. Companies that are "getting it right" from the top down are reaping the benefits—financially and otherwise—of CEO attention to employee engagement.

Ultimately, it is the CEO's personal engagement that impacts the engagement of the rest of the organization. To be personally engaged, CEOs must play a role in defining the employee experience required for success, and they must actively marshal resources to measure, foster and sustain it over time through targeted high-impact investments.
When you think of the type of experience that is required for your company to effectively execute its strategy, who better than the CEO and his or her senior team to start answering this? After all, it is the responsibility of corporate leaders to engage employees in the right way to create strategic alignment and the subsequent delivery of customer and financial targets.

CEO as Chief 'Engagement' Officer

When companies consider designing an employee experience that will lead to improved organization performance, the process typically starts with employee feedback. But it is noteworthy that the main reason such efforts fail is because no visible or meaningful action is taken based on the feedback. Therefore, the most critical step in the process of engaging employees is to take their feedback seriously and act on it.

The following best practices can guide a CEO through the other key steps in successfully engaging employees:

  • Prioritize: While CEOs learn of many issues during an employee feedback process, it is advisable to choose "big bets" (three to five actions with the greatest impact) and focus time and resources accordingly. This way, the organization can plan for such actions and have the capacity to deliver. Key driver and strategic priority analyses can reveal the greatest leverage points across various key outcomes, such as retention, customer service and productivity. These analyses can ensure that the CEO does not focus on the wrong set of issues.
  • Gain leadership commitment: One of the main determinants of a highly engaged workforce is to have highly engaged leaders. Therefore, engaging leaders must be a central part of a company's engagement strategy. If your leaders are not engaged, how can you expect them to engage their subordinates?
  • Ensure engagement is on the CEO agenda: The best way to generate momentum and ensure follow through when designing a successful employee engagement strategy is to put it on the CEO's agenda. If the CEO does not commit up front to owning and driving the employee-engagement strategy, the chances of creating one that lasts are greatly diminished.
  • Gain employee buy-in: While actions following feedback are typically leader led, successful execution depends on employee participation. By incorporating employees in action planning, there is greater likelihood that those actions will resonate throughout the organization and gain momentum. In Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that openly engaging with employees through dialogue, debate and "brutal facts" helps to create more sustainable corporate performance over time.
  • Create organizational linkages: Because employee feedback concerns the entire organization, it is vital to integrate action planning into the various organizational systems and processes that it affects, including leadership alignment, training, performance management, recognition and rewards, culture and communication. In this way, actions taken can be communicated consistently and in a way that sticks. Without proper branding, feedback-related actions will get lost in the shuffle among other priorities or day-to-day activities, and employees will fail to see the link between their input and organizational actions.
  • Monitor progress and adjust: Plan "pulse checks" to gauge progress over time, and take action accordingly. These checks serve critical functions: (1) actions remain visible across the organization; (2) accountability is increased; (3) best practices can be shared across the organization; and (4) action plans can be adjusted in accordance with changing employee/organizational needs and priorities.

Fostering a Highly En-gaged Workforce

While CEOs are recognizing the value of having a highly engaged workforce, there is still a great deal of uncertainty concerning what engagement means.

Researchers and practitioners are still debating how to best define employee engagement and which ingredients best capture it. To confuse the issue, numerous employee-centric trends have emerged over the past decade that resemble employee engagement, such as employee value proposition and best place/company to work awards or rankings. Are these concepts related, similar or different?

First of all, it is helpful to think of employee engagement as a goal that companies strive to achieve. Second, regardless of the label used, the common goal is to design work environments that foster a highly engaged workforce. The result is a clear "win-win" from both the company and employee perspective.

It is also imperative to go beyond looking at the type of experience that will engage employees through a uni-dimensional lens. The days of only focusing on job satisfaction, organizational commitment or loyalty are pass

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