Building a High-Performance Culture

After implementing an employee engagement survey, this regional transmission company saw moderate improvement in its employee engagement scores.  Unfortunately, the survey and follow-up activities resulted in little improvement in the company’s performance.  The leadership team decided it had to enhance their diagnostic tool to include not only engagement, but other important drivers of business performance.

Through the Metrus Group’s strategic ACE survey, this client was able to measure not only employee engagement, but also two other key drivers of business performance: Alignment and Capabilities.  The baseline ACE survey conducted in year 1 revealed significant gaps in the drivers of employee alignment and validated the concerns of senior management that regardless of engagement, employees did not have a clear line of sight from job goals, to department goals, to organizational strategy.

The enterprise-level effort to improve Alignment began with Metrus-conducted employee focus groups designed to further explore key issues and guide action planning.  An analysis of the focus group data, along with a view of the survey results using Metrus Group’s ACE Scorecard®, enabled the client to identify performance management as an important leverage point for improving both Alignment and company performance.

The performance management process was redesigned to ensure the development of employee objectives that connected individual goals to department goals to company strategic goals.  Communication of the company strategy was greatly improved and employees were better able to understand how their efforts contributed to department and company success.

The client then retained the Metrus Group to conduct a series of employee surveys and deploy a system for team and company-level action.  This made it possible to measure progress and continuously adjust priorities to accelerate improvements to Alignment, Capabilities, and Engagement.

Armed with information obtained from Metrus Group’s strategic ACE survey, this client was able to pinpoint gaps, identify root causes and take action that resulted in a 17-point increase in alignment scores in just one year.

Subsequent surveys provided the ammunition needed to take action on key drivers of Capabilities and Engagement, increasing the ratings in these two areas from moderate to high over the next 2 years.  As a result, in just 3 years the client was able to achieve superior scores in all three critical areas, thereby fully optimizing their workforce and earning the High ACE Organization designation.  Most importantly, the company leadership was able to see improvements in company business performance.