Mining Services

One of the clients, in the mining services industry engaged us to evaluate their current culture and engagement levels. Some 30 staff members participated in our Engaged Organization™ Scorecard, which provides a 3-point engagement and “below-the-line” survey.
Here are the organization’s results:

On the surface, it might be said that this company fits the “average” engagement profile. They have a few workers who are more highly engaged than average and a few less in the actively disengaged category. Something to crow about…perhaps.

As we already know, however, there are substantial financial advantages if an organization can shift towards world-class engagement levels. In this organization, it might be said that there is plenty of room to shift, if those in the “not-engaged” camp can be moved to the “engaged” camp.

So what was going on “below-the-line?”

Well, it became apparent that much of the disengagement issue stemmed from the top (no surprises there, given that engagement is a Top+Down™ matter). Using a “below-the-line” survey enabled us to pinpoint, very swiftly, where focus and attention needed to be placed.

Let me expose what was really going on (in the words of the employees), in a few critical areas:

The Boss:

• Who really is the boss?
• Could communicate more clearly
• Is a micro-manager who controls and manipulates
• “Is living in a dream world”
• Sets unrealistic targets
• Says very few encouraging things.

It’s Acceptable:

• To come and go as people please
• To leave things to the last minute, putting teams under pressure
• To shirk accountability for not meeting key objectives
• To go behind peoples’ backs
• To back-stab
• To have double standards
• To gossip
• To blame the sales team for poor performance
• To do nothing or let some people do nothing.

Communication:

• There is none
• It’s poor at best
• Too much reliance on emails
• Seems to be in silos
• There’s an inner circle and if you’re not part of it, you’re out of the loop
• The field does not feel connected to management.

The leadership team at this company knew they had an issue because they were losing customers, failing to meet targets and couldn’t rally the staff. By the way, they’d already tried the big stick approach, but that had the reverse effect and saw some of their best people quit. The results of the survey confirmed that there was indeed a problem and that, like most engagement issues, the root of it stemmed from weaknesses in things lead from the top: leadership, communication and accountability for standards.

Regrettably in this case, the leadership team refused to acknowledge that they were the root cause of the issue and chose to keep “punishing” the staff for poor results.

What is interesting is, that a recent check-in with this company revealed that the majority of the leadership team has been replaced by the parent company and the new CEO is a more progressive thinker and understands both the financial and cultural impact of a lack of engagement.