Empowering Teams: Navigating the Road to Workplace Engagement

By: RPI Tech Connect   May 7, 2024

In this episode of RPI Tech Connect, we explore the critical role of employee engagement, a topic gaining traction across organizations large and small. Melissa Olson, RPI Director of Infor Solutions shares what it takes to foster a thriving workforce environment.

Kicking off with an exploration into the shifting dynamics that have catapulted employee engagement to the forefront of organizational priorities, Melissa sheds light on industry-specific challenges and the imperative for companies to reassess their engagement strategies. Emphasizing the significance of soliciting feedback and identifying actionable insights, Melissa underscores the pivotal role data & analytics play in driving engagement initiatives.

From practical steps, like check-ins and recognition programs to the transformative potential of innovative solutions like Infor Talent Science and the Continuous Performance Engagement (CPE) Module, Melissa draws a roadmap for organizations to commence their journey towards bolstering employee engagement.

If you’re looking to revamp your employee engagement initiatives, this is an episode you wont want to miss. Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories.

Meet Today’s Guest, Melissa Olson

As RPI’s Director of Infor Solutions, Melissa Olson has been at the forefront of massive Infor CloudSuite and legacy Lawson implementations for well over a decade. Nowadays, you are likely to find Melissa in the role of Executive Oversight ensuring quality in HR Talent implementations and out in the community presenting, demonstrating, and connecting with clients.

Over the last 20 years of Melissa’s career, she has modified the Lawson code set as a programmer for a transportation agency, led an North American HCM implementation while tending to her day job as a HR Business Partner for a marketing and merchandising firm and built an HCM Practice with RPI from scratch while consulting.

With her unique mix of experience understanding organizational needs, deep knowledge of Infor People Solutions, and the boundaries of the Infor technical extension toolset, Melissa enjoys tackling organizational problems with solutions that are process focused more so than product focused.

Meet Your Host, Chris Arey

Chris Arey is an experienced B2B marketing professional with nearly a decade of working in content creation, copywriting, SEO, website architecture, corporate branding, and social media. Beginning his career as an analyst before making a lateral move into marketing, he combines analytical thinking with creative flair—two fundamental principles required in marketing.

With a Bachelor’s degree in English and certifications from the Digital Marketing Institute and HubSpot, Chris has spearheaded impactful content marketing initiatives, participated in corporate re-branding efforts, and collaborated with celebrity influencers. He has also worked with award-winning PR professionals to create unique, compelling campaigns that drove brand recognition and revenue growth for his previous employers.

Chris’ versatility is highlighted by his experience working across different industries, including HR, Tech, SaaS, and Consulting.

About RPI Tech Connect

RPI Tech Connect is the go-to podcast for catching up on the dynamic world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Join us as we discuss the future of ERPs, covering everything from best practices and organizational change to seamless cloud migration and optimizing applications. Plus, we’ll share predictions and insights of what to expect in the future world of ERPs.

RPI Tech Connect delivers relevant, valuable information in a digestible format. Through candid, genuine conversations and stories from the world of consulting, we aim to provide actionable steps to help you elevate your organization’s ERP. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the ERP scene, our podcast ensures you’re well-equipped for success.

Tune in as we explore tips and tricks in the field of ERP consulting each week and subscribe to RPI Tech Connect below.

Transcript

Chris (00:00)
On today’s session, we’re going to explore the role of employee engagement. The people-centric topic is becoming an increasing priority for organizations. With data, analytics, and a steady pulse in your teams, companies can identify areas where engagement is thriving and lacking. Stick around to discover actionable steps you can take today to drive engagement and create a work environment where individuals feel valued.

Chris (00:02)
Hello and welcome back to RPI Tech Connect. Once again, I’m your host Chris Arey and today we’re joined by the one and only Melissa Olson. Melissa is the Director of Infor Solutions here at RPI and she’s been with the company since the beginning. Her experience spans industries and solutions but she got her start in the HR space which makes her the perfect speaker for today’s topic, employee engagement. Before we dive in, Melissa, you wanna share a little bit about yourself with the audience?

Melissa (00:29)
Yeah, thanks Chris. Sure. Um, as you said, you know, I’ve had a pretty deep HR background. I started years and years ago programming HRS software. Yeah, I was with a public sector organization that required kind of a lot of modifications in order for it to work with some different funding sources we had. So I started there supporting payroll, benefits, employee self-service, and then moved into a marketing company, private sector.

Huge turn. We did marketing and merchandising for a lot of North American brands that you may recognize, Walmart, Microsoft, Budweiser, and sometimes these engagements were as short as four hours. So I would have to make sure to get people onboarded into our system and ready for their engagement and off-boarded at the end of their shift. So that was a very high volume.

And then moving into RPI where I’ve been for the last 11 years, I’ve seen a lot of different organizations and helped navigate their processes and their strategy through visibility into their people and their programs. So what works, what doesn’t? We’re really getting into an age of analytics now and helping make better decisions through data. So this is an exciting time to be in HR, an exciting time.

to tackle some of these engagement issues that we’ll be talking about today because we didn’t have the tools that we have today in the past, but we had a lot of similar problems.

Chris (02:07)
Yeah, awesome. So glad you shared that with us. And you’re definitely right. The work world is not what it once was. And looking back at 2023, we saw a lot of change, a lot of shifting in priorities. And I think some of that, you know, kind of, you know, spurned by COVID, which feels like a lifetime ago. But as we all know, it really kind of brought to life some, some important issues that maybe weren’t as prominent as they are today.

Melissa (02:27)
Alright.

Chris (02:37)
But beyond that though, I’m curious to hear what you think. Why has there been this shift in employee engagement as a priority? What do you think?

Melissa (02:47)
Yeah, so I think it’s two things, right? You mentioned the COVID pandemic. That really brought people’s priorities in light. You know, people were losing family members, friends, they were isolated. There was a lot of depression. There was a lot of loneliness. There was, yeah, I’m reading this book right now. And yeah, it’s a Stephen King book. It’s Salem’s Lot. I like it.

Chris (03:17)
Nice.

Melissa (03:17)
Because you know our book club for spooky season believe we kind of extended it and Yeah, there’s like this line in there about The word alone is The scariest almost scariest word in the English language even more scary than murder not even a word, but just the thought of being alone is scarier than murder and You know, we lived in a society where a lot of us were alone

For a very long time and didn’t get to see people. So when we think about work, we’re not thinking about, okay, I’m gonna live to work anymore. It’s really about what are the priorities that we’ve had? What are the things we don’t wanna have because we were alone with our thoughts for a very long time at that point. And then the other side of it is just newer generations coming into the workforce. So while the earlier generations, the Bimmers, the Exers,

Even to some extent, the older millennials, you know, we just followed the same path. You get a job, you look for some security, you look to pay your bills, and you stay there. And newer generations are affected. They’ve grown up on technology and they’re affected by this constant, like, barrage of content and information. And it’s three minutes and it’s TikTok.

News feed and everything, notifications on your phone, and they’re not wanting to stay somewhere looking for job security and just a paycheck. They want some meaning. They want to understand how they fit in the bigger picture. So I think a combination of both of those has brought us to a place where people aren’t going to just settle for a paycheck anymore if they have the skill set, the background that they need.

Kind of allows them to be a little bit more mobile.

Chris (05:15)
It’s interesting that you mentioned that. I think I saw something recently that said that for the first time, I think maybe ever, there are five different generations in the workplace. Is that right?

Melissa (05:28)
Yeah, that was actually in one of my older podcasts, because we’ll be getting Generation Alpha coming into, you know, not corporate world quite yet, but they are starting to get their first job and they’ll be coming in pretty soon.

Chris (05:32)
Yeah?

And you can only imagine from an HR perspective how challenging that might be to juggle these different expectations of what employees want from work, right?

Melissa (05:54)
Exactly. And it’s not one size fits all. You know, that’s, that’s the hard thing is, um, you know, I think a lot of employers and organizations look at this buzzword of engagement and they’re like, oh, let’s just have some recognition, recognition programs or let’s, let’s give everybody a membership to a gym and pay for some wellness programs. And that will help with burnout. And, you know, we’re seeing a lot of burnout with our

Chris (05:55)
Okay.

Melissa (06:23)
Healthcare workers, frontline workers. Compensation has a lot to do with it, but just having to be there all the time when the population was just kind of surging within these hospitals and patient care clinics. So this one size fits all for employee engagement and retention is not going to work, not even industry specific.

Because people have very different drivers for where they’re going to work, why they’re working with an organization, and what they want, you know, at the end of the day.

Chris (07:03)
So it sounds like then, so as companies, regardless of industry, as they’re shifting their priority into employee engagement, it sounds like a good place to start is to kind of first understand what it is you’re doing and to kind of have like a pulse on your different teams. Would you agree? That’s a good place to kind of begin that journey.

Melissa (07:24)
It’s the micro level. Yeah, 100%. It’s micro level. We think about it as this overarching initiative for organizations or for HR departments. And the HR departments don’t have that pulse that you’re talking about. They only engage with employees when something’s wrong. And it’s something on the employee relations side. Something wrong with that. Or they’re saying something’s wrong with someone else.

Chris (07:49)
Reactive.

Melissa (07:52)
Or they’re engaged because they’re asking about any kind of health care benefits, something they want a question answered on that side. They don’t just sit in HR’s office, kind of like a, is it Ted Las? No, it’s not Ted Las. There’s like one of the shows where the person just goes in to the HR person, just like the psychologist, and sits there and they’re like, no, no. Oh, it’s a-

Chris (08:19)
It’s not venting a venting session. It’s not what employee engagement is. If that is what your engagement is, you probably have a problem, right? It’s just like…

Melissa (08:21)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good way to say it. But yeah, it’s a, sorry. Well, great, right. So, HR can’t create these programs in a silo. It’s managers and it’s, I mean, even employees can reach out to their teammates and we can make a difference to each other. If there’s a dish, disengaged employee, there’s disengaged teammate. Like, why are they not either happy or not, you know, rah around the team and rah around the organization? Not that everybody has to be, but you know, you wanna have some sort of connection to the people and the place that you’re working. We spend so much time working, whether it’s in an actual office or not.

We want to have something with some kind of meaning and value. So it really is understanding your teams, your colleagues, and I think we’ll continue to talk about it, but I think anybody can be that catalyst for change around that engagement and help bring others up or help people determine that maybe that’s not the place for them and they would be happier.

Whether it’s another, what we’d hope, what we’re gonna try, strive for, is another position in the organization where you’ve been able to have opportunities develop and move around. That’s where true employee engagement and retention happens, not around gym memberships and head space memberships.

Chris (10:11)
So with that then, what would you say, what are some things that folks can do today to help drive engagement? Beyond getting a read on where they’re at, what they’re doing right, and where they’d have to improve, I feel like there’s other types of tools and things that organizations can deploy to help, I guess, create that environment that they’re hoping to foster.

Melissa (10:38)
Right. It’s a multi-pronged approach. I think you can use, we talked about at the beginning, the technology and the tools we have today give us visibility and insights into our people like we’ve never had before. So leveraging analytics, but not just, hey, let’s plug in an analytics tool. It’s understanding what are the questions you’re trying to answer. What is the direction that the organization is going?

And no matter what the output product of an organization is, the people are the ones that output that product. So you cannot be successful, whether it is healthcare, or retail, or public sector, whatever industry you’re in, your people are truly your product. And you wanna really have that understanding of what is your mission? Where are you trying to go?

And where do you need your, I’m going to continue to say people because I feel like workforce is such a kind of a cold, old word. You know, it doesn’t really give us all the facets of the people that are in our organization. That sees them as just this one generic, you know, exactly. So you know, you start with understanding. Okay.

Chris (11:45)
Yeah. Catch all term, right?

Melissa (12:05)
Where does our organization want to go? If we’re trying to grow and scale, what do we need to do that? If we’re trying to cut costs, if we’re trying to garner the best talent because we need a competitive advantage. First, you want to understand what your goal of your organization is, and then start applying those analytics, not get technical, but the data models, to basically say,

This is the information I need. These are the time periods I need. And these are the data points that I can start seeing the patterns. I want to see if there’s a high turnover in one area. What is it? Is it an environmental factor? Is it a people factor? It doesn’t have to just be a manager to be a disengaged coworker that’s just super negative and toxic to the team.

The job description is not, you know, exactly reflective of what the duties actually are. So here you’re in this position that you think you’re qualified for and you’re asked to do these things that are so far outside of your realm of experience and then you don’t have the support and development to be able to get to where you need to be. So you leave. So it’s just understanding.

Chris (13:09)
Yeah.

Melissa (13:33)
turnover and then it’s also understanding where are the successful pockets, you know, who is doing really well who Who has been with the organization for many years? but not in the same role because they’re gonna die and retire there and You have to wait to move up to that role until they die or retire but it’s who has been really successful about Taking their experience and offering value across the organization and having the opportunities and development that is backed by the organization to kind of, like I said, foster it.

Chris (14:11)
So there’s two things that you said there that I think are really, really important. And the first one is the distinction you made between simply looking at data. People aren’t data, they’re not data points, they’re not analytics. You use that data support and to answer the questions that you’re trying to solve for, which is what you said. Super important, the data supports that. And the second thing is this concept of like, creating a path.

For people who work within your company, right? It’s not, they don’t wanna stay in stagnant positions. They want, I think that’s a big factor that is of what’s helping, you know, engage teams is like, what can these employees expect from their careers working in this establishment? Would you, I mean, is that?

Melissa (14:58)
Right. I mean, remember, nobody has any like, they can’t pay attention for that long. And their personal life, they can’t go, you know, 20 minutes without checking a notification on their phone. And you expect them to be in that same role doing the same thing for year on year without any dynamic change without any autonomy to say, this job is no longer the same, our organization has changed.

Chris (15:05)
Yeah.

Melissa (15:27)
What I do needs to change with it and give me, I know this so well, give me the reins to be able to create something new and progress the organization where it needs to go. We hire people that are qualified, that we trust, that we like. We also should be able to, if they are that good at their job, and it’s not just a, you know, this is, I am talking about more of those skill positions where people.

Do see change and do have, you know, the opportunity to grow within their same position. But then there are also people who are completely fine with doing the same thing every day because they have a young child at home and they want to leave early to be able to go to pick their kid up from school or to go to recitals and, you know, having a lot more.

Chris (16:14)
ability right? Yeah.

Melissa (16:25)
Responsibilities means potentially being at work longer and later. And if they’re at home, there’s no delineation between work time and home time. So it’s okay. If somebody wants to do what they want to do for the next 10 years, you just need to understand who your, your team is. Do they want that progression? Do they want to innovate? Do they want to, you know, be able to contribute to the organization in a different way, or do they just want a paycheck?

And be able to have other priorities where work is not constantly pulling at them, whether it’s emails or phone or just kind of not being able to sleep because you’re thinking about a problem that you want to need to solve.

Chris (17:11)
It gets back to what we were saying originally, where it’s like, the very first step is to understand what your employees want. And I agree with you that like, workplace dynamics are changing and no employee wants the same things. And those, my former colleague of mine used to call them steady eddies, where the people who came to work, they’re expected to do and left. And like, they left it there. And having that balance was more important to them than like, moving up the corporate ladder or career advancements, but the same isn’t true. So like, you really need to understand what it is that like your teams want and you have to listen, right? I feel like listening is at the root of all of that. But with that though, I think there’s like, there’s tools that companies can use to kind of help sift through and identify the candidates who are looking to like move up the corporate ladder. I think is it in for talent science is one of those? Is that right?

Melissa (18:05)
Yeah, so there’s a few of them. So talent science is really about what are your behavioral characteristics and What are the what are you more successful at? So it’s not looking at your skill set or your experience or your degree it’s saying Because of the way you’ve answered an assessment You’re you know, you’re within this organization because talent science also

Chris (18:18)
You’re next.

Melissa (18:33)
Looks at the assessment responses from who the organization deems to be a great culture fit, a successful group of people, and these are the more type of these people are what we want, and we’re hoping that means it’s people who are innovative, people who are creative, people who are problem solvers, people who are able to work autonomously, people who are a joy to be around.

There are a lot of factors in different organizations as to what makes them a culture fit and we’re not talking, you know, everybody likes to throw the word culture around and it’s not, there’s no one culture. There’s so many teams and organizations, there’s not going to be one culture. Every manager is going to drive the culture that’s in their area. But you know, who you see move around the organization successfully is what Talent Science will have some.

Chris (19:15)
It’s a buzzword. It’s been a buzzword.

Sure.

Melissa (19:31)
I have psychologists come in and look at those profiles and kind of look at your internal population and say, okay, you know what, these people are sitting over here in this department doing X, but the way their mind works, the way their innate characteristics are, they would be so much more successful in Y. How can we, because not only will they be more successful, but they’ll probably be super happy because now…

They’re firing on all cylinders, they’re doing the things that they enjoy and they’re doing what they’re good at. And how do we get them from X to Y? What is that path? It’s not going to be, oh, let’s just transfer positions. They’re not going to possibly have the skill set. So creating those development paths using leveraging talent management software to say, to gather more data. We talked about it with analytics. The more information you have and it’s like…

Chris (20:02)
They’re engaged.

Melissa (20:26)
Scary big brother, everybody knows what I’m doing, everybody wants to know everything about me. Well, they already do, guess what? So you need to start capturing a lot of that in your HRAS system so you can start seeing, you know, John over here, it has some qualifications or skill sets that have nothing to do with his job. But if you didn’t capture them, you don’t realize that he might be a great fit.

For another role, maybe a key position in your succession planning, maybe leveraging that talent science or some other assessment type software where you can really leverage the strengths they bring. It’s so much more expensive to lose somebody and have to rehire. It’s not just the cost per hire on the talent acquisition side and everything you have to do, the time spent by managers.

Chris (20:52)
somewhere else.

Melissa (21:21)
And your talent acquisition recruiters and directors, but it’s also that institutional knowledge that you lost. You lost somebody who knew the politics of the area. They knew the way the organization works. They knew what they can push through and what they can’t. How to get things done. To get somebody ramped up like that will take probably a year and a half to two years. So you’re not… To be able to keep somebody is so much…

Chris (21:43)
time.

Melissa (21:51)
cheaper. Even, I mean, we’re talking about development, but even if it’s comp, even if it’s throwing an extra, you know, X amount to them, you feel like you can’t afford it. But I’ll tell you, you really can’t afford it if you lose them and you have to bring you into that organization. Yeah.

Chris (22:05)
lose them. Start that process over again. There was something you mentioned though, I want to take a step back and revisit this idea that when you understand an employee’s strengths, what they’re good at, and when they’re put in a position where they’re fully engaged and they’re firing on all cylinders, as you mentioned, they become happy. And I think there’s a lot of data points out there that say that when employees are engaged and they’re happy and they’re… involved, the way you’re explaining, a lot of times the company is going to benefit more from that because the customers on the other end who are like, you know, inadvertently benefiting from employees who are happy, engaged and paying attention, it’s going to be better service, right? That means a better result for like their, you know, customers or patients or what have you like they’re, they’re getting, it’s a win-win for everybody involved, right?

Melissa (22:50)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right.

Chris (23:03)
And you’re saving on top of that too, like you mentioned. It’s way more expensive to lose, rehire, replace, and you know they’re coming in at a higher rate because of the way that the job market’s been.

Melissa (23:12)
Mm-hmm. I’m glad you’re a job market, yep.

Chris (23:15)
It’s just, it’s, yeah. Well, anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Melissa (23:18)
Yeah, no, I was just going to agree with you because it’s not only what makes them happy but I think a lot of people feel like they have to have, we talked about it a little earlier, just that they’re part of the organization. Whatever they are doing has a direct reflection on the wellness or not wellness.

Chris (23:36)
Mmm.

Melissa (23:47)
Of an organization and that’s where you’re disengaged employees. You know, they’re not only unproductive and not doing what they should be, but now their teammates are having to carry their weight. So now their teammates are starting to gather resentment because you’re not firing somebody who’s not doing their work. They’re just sitting around and you have to do their work or work longer and not get paid as much.

Chris (24:00)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Melissa (24:14)
And you know, just kind of a domino effect. It doesn’t just affect that one person who’s not happy. It affects so, and then they’ll be talking negatively about the, the organization, about teens, about whatever it is. And they, that slowly starts to, you know, filter through everywhere else and people are questioning, I, I like this company, but I didn’t realize there is this or that maybe I don’t like this company. And I mean, that’s what you.

Chris (24:38)
Yeah.

Melissa (24:44)
Also want to avoid. You want the positive, the productivity and the happiness and engagement, but you also don’t want that toxicity permeating in real life. Yeah, a lot of times you have nothing to do about it because sometimes this comes from above. There could be no choice because

Chris (24:58)
Your choice.

Melissa (25:14)
I was talking to somebody about, I don’t even remember what company they were working with. Oh, it was healthcare. Oh no, it’s oil and gas, but the person was in the car. She’s like, the CEO just wants everything done the way he wants to do it. He wants to tell you how to do it. He doesn’t want people to say, no, there’s a better way, or let me figure it out myself. He just wants little wackies to do…

Chris (25:26)
Sure.

Melissa (25:42)
What he wants to do across the whole organization. So when you get this, it’s really hard to bring up some of these initiatives or try and understand what your workforce is like because leadership might not be attuned to, they want workers and they’re fine with the turn and burn because they don’t understand the other costs that it costs.

Chris (26:09)
That’s a oppressive leadership is definitely a detriment to employee engagement. But I think that’s a topic that we could dive into and could say it for another day, because there’s a lot there. But I agree with you. But so we’re getting close to the end here. And before we wrap up, I want to ask you a closing thought. And it’s, if you could offer our audience one piece of advice around employee engagement, what would it be?

Melissa (26:18)
Yeah, right. Oh boy, one piece of advice, I mean because there’s listening side but I mean we’re all employees too. So it’s really take care of yourself. Make sure you’re okay. Like they say, I fly a lot like they say in the airlines, put your oxygen mask on first before you take care of your kids and you hear that in your personal life. You can’t lose yourself when you’re…

Chris (26:39)
Just one thing. Yeah. I can’t believe it.

Melissa (27:05)
Raising small children and whatever, you have to be there and present. But in order to do any of these initiatives, in order to help support a great organization and engagement, you have to kind of take a look and take stock of where you are. And you’re probably not that far off from any of your coworkers and your employees. So however you’re feeling, start there.

Make sure you’re okay because everybody will see that positivity and see that engagement from you. And then also, you can start understanding, okay, what are the questions I ask myself to make sure I’m okay? These are the questions I need an open, real dialogue with your teammates and your departments. It’s not surveys. There’s information for surveys.

Chris (28:03)
Have a small role to play, yeah?

Melissa (28:05)
Yeah, there’s a great place for technology. Again, it’s seeing patterns but you don’t want to interact with your people with not a person. As an HR, our whole job is to be of service to our employees, to the organization. When we’re caught up with being data stewards, it’s harder to spend the time to really connect it. Oh, I don’t have time to answer these calls.

Or connect with this person, I’ll schedule some time with you next week. I need to get this report out or I need to get this initiative pushed out or whatever. And, you know, you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with your employees who may want to sit down on that couch and say, you know, this is, this is where I am, this is how I’m feeling. And it might not be that different from other people in their area. So to have that introspection and then to have those real genuine connections and conversations to understand, okay, this is where we are today, how can we move past it? Because it’s not as easy as a lot of things made it sound in this podcast. There’s a lot of politics and there’s a lot of ingrained thinking of the way things are and things aren’t broken operationally. We don’t want to change it, but you know.

Everything, as we’ve seen in the last three years, everything’s changing and it’s going to continue to change at this warp speed. So to be on top of it, it’s having the visibility, being able to be agile, and having just that honesty and transparency.

Chris (29:55)
Awesome. Yeah, like you said, the script is being flipped. So things as they were are not going to be the same. And I think you’re raising some great points here on how having a pulse and listening to yourself and listening to those around you, it’s going to be a great starting place for organizations. But yeah, for those tuning in, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

If you’re struggling with an employee engagement or another aspect of HR, we encourage you to reach out. You can contact us at podcast at rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast at rpic.com. Thanks for joining us today. We’ll see you next time. Thanks a lot.

Melissa (30:38)
Thank you.