Next up is a great speaker named Marissa Lee, who’s also an expert and authority in human resources. She is going to be sharing with us how she has used data in employee engagement. Because right before my internet dropped out, I was talking about employers shifting their employees lash in 2020. To their home. So working remote, and what did that look like in organizations? Like, how do we know they’re working? How are they feeling? What are they doing? How do we make this better without being in the office? So she is going to come welcome Marissa, and join us to have that discussion about employee engagement. Hi, Marissa. You are on mute. Hold on, I got you. No, no. Let’s try it again.

That’s a good Oh, hi, how are you? I’m making it work. Okay. So can you tell everyone a bit about your experience in HR being a leader? And we’ll start there?

Absolutely. So hello to everyone. My name is Marissa Lee, and I am the founder and CEO of soul evolve, LLC, which is an HR consulting firm, and I specialize and decoding employee engagement for managers, and really being in the employee experience employee engagement space. But in addition to my business, I have been in HR over 10 years, like I have been in the healthcare industry, retail, building materials, coatings, chemicals, you name it, I’ve had a lot of HR experience in these different industries. And it’s given me the opportunity to really learn a lot about people learn about business, and how they intersect when it comes to looking at engagement and building that strategy. And so, I’m really excited about the opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into, you know, my HR expertise, how that led me into engagement, and how I can continue to support you and give you some tips here today to consider as you look at your own engagement strategies.
So when we step back, and we look at what engagement look like in 2019, to 2020. What were some employers see in their employee engagement?

Yeah, so when it comes to engagement, there are some standard engagement factors that you will see then and that you will still see now. So things that come up like compensation, looking at being able to have flexibility, but it wasn’t in the same way as it is now. And in 2020, you would see things like, more so people filling, Are they satisfied with the work that they they’re doing? What types of benefits are things that the company are offering to them, so was pretty much I like to call those like the foundational engagement, tenants that you need to be able to address when it comes to any type of employee. But when 2020 happened, that pendulum swung, and there was a big emphasis around flexibility, purpose work, and really being able to make sure people felt like they belong or that they were looked being looked at as an individual, as opposed to just this. This one size fits all, I heard that us earlier one size fits all approach when it comes to engaging them. And just from a topic standpoint, when it comes to equity, really being able to look and see what is the intersectionality when it comes to engagement. Are you creating consistent experiences for all your employees? And how does that show up? How are you? How are you making sure you get insight into that? Because I can tell you right now without being intentional with that, more than likely you’re missing the mark.

Absolutely, absolutely agree. So I jumped a little head because I’m excited about you talking about employee engagement, but out of HR overall, how did you end up focus and really looking at employee engagement especially as it relates number one to leaders. So let’s just talk about employee engagement and then leaders. And then we can tie those two together.

Absolutely. So I wrote a book called Why I broke up with my company. So people look at HR, and they view HR as if they’re not having an employee experience. And we are having an employee experience, I just So shout out to all the HR people out there. And I asked you all to show us some grace in regards to that. But throughout my career, I was having an employee experience. And from that, I started to get insight around, you know, the things that were going well, the things that weren’t going well, why weren’t they going well? How can that be improved by myself? How can that be improved by the leader. And so in going through my own journey, then I started, I moved away from the micro while just looking at myself, and started looking at the macro, while if I’m having these experiences, other people are also having these experiences, how can I assist them with improving the experience and getting better at that. And so that helped me hone in on really leveraging love relationships, and comparing it to working relationships, to help that resonate with people to show that how much energy you put into this relationship is going to determine how well it works. And you’re always creating experiences for people, are you creating the right ones. And in the process of doing that, that’s where I saw how leadership is really an activator for engagement, the leader can really drive engagement in the positive direction, or they can be poor leaders in sending in the other direction. And so there is a lot of power that leaders have in being able to keep a workforce engaged and focus on the things that they need to accomplish for the organization.

Yeah, those good leaders will keep you engaged, those not so good leaders will drive people out the door or to another team or department or division or country, but they’re gonna go somewhere else somewhere. So I love how you bridge those two, because it’s really important that understanding employee engagement is tied to leadership. And it’s not like, oh, well, they’re, they’re not engaged. I’m not responsible for them doing their job. It’s like, well, let’s talk about that. Right? You have to own what that means to be a leader. And this is this is the thing I wrote a few years ago, many years, not that many years, less than two years ago, when I was still in corporate. They sent out a an employee survey. And they said, What do you think about your leadership team? I said, number one, you can’t tell me they’re my leaders. Because I may not follow them. I just work here. Right? The person I call my leader does not have a C suite title, or a VP title, right? And I think I always push back on that, like you mean your management team. Because oftentimes, you’re a lot of leaders aren’t accessible, the higher up they go, the they’re not accessible to people. And I think if you’re a true leader, you’re accessible to people, I don’t mean to the point we’re in, there was a line outside your door. But it means that if somebody calls, whether it’s the sake of mourning, or to say they’re having an issue, you’re responsive to that. Right, right. And oftentimes, like you’re in the wrong place, and I think it, I have a whole other definition on take it when it comes to management and the terms leadership in the workplace, it needs to be earned. And it’s not given and even telling me you’re my leader, like, Oh, I’m not following y’all to the bathroom. And I have. So that, you know,

I don’t believe fully agree with you on that. Like when I’m sharing tips around engagement, I will say Attention managers. And so I’ve had people talk to me about well, why do you say managers? Why don’t you just call them leaders, everyone? Everyone isn’t a leader? I agree with you. I definitely think that there’s a distinction between management and leaders, you manage the process, you read people, and everybody hasn’t made that transition to fully leading people they are trying to use management to to do the act of what a leader is supposed to do. And without that clarity and distinction. Those are some of the challenges and pitfalls organizations miss, and it manifests in the engagement of their employees. So something that’s simple and subtle is really getting clear on the definition of what a leader is supposed to be doing. Is is paramount to drive in the engagement?
Absolutely. So I think you answered this, but I’m asking anyway. What’s the difference about your approach to employee engagement? Then what others are doing in the space right now?

Yeah, so a couple of things, I would say one, a lot of a lot of different companies are looking at kind of the one size fits all, and not really doing the comprehensive look at engagement. So where I see my organization having an advantage, it’s really helping organizations get clarity, to transition from the reality to their aspirational state, because a lot of times organizations look at engagement, they think they’re in the aspirational state, where the reality says something completely different. So being able to help them understand what that is what that means. And then helping them go deeper. Because at times when it comes to engagement, people can remain very surface with that, you can something as simple for example, like, if you asked your employees, you know, did you review it, the survey feedback, you may get five different responses based on how those individuals looked at the question and how they process it. One person may say, I got the feedback, the other person may say, I got the feedback, but you didn’t do any action with it. So I’m going to ding you here. Other person may say, I didn’t get it because I was in a different groups, there are a lot of different responses that can come with that. And without doing the extra work of going below the surface, you don’t really get to that information. So that’s the operation side of me really looking for the root cause versus the cookie cutter approach of here’s engagement, here’s the things that you can look to work on. The other piece is really looking at the intersectionality part of engagement. As I mentioned earlier, if you are not leaning in, in that space, and if you think that everybody’s experience is the same, I’m going to tell you now it’s not. So you need to take the time to really review and see where are those differences? What are those nuances? And how can you improve that because it’s likely to show up in your results, or it’s not showing up in your results, you are getting good engagement results. But it’s you’re not seeing the impact in your business results, you’re not seeing the impact and productivity, you’re not seeing impact in these other areas. And that is informing you that even though you may have great results, there’s something else that’s amiss, that you have to really dig deeper and get an understanding about.

Absolutely. So Whoo, you got to my favorites spot. Right, right, we got enough time to dig into this, okay. Because I always like to get the tactical stuff. You talked about data. And you talked about intersectionality. And you talked about managers, and I’m gonna put up this quote, real quickly, very quickly, Haley said, I just saw a quote stating, become the kind of leader that people will follow voluntarily, even if you have no title or position. And that’s that that’s my challenge. Like that’s, that’s what that’s all I’m saying. So I’m gonna go back to where we are, where we’re really talking about data intersectionality, and looking at what’s going on at those levels. And the reason I talk about this is organization like well as a whole or a majority, we’re doing well. When you’re looking at an equitable workplaces, there is no majority, you really have to look to see who and why it’s not part of that. And and I want to get into that that intersectionality part as you utilize data, what were the things that you went through in that in that lens, and the data you’re looking at to try to understand what the what, what type of engagement strategy to create and tactics to include in order to improve engagement?

Yeah, so I look at it in a couple of ways. First, you have to have like the quantitative data and the qualitative piece. So once you’re getting the Insight if you have a survey versus if you get use employee engagement surveys or not, you can leverage that as a starting point to get some insight as to where you need to look to begin to have conversations, but there are other pieces to the engagement story. So if you are not looking at turnover in If you’re not looking at employee complaints, if you are not looking at discretionary effort, and when I say discretionary efforts, that’s not when, you know, employees are working long hours, because they got to get the work done, it’s more so they are volunteering their time, they are happy to give their time to do extra things in the workplace or take on additional responsibilities as they go forward. And so those are different pieces that you have to first start with the the quantitative part, but then there’s the piece of you have to have some conversation, the data means nothing without the insight to what that actually needs. So you may have a certain number in these areas. But if you’re not doing stay interviews, you’re not doing exit interviews, if you are not having focus groups around your engagement with different populations, and splitting up to get insight around that you’re missing the mark there. So for example, it may be with different people of color that you are looking at having those conversations with, it could be different band levels, or great levels that you have in your workplace that you may have a higher level of engagement at the top of the organization. But as you continue to go get go deeper and cascade through the organization that shifts. And so where does that shift, and when it does shift, why, and really look to understand that as you go forward. And that helps you start to get more insight on things that you need to do that’s tailored to specific groups, as opposed to this one size fits all engagement approach.

I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for digging in. And actually like telling, hey, go go have a focus group. But who we have to talk to the people? Yes, we have to talk. Yeah, you’re gonna have to do that. We really appreciate you doing that. Oh, okay. So putting the human back in Human Resources is what I love to say about your approach. In doing that, because too often we’re trying to automate, we’re trying to separate. And it’s really important to get back to that human side, even though we’re looking at data is a people problem that has to be solved by people, data is just a part or tool to help us do that. And I love how you brought that aspect in here. Now, I just want to make sure we don’t have any no questions. But I of course I do. Now, as you’re looking at the data, what how do you know if something isn’t success? Maybe that’s an anomaly. When you’re getting the results back in after after you start working through your strategy?

Yes. So the first part is you have to get clarity. And you have to define what is your engagement story. So that helps you with the baseline of what you’re looking what you currently have. And it needs to be connected with the strategy. So as you are engaging your people, what is it? How do you see that manifesting in the workplace, so then that helps you kind of hone in on the the different KPIs, you want to look to measure and align with your engagement strategy. So you get your baseline, and then you start to manage that. But then it’s like, What trends are you seeing what different engagement factors you need to introduce? Those are, once you have the story, then that helps you determine how you measure it, and align that success to organization success. And a lot of times what happens is the engagement strategy is separate from business strategy. It’s one in the same, you it’s just a component of that business strategy. So if you are looking at it different, like, oh, we need to work on this thing. No, it needs to be connected with what you are trying to achieve. What is your mission? What is the purpose? And how are you bringing that alive for your people? And how are you engaging them in the process? And a part of engaging them is it’s not there’s reciprocity. You have to remember that, yes, you know, there people are performing the service and things like that, but there still needs to be reciprocity there. What are you giving him pouring into them so they are able to pour into your company and then be able to drive it the way you want to? So you are the employer of choice. You are the leader in the market. And when you don’t invest there is no different from the business side. If you don’t invest in growing your business if you don’t invest in it. You know, in materials and products and expansions and things like that you may run the risk of falling behind the competition. So what’s the difference within an employee? What’s the difference in being able to engage them? So there are different aspects, even from a business side, if you think about it from that lens, if you take that, and put that over to the people side would help to be able to guide your engagement strategy in a different way.

Oh, thank you so much. For for just one to two last questions. I’ve never number one, to ask questions. Is that such a thing as it will be? For people that just getting started understanding where their employee engagement, what is that one thing they have to do?
The one thing they have to do is understand their story. A lot of people just go into engagement haphazardly, and you have to understand what is current state. So having that clarity of where you stand today, and how that connects with you being able to execute on your business initiatives.
I love it. I love it. Next. Okay, then the final last question. Can people connect with you?
That’s a great question. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I am very active on LinkedIn. And I definitely would love you to give your feedback and comment and engage with me. I love having dialogues with people. And the posts that I put up I love connecting on their posts that they’re putting them is really a community being a part of my LinkedIn family. So definitely make sure you connect with me, I will connect with you and engage in your content and vice versa.

Thank you so much, Marissa, for joining us today. Be sure you connect with her. You can also pick up her book and and I and I love why I broke up with my company. It’s like, I don’t know, sort of kind of feels like a lifetime movie, but not Queenie, like Tifa as maybe terace and how it’s really gonna happen. So I just I don’t know. But I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun and might end up in New Orleans in Miami. Oh, no. I think I think I really really liked that. Um, I we do have one comment I want to share. I agree Marissa understand your organization’s story. This will help take you from where you are to where you desire to go. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. Dr. Pearson, thank you so much for being here today. She’d been hanging out. She’d been running strong for like three hours. So we’re glad she could remain here. So Marissa, everybody check her out. Be sure to check out her book. I will talk to you later. Thanks for joining today.

Thank you. Thank you for everybody that joined I look forward to connecting with you. All
right. Bye bye.