Glanbia is an Ireland-based nutrition company that has grown significantly to have a global presence. Glanbia Performance Nutrition (GPN) has a portfolio of leading brands in sports and lifestyle nutrition, including Optimum Nutrition, SlimFast and Isopure, which are sold in more than 100 markets worldwide.
GPN’s Executive Leadership Team (ELT) wanted to better understand data from its 2021 Employee Engagement Survey to make sure employee voices were heard with a view to maximising engagement and adapting to their teams’ changing needs.
The ELT had identified Wellbeing, Belonging and Barriers to Execution as three focus themes from the survey. Any subsequent data gathering needed to build on the survey foundation already laid, not introduce another employee survey – which could risk survey fatigue.
Off the back of facilitating Highly Effective Teams (H.E.T.) journeys with GPN’s ELT and international/regional teams, Leading Edge were well placed to collaborate with sister company Performance Edge to generate contextual insight and to support with follow-up H.E.T. journeys and the creation of immediate actions in pursuit of GPN’s engagement goals.
Performance Edge are experts in accessing and deploying the human intelligence that drives sustainable high performance. In their experience, people want to talk, so through debriefing and decompression interviews, employees were to be given more of an opportunity to be open about how things are for them and to feel an increased sense of engagement.
With employee surveys of any kind, organisations often have the data but not the story. Our Leading Edge/Performance Edge partnership put us in a great place to focus on the human dimension and gather useful data to feed into meaningful interventions.
We engaged more than 200 GPN employees globally on the identified themes from the survey. This data gathering took place in January and February as a combination of 1:1 senior stakeholder interviews and multi-employee forum discussions across six business functions.
Being external in these interviews and discussions made it easier for our team to facilitate the space and work through tensions – to help with sense-making (helping people to interpret and give meaning to their experiences).
We collated themes, analysis and recommendations into a report for the ELT and fed back/facilitated discussion around these findings by region, workforce and job role. This is where a human intelligence approach adds clarity and nuance to standalone survey items. Where a score of ‘64’, for example, is a useful benchmark, it doesn’t reveal context or how survey items are interlinked, which is something that stood out through the interviews. Diving deeper into the data with future surveys would help to reveal patterns of engagement and identify the focus areas that would effect meaningful change and provide valuable support.
From the data gathered through interviews and forum discussions with teams, Wellbeing and Belonging were the themes with the highest potential for impact. We provided a series of recommendations for interventions and initiatives that could move the needle.
