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A how-to, and a how-not-to guide

Taking engagement lessons from football

As a lifelong football fan, I have often wondered why some teams exceed expectations, and others constantly fail to match expectations. There are teams in all forms of sport that, despite paying less than more illustrious clubs, continue to enjoy relative success – and it’s all thanks to excellent employee engagement. The parallels in business are stark – be fair, consistent, innovative and supportive, and HR can really help business growth.

Equal opportunities + no stars = greater engagement

Legendary Nottingham Forest and Derby County manager Brian Clough was one of football’s greatest exponents of equal opportunities. For him, if you were good enough, you played.

Admittedly, the rules of the sport ensured that it was an all-male team, but Clough’s Forest and Derby sides were diverse in that he would employ someone nearing retirement alongside someone starting out in the game. Equally, he would never allow one player to be the “star” of the team. When he broke the British transfer record to buy Trevor Francis, he made sure that Francis fitted into the team – and not the other way round.

A similar, yet extreme, example in the corporate world is Delaware-based WL Gore, whose flat hierarchy allows for creative freedom and fluidity. Indeed, job titles have been stripped away: everyone is an associate, from top to bottom. There are no managers, just mentors. There are no stars, just an environment of self-realisation and innovation that makes their employees engaged, and the business successful.

Naturally, this model would not function in the majority of workplaces, but the engagement model holds true: give everyone an equal opportunity and an equal billing, and the workforce will be more engaged.

Recruit the right people and have a solid pay structure

Football is littered with examples of players recruited, often at incredible expense, that have failed to fit in with the team. Some managers, such as David Moyes at Everton or Roy Hodgson at Fulham, recruit infrequently, but after painstaking research into the player’s attitude, background and behaviour, ensuring that the player adapts to the team culture quickly.

This long-term view of team building has reaped rewards in that both clubs are now viewed as a model for others to follow. With solid pay structures in place, there is less scope for jealousy within the team (footballers talk, and so do employees).

Without solid pay structures, players grow uneasy. There is the famous story of Ashley Cole so shocked at receiving only £50,000 per week that he lost control of his car. He was aware that some of his colleagues were earning £60,000 per week, and wanted at least parity.

Employees need to trust your communication on pay policies. If they don’t, they’ll believe the grapevine, damaging engagement and retention. For the record, Arsenal did not retain Ashley Cole – he went to a competitor.

Research by Mercer recently highlights this problem. Chris Johnson, head of Mercer's Human Capital Business, said that their research “shows that companies spend nearly 40% of their revenues on employee pay and yet they fail to deliver their pay policies effectively. Initial data suggests that this leads companies to waste nearly £4,000 per employee, or nearly 8% of their payroll. Employees know that some of their colleagues are overpaid and others are underpaid: this undermines high performance and employee engagement."

Players have private lives, too

Players have lives outside their sport. Indeed, very often, those problems can affect their performance. Chelsea captain John Terry was the centre of a media storm recently concerning his private life. His performances suffered, and as a result, so did the team – and the business.

Club colleague Ashley Cole (him again!) has also been suffering problems in his private life, and the two players together raise two not unrelated issues: how do you treat misdemeanours equally, and how do you support employees going through a time of crisis?

Imagine Chelsea’s employee engagement problem at the moment: Ashley Cole is complaining that he feels victimised by his employer, while John Terry was given time off to spend with his family. Two seemingly similar misdemeanours have resulted in two seemingly extreme responses.

Clear codes of conduct are therefore essential to maintaining team cohesion, and ensuring that HR’s reaction to personal problems are consistent, coherent, and do not affect employee engagement.

Proactive solutions would include some form of employee support, made available, and made known to all employees, so that whenever a personal crisis arises, they have somewhere to turn that is both private and comprehensive. Equally, it is up to Human Resources professionals to encourage a culture that prevents the behaviour we have seen by the above-mentioned footballers: ethical, honest and fair.

As we have seen with previous examples, culture drives performance, which drives the business and provides results, and if HR can demonstrate this, it’s further proof that the profession is absolutely central to aiding business growth.