Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart, Patrick Wright

Exercise 6

Stryker's Striking Commitment to Employee Engagement
Stryker's 20,000 employees design, make, and sell medical and surgical equipment as varied as hospital beds, spinal implants, and power tools for use in surgery. The company runs 30 manufacturing and R D locations in the United States, Europe, and China, and it sells products in 89 countries around the world. To run such complex operations and deliver products that must meet exacting standards to protect the patients who benefit from them, Stryker needs an extremely talented and dedicated workforce.
In one sign that the company has risen to the challenge, it recently landed a spot on Fortune's list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Employees seeking help with work-life balance can take advantage of telecommuting, job sharing, and a compressed workweek. Career development is aided by 100 hours per year of training for hourly employees and 120 hours per year for salaried employees. The company's voluntary turnover rate is 8%.
But where Stryker stands out as an employer is its dedication to promoting employee engagement. Take the case of Stryker's product development and production facility in Freiburg, Germany, which specializes in navigation systems used in computer-assisted surgery. Stryker Navigation was preparing to tackle shortcomings in the production process and realized that teams in the facility were not cooperating. Stryker hired Gallup Management to conduct a survey of employee engagement and teamwork and compare the results for each team and the facility as a whole against standards developed by Gallup in its work with other organizations.
Gallup found that although Stryker Navigation had above-average employee engagement for Germany at that time, only 32% of its employees were engaged. Scores were low in the areas of employees knowing what was expected of them and having the resources they needed to do their jobs. Guided by the Gallup consultants, Stryker addressed those problems for each team. A year later, employees retook the engagement survey. This time, 64% of employees were engaged. To ensure that engagement remains important, Stryker Navigation holds monthly reviews of its action plans and shares the results with employees. It continues measuring engagement annually; so far, the improvement continues. At the same time, teams in Freiberg are collaborating more effectively, and the facility's output and quality have risen.
Not long afterward, Stryker realized it needed to bring the lessons from Germany to the United States. At its orthopedics facility in Mahwah, New Jersey, employees were above average for a U.S. company: 48% of employees were engaged (versus 28% for the United States overall), 37% not engaged (versus 53%), and 15% actively disengaged (versus 19%). But above average is not good enough for Stryker; the company wanted a highly engaged workforce that can deliver exceptional results.
Stryker sent the Mahwah facility one of its experts: Sabine Krummel-Mihajlovic, senior human resources director for continental Europe. She learned that the managers in New Jersey administered the engagement surveys, but had not been acting on the results. Consequently, employees lacked trust in the process. Krummel-Mihajlovic trained the facility's leadership in the importance of employee engagement. Then, to demonstrate her deep commitment to the process, she announced that she would attend every team's meeting to review feedback from the survey and create an action plan. Her commitment would represent 55 planning meetings.
Krummel-Mihajlovic saw that some managers skillfully led the planning meetings. These managers tended to lead teams with high engagement scores. She targeted the managers with low scores and worked with them individually to help them interpret the scores and figure out what they needed so they could help their team improve. Often, these managers needed training in how to lead more effectively. Then, to keep the process moving forward without her direct involvement, Krummel-Mihajlovic gathered the names of informal leaders in each team and assembled them into a group that would meet monthly to discuss a driver of engagement and figure out how to improve in that area. Finally, she crafted ways to communicate how management was responding to all the ideas and action plans generated, and she arranged a dinner party to recognize those who had contributed to improving engagement.
Less than a year later, the employees retook the engagement survey. In that short time, scores improved to 57% engaged, 32% not engaged, and 11% actively disengaged. At that point, Krummel-Mihajlovic was offered a promotion in Europe, so the Mahwah plant's commitment to engagement would have to endure without her.
How can Stryker ensure that its progress on engagement continues in Mahwah?