How to gain leadership buy-in for your engagement strategy

The biggest blockers to leadership buy-in

When on this journey it’s important to recognise that getting leadership buy-in for employee engagement initiatives hinges on understanding leadership mindset and priorities.

Challenges will vary depending on your organisation’s culture, leadership style, industry, and specific circumstances, but some common ones include:

• Limited resources

Budget constraints or competing priorities within organisations make it difficult for leadership to commit resources to engagement initiatives if they can’t see an immediate or tangible return.

• Resistance to change

Some leaders may prefer sticking with existing practices or strategies, even if there is evidence to suggest that improvements are needed.

• Hierarchy and power dynamics

Sometimes these can hinder open communication and collaboration between HR departments and senior leadership, making it challenging for HR managers to advocate for their ideas or gain buy-in.

• Lack of awareness or understanding

Leadership may not fully understand the importance of potential benefits of the proposed engagement initiatives, such as engagement programmes or new software (e.g. survey software).

Understanding the mindset of leadership 

Your leadership team set the tone for your organisational culture and strategic direction, by understanding their mindset, you can tailor your proposals to resonate with their values and objectives. Without this, your pitches may miss the mark or fail to address key concerns, leading to resistance or rejection. Some things you need to consider…

• Strategic objectives

Leadership are typically focused on achieving strategic objectives and driving business growth. Proposals need to align with these objectives to gain their support.

For example, if a key focus is that the organisation aims to improve customer retention or satisfaction, you can highlight how engaged employees contribute to better customer experiences.

• Risk aversion

Many leaders currently are cautious about investing budget in new things. Understanding their tolerance to risk helps us frame your proposals in a way that minimises those risks and emphasises the potential returns.

The best way to do this is to demonstrate how the initiative you’re proposing will yield tangible benefits – breakdown those elements of employee engagement into areas that will really speak to your leaders and then back those up with evidence.

For example, if you are looking to buy a product or piece of software – look for case-studies or quotes you can use to demonstrate that the project works in similar organisations and has the desired impact.

• Metrics and KPIs

Your leadership team will be held accountable on the metrics and KPIs that are set out for them in financial or strategic plans.

You should be aligning your proposals with measurable outcomes that resonate with leadership. That might involve linking employee engagement initiatives to metrics such as productivity, turnover, customer retention or increased profitability.

Whilst there are lots of statistics out there to support the link between employee engagement initiatives – such as employee survey software – and improving the KPIs your leadership will care about – the best thing you can do is find evidence as specific to your sector or organisation as possible.

6 steps to creating a winning proposal every time

Once you understand leadership’s mindset and priorities, you can tailor your proposal accordingly. By speaking the language of your leaders and addressing their concerns, you will increase the likelihood of securing buy-in and investment.

• Step 1: Identifying organisational challenges to support your conversations

Your leaders need to be able to visualise how you will use the data to make a real difference in your company objectives. One of the easiest ways to do this is to identify where you currently have challenges in meeting those, and understanding how your employee engagement initiative may be able to support that.

For example:

• Organisational challenge: Our employee turnover rate in the marketing team has increased and we’re now losing people faster than we can replace them. We’re planning for a new product launch in three months which we need their support with.

• The proposed solution: Use employees surveys to understand why your marketing talent as leaving at such a high rate and why it’s become worse as the year has progressed. Use the data to create solutions that you can work with marketing leadership on.

• Intangible benefits: You help identify that your marketing team are feeling neglected and discouraged by the difficult economic environment and disengaged due to their change in workload. You understand what their warning signals are so that you can avoid employee retention being impacted in the future.

> Team morale and cohesion
> Elevate your employer brand and attract top talent
> Improved market reputation

• Tangible benefits: Leadership understand how to motivate and reward employees and see higher employee retention as a result. The marketing team feel appreciated and heard. A happy marketing team means happy customers and a better service, having a positive impact on the bottom line.

> Reduced turnover
> Reduced recruitment costs
> Increase in workforce stability
> Retain knowledge and expertise

• Step 2: Aligning your engagement strategy with business objectives

Your engagement strategy shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, work with leadership and managers to identify key business objectives that you can tie into your engagement plan.

Work closely with senior leaders and department heads to understand what your organisation’s strategic direction is and during these conversations, aim to identify any challenges leaders foresee in hitting those goals.

When business leaders can see how your engagement strategy relates to their overall business objectives, they will get on board.

• Step 3: Creating internal champions

These people will be your key decision-makers when it comes to deciding whether to commit to a new initiative or software.

Look for someone who has credibility and is respected within your organisation. Make sure they are confident and knowledgeable in their department and are passionate about solving the challenges of employee engagement.

These people will become your sounding board as you work through the conversations with your leadership team, and can also give that added boost to your proposal when it’s finally time to pitch it.

• Step 4: Gathering evidence to create a business case

Explore the challenges you identified in Step 1 and look at ways you can gather data points related to them.

Being able to find specific examples with data points relating to teams etc. will be powerful. It will demonstrate that with a more thorough ability to gather feedback and measure the pulse of the organisation, you can create realistic impactful solutions to organisational challenges.

This data can come from the research you did in Step 2 to align your business objectives with the employee engagement initiative – or it may come from other internal data sources you have such as employee survey results, performance metrics, and industry benchmarks.

• Step 5: Preparing your proposal

Now you have all of the key points, it’s time to build your proposal so that it will resonate with your leaders. On a high level, you will need to cover:

• How the initiative you’re introducing will integrate with other systems and processes you have.
• Highlight how your leadership team will benefit.
• Demonstrate how it will improve your KPIs/objectives.
• Prove that now is the right time to introduce the change.
• How you’ll implement the initiative – preferably with a few options from suppliers for your leaders to consider.
• Detail how you will report on progress and successes.
• Showcase the support you received from your internal champions.

It’s also a great opportunity to address and alleviate any potential concerns; your leaders will appreciate you considered the obstacles and challenges.

For example, with employee surveys we often see concerns around being overwhelmed with the information that is received or not having the resources available to make the suggested changes – overcoming these challenges in your pitch will go a long way and demonstrate you’ve thoroughly researched the solution.

• Step 6: Overcoming objections from leadership

The key to overcoming objections is to anticipate the concerns of your leadership team and be prepared with hard facts and data that will help them get behind your initiative.

When you know your stuff, they will gain confidence in your ability to deliver results. We’ve out together some common examples of objections we’ve seen:

Budget

• Objection: We’re trying to focus on a lot more than employee engagement right now – why should we devote time and budget to this?
• Response: Draw from your business objective and KPI work – if one of your key struggles is attracting and retaining talent, highlight that keeping your employees engaged is one of the most powerful tools to improve retention. Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their workplace (Think Learning, 2023).

Productivity

• Objection: Productivity is at an all-time low. Why should we spend time and money engaging employees if we can’t even get them to perform at ideal levels?
• Response: 69% of employees feel would work harder if their bosses appreciated their efforts (Oak Engage, 2023). Something that would have an impact on productivity, especially for roughly 7 out of 10 of our workers, is definitely something we should put in place to fix our productivity challenges.

Time poor

• Objection: (Survey software specific) Our people are stressed and frustrated – why should we give them one more thing to think about?
• Response: Employees are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work if they feel that their feedback and ideas are valued by the organisation (Haiilo, 2023). If we give our employees the opportunity to voice their experiences, we’ll be rewarded with their hard work tenfold.

Talk to the team at Stribe to learn more about how we can help improve your employee engagement strategy and get your leaders onboard too.

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