ENGAGING EMPLOYEES Take The Leadership Challenge By: David Irvine
Content The Three Assumptions About Employee Engagement 4 Assessing Employee Engagement 5 Three Keys To Employee Engagement 6 Engaging Employees 2
Introduction As I was wandering around the offices of a client, helping him assess employee engagement in his division, I noticed the screen saver of one of his administrators had a large number on it. What s with the number? I asked the young woman sitting by the computer. Oh, this tells me how many days I have left until I retire was the response. It motivates me to come to work, especially on Monday morning when the number drops by two days over the weekend. Perhaps this could be a fun strategy if retirement is just around the corner. The problem with this employee was that the number on the computer was 7,219! A recent Gallup poll on employee engagement declared that 71 percent of North American workers are not fully engaged in their work. This means that roughly two-thirds of all employees are less than highly motivated to be productive, ultimately affecting customer satisfaction, profitability, innovation, and rising costs. This whitepaper is the third in the series of four whitepapers on the four accountabilities of a leader. After you build trust, after you create vivid and compelling clarity around your purpose, vision, and values, leaders have a third accountability: to engage their employees. As a leader you need to build an inspiring environment that gets people excited to come to work. You need to connect to people s passion, unique gifts, and innate desire to contribute. You need to bring out the best in others. You need to inspire people. If you are committed to building great places to work and live, our e-books on the other three Pillars of Accountability, the fundamental accountabilities of a leader are a mustread. They include: Building Trust, Leading with Unusual Clarity, and Ensuring Results. Building these Pillars of Accountability ensures leadership, regardless of your title or lack of title. As in all our approaches to leadership, it starts with a decision: to make the world around you better by your presence. Engaging Employees 3
The Three Assumptions About Employee Engagement 1 2 3 Employee engagement is defined as the desire by employees to go the extra mile to help their organization succeed, while deeming their work meaningful and significant. Engagement is a positive emotional connection an employee has to their work and to their workplace. Engagement goes beyond mere satisfaction, to deep caring and commitment. It s about wanting to give more than is required or even expected. Employee engagement is about pride, enjoyment, and being supported in your work. It s about knowing that your work matters and makes a difference. Employee engagement is a shared ownership. Positional leaders have a responsibility to create an inspiring place to come to work. Bosses have to care more than just about getting the job done. They have to care about how the job gets done and about the people doing the job. They have to care about what motivates people and attempt to respond to these needs. But it s not all up to the boss. Employees too, must take ownership for their own personal level of engagement. As an employee, you bring your body to work everyday. But do you also bring your passion, your dreams, your unique gifts, your values, your commitment to serve? It s not all up to the boss. Employee engagement is a shared responsibility. Employee engagement starts with you. Employee engagement starts by looking in the mirror. Whatever you want from others you must be prepared to give. If you want others to be engaged, you must be engaged. Employee engagement studies and surveys consistently cite leadership credibility as a crucial factor for employees emotional connection to their work. If you don t believe in the messenger, you won t believe the message. This means that you can take whatever we suggest to engage your employees and apply it first to yourself. Employee engagement starts with you. Engaging Employees 4
Assessing Employee Engagement There are several ways to assess how engaged your employees are. One is to send out an employee engagement survey. While surveys can be very useful tools, you learned in our white paper on organizational culture that surveys are limited. Surveys give you a photograph of people s current level of engagement. They don t give you the movie. They don t give you the context, the whole story, the reasons below the surface of engagement. Surveys are limited, especially if you rely solely on the data to assess engagement. To effectively assess employee engagement, you have to get out of your office. You have to wander around. You have to make contact with people. You have to observe. You have to listen. You have to be in touch. How do you use your strengths and values at work, and how often? How do you see your work contributing to what you care about? What are you learning about yourself in this job? How do you explain what you do at work to your closest friends and family? How much energy and passion do you feel for your work? How can I support you to grow, both personally and professionally? How open can you be about these questions? The Employee Engagement Audit Some informal observations to track employee engagement and meaning in their work include: How staff treat customers, colleagues: stakeholders inside and outside of the organization. Of course, if people aren t honest with you about the answers to these questions, then you can go back to our first e-book that outlines how to build trust. A thorough Employee Engagement Audit requires a degree of trust before you will get honest answers. This level of trust and openness doesn t come overnight. You have to keep working on it. How staff show pride in their work setting. (e.g. cleanliness, tidiness, attitude, etc.) What staff talk about when asked about their work. What staff talk about when the boss isn t in the room. What staff talk about when they go home at night. Suggested Questions To Assess Engagement Tell me a story about why you work here How do you feel about the work you do? Engaging Employees 5
Three Keys To Employee Engagement Most of us believe that the best way to get people motivated and engaged is with external rewards such as money. That s a mistake. To get people engaged you have to reach some fundamental human needs. Drawing on three decades of scientific research and observation on engagement, we have found three key elements of true engagement. First, you have to connect people to their values, which may include such things as having autonomy, choices over the direction of their life and work. Then you have to connect people to their authentic self: their passion, their unique gifts, their essence. Finally, you have to connect people with their innate desire to contribute, to make a difference to the purpose and direction of the organization, as well as to the lives of others. When you create a culture that inspires and connects people to these fundamental human needs, you no longer will have to motivate people. Commitment and engagement will result intrinsically. 1. Engagement Arises From Personal Values Human beings don t put their hearts into causes they don t value. We don t commit energy and intensity into something that is misaligned with what we deem to be important. Research done by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, found in their book, Encouraging the Heart, show how values make a difference in how people behave inside organizations and how they feel about themselves, their colleagues, and their leaders. What they found was that it wasn t the fancy, well-articulated value statements on the walls or the glitzy videotapes played at the leadership retreats that get people engaged. While clarity of organizational values is important, they are only one side of the equation. When it comes to engagement, these efforts to spell out organizational values are essentially a waste of time and resources unless there s also a concerted effort to help individuals understand their own values and examine the fit between their values and the organization s values. In order to get employees engaged, leaders must engage employees in open discussions about what matters to them, what matters to the organization, and the level of alignment between the two. The emphasis in traditional leadership approaches is to align the people to the organization s values. But you also have to align the organization to people s values. Following are some questions to ask your employees that will uncover their values. It s ideal if you can ask these questions in the hiring process, but it s never too late to get people engaged. What would make you excited to come to work here? What are your personal values? What matters to you at work and away from work? In your previous employment (or a previous position here), where have you found alignment between what you value and what you do? What was that like for you? Tell me a story about that. Where have you worked in a job that was misaligned with your values? What was that like for you? How do your personal values align with our organizational values? How can we best support you to find - and live - your values in your work? How can your work here support you to live your values away from work? These questions are not ones that people are used to answering. It may take some time to develop the muscles required for clarity in these areas. You may notice that you will have to struggle with the answer to these questions yourself. What we ve found is that it s not important that people have pristine clarity about the answers. It s also not realistic to get perfect alignment. No job is designed to support all your values all the time. What s important is to bring to the surface any severe misalignment. What s important to employees is that you care enough to ask, and that you care enough to work toward a degree of alignment, that your commitment to want to know the answers is there. Your best employees will be the ones that will work with you to get values alignment and engagement. Engaging Employees 6
2. Engagement Flows From Authentic Alignment It is useful for us to search for that region which best suits us, a place where our spirit is advanced and refreshed, where our senses remain thriving, and where things nourish us. Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Philosopher To get engaged in your work you have to connect your work with what the Eastern philosophers call dharma. Dharma is your calling, your aptitude, your capacities, your natural inclination, your authentic essence. For example, the human dharma physically and mentally is to walk. A snake s dharma is to crawl. Crawling is not the human dharma. It might look cute, but we aren t created to crawl. You can t stay engaged for long trying to imitate a crawling species. In order to feel that you measure up, it is easy to feel the pressure of equality, which results in the expectation that we have to do everything he/she does. If so-and-so is good at sales, then I need to be good at sales. If he is good at speaking in public, then I have to be. If she is good at writing, then I have to be. This limited, depleting, self-depreciating way of thinking stems, in part, from the pressure to strengthen your weaknesses. For example, bring home a report card with five A s and one C and where would the attention lie? Fixing the C, rather than strengthening the A s. Science has shown that there is no duplication in creation. No two snowflakes, or human beings, for that matter, are the same. We are all unique. You have been created unique with certain abilities and strengths that no other person has. Discovering and living in alignment with your dharma, your authentic self, is your personal duty. If you want to realize the power of full engagement, the duty of a leader is to align your organization with your employee s dharma. Fit people; don t fix people. Here are three questions for reflection on your current level of alignment between your work and your dharma, your authentic self: How often have you found yourself at work and discovered that there is some vital, valuable part of yourself that didn t travel there with you? What happens to your soul when your special gifts cannot seem to find their place in what you are doing? How often have you been in an organization where you found that there is far more talent, brainpower, wisdom, and resourcefulness than the job required or even allowed? When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, writes Gary Zukav when what you do serves both yourself and others, when you do not tire on the inside but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work. What then? Then you know you are doing what you are meant to be doing. Stop and take a moment to reflect on which of the questions on the previous page speak to you. In what way do they speak to you? When have you had a performance review where your boss asked, How is your sweet satisfaction? If you have ever worked in an organization where you had to leave you who are at the door, or play the role of what the culture expects of you and were unable to be yourself, you know about disengagement. Employees today are simply not going to stick around just because they have a paycheck, even if it s a good paycheck, if they can t be who they are. If you can t get to people s sense of sweet satisfaction, they ll either walk out the door, or worse, they ll quit and stay. You will discover the nature of your unique genius when you stop trying to conform to other people s models and expectations, and allow your natural channel to open. Below is a list of indictors of both authenticity and inauthenticity, along with some questions for reflection to help you assess the current level of alignment between your work and your authentic self. Indicators of Inauthenticity Tense Anxious Shut down Disengaged Frenetic, continual demands Cautious Depressed Exhausted, Bad Tired Isolated Indicators of Authenticity Flow Calm Open Engaged Focused Courageous Refreshed Fulfilled, Good tired Connected Reflect on your own indicators of authenticity. How do you know when you are being authentic? How do you know when you are in authentic? How would you describe your sense of sweet satisfaction in your work and/or in your life? What is the result of being in alignment with your authentic self? Where, in your life, have you been involved in work (paid or unpaid) that was aligned with your authentic self? How have you drifted from your authentic self in your work and/or in life? What have been the results of this misalignment? Where have you been able to mentor someone to find their authentic self? Engaging Employees 7
What is the value to yourself and to the world, for you to live authentically? What are the risks to being authentic? Burnout comes not from hard work but from heart ache. Rabbi Ira Eisenstein Discovering, and living in alignment with your authentic self, means making time for reflection and attention to how you are expending your energy. What gives you energy and what depletes your energy? At the end of the week, when you are tired, is it good tired or bad tired? Are you tired from doing fulfilling work that was aligned with your dharma, or are you tired from living in a culture where you have to play games, be political, and polite, where you have to expend energy pretending to be someone you aren t? Find out what your dharma is. Here are some questions to help you out. What comes easily to me? What is natural for me? Or: How much am I trying to imitate someone else? What do I do well that I don t remember learning? What do I do, that when I do it, I lose all track of time? What inspires me to get up early, to stay late, to go the extra mile? What am I passionate about? When you reach for your sweet spot, that place that give you a deep sense of satisfaction, it s important to understand that it s unrealistic that any job will provide this degree of fulfillment and meaning completely. Like aligning your work with your values, it s naïve to expect that one position will keep you 100% aligned with your authentic self. Chores, unfulfilling, dull work, are a part of all employment. Sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and get the job done. While it s important to assess the amount your current job creates authentic alignment, there is no standard answer as what the percentage should be that you spend at work in your sweet spot. For some, the sweet spot happens when they get home from work. For these people, their work is merely a fulfilling job that enables them to find meaning and satisfaction in their personal life. For others, the majority of their work is in their sweet spot. We call this a vocation, where what you do is almost completely aligned with who you are. For most, it is somewhere in between. What s important, if you are committed to fostering employee engagement, is to have the conversation and continually move toward supporting employees as best you can, and when appropriate and available, to have them work in areas that support their authentic self. Once again, fit people, don t fix people. 3. Contribution Unleashing Your Innate Desire To Make a Difference Your authentic essence, your dharma, is different from action based solely on self-interest. Just because you find passion in an activity doesn t make it authentic. Authentic expression is something that is completely natural to you that you do for the benefit of others. For example, have a passion to climb mountains. Climbing mountains may even be in your dharma. What makes this passion authentic is to find a way to benefit others by climbing mountains. What we are referring to here is fostering contribution, an innate desire humans have to make a difference in the world, to make an impact, to be needed. I ve learned from working with kids that there is a difference between chores and contribution. There are always chores to do, but if you don t feel that your work contributes to the mission of the organization, makes a difference, and causes an impact, then engagement will start to drop. People need to know where they fit in, where their work contributes to the organization s purpose and vision. There has to be a balance between contribution and chores. It s important to have the conversation: What aspects of your work make a contribution? and What aspects are simply chores that need to be done? Distinguish between the two. Be honest about the difference. Then ensure that you are ramping up and fostering the need for contribution. We all have an innate need to make a difference. If you aren t tapping in to that need, people s engagement will drop. The bottom line is that self-centered people are not engaged. Leadership requires modeling and expecting a servant attitude. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it, wrote George Bernard Shaw. There appears to be two kinds of people in the world: those who help, and those who hinder; those who give and those who take; those who lift, and those who lean; those who contribute, and those who consume. Which kind of person will you decide to be? Model servant leadership and inspire people around you to be engaged. When It Comes To Engagement, Give What You Expect My teenage daughters have been my best Engaging Employees 8
teachers for understanding engagement. When I ve been traveling for an extended time, my tendency is to come home and see all the things they aren t doing to help around the house. When I m tired and detached from them I ll notice how they haven t been keeping their rooms clean enough, their chores haven t been done adequately, and their responsibilities have been neglected. Then I ll proceed to lecture them and willfully try to engage the disengaged. This type of approach, or management by pressure, is what Ken Blanchard used to call seagull management, which means you ignore people and then you fly around and crap on them. The obvious result of this line of attack is resistance, disengagement, and power struggles. What my kids continue to teach me is that if you want engagement, you first of all have to be engaged. Paradoxically, commitment and accountability for results is correlated with the time you spend with your kids when you aren t expecting anything, when you are just hanging around, listening and hearing their concerns and desires. Before you can engage people you have to be engaged with them. Connection or reconnection if you have been detached - is a prerequisite to engagement. So often I see executives in their corporate offices sending out employee engagement surveys to people they don t even know and then wondering why people say they are disengaged. Sole reliance on employee engagement surveys to assess whether your employees are engaged is an indication of disengagement! Give to others what you expect from others. If you want engagement, take time to get engaged in people s lives. If you want to engage people you need to know people, and they need to know you. What do you want from this career? What matters to you? What do you believe in? What are you committed to? What is your passion? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Connections precede engagement. Engaging Employees: Take The Leadership Challenge We have outlined our philosophy, along with some practical suggestions for engaging employees, the third of the Four Pillars of Accountability. Now there is an opportunity and challenge to step into leadership. Because leadership is about presence, not position, you lead by word and action simply because you are taking action in service to the greater good. By taking a careful inventory of your own level of engagement, by reviewing this material and finding ways to become engaged, you inspire others to be engaged. Engagement begets engagement. Like all leadership practices, it starts with you. If you are prepared to take the leadership challenge and are committed to building great places to work and live, we offer whitepapers on the other three Pillars of Accountability: Building Trust, Leading With Unusual Clarity, and Ensuring Results. Honouring these Four Pillars of Accountability will make you a great leader in today s complex, demanding workplace. Engaging Employees 9
If you need any support on the journey, regardless of your title, we d love to hear from you. Please visit www.davidirvine.com Engaging Employees 10