Is the traditional approach to engagement all wrong?

[Judy McLeish]

Maybe our approach is all wrong. Maybe we are too focused on the drivers of engaging the entire employee population and are not focused on where engagement starts. I would love to hear your thoughts on our post. http://employeefactor.com/2008/06/maybe_the_traditional_approach.html

[David Zinger]

Judy,
I appreciated your post. Very few things are ever all wrong yet I appreciate that we need a pluralism of approaches to work in engagement and one size does not fit all.
David

[Judy McLeish]

Great way to put it David. I agree that certainly a one size solution just won't work. I wonder if we really need to rethink the expectation of high engagement in the workplace and derive methods to create high engaged people - not highly engaged employees....

[David Zinger]

We are people/humans first before we are employees. I would agree on people.

[Chris Bailey]

Judy, the trick will be making the case connecting the people (instead of employee) to the business need. I think there is still a strong reluctance from executives when it comes to developing the whole person rather than just the part of them that walks through the office door. Our job is convincing them that business can and should be a humanistic endeavor rather than solely a financial endeavor.

[Judy McLeish]

Chris, I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, our challenge will be to ensure that Leaders start to really value employees first and then to see the value of engaging them as people. A strange thing happens when executives get in the corner office - they seem to lose sight of what it is like to struggle, juggle and balance work when you are "the little guy"!

[Lisa Cox]

Chris, I have to agree with you. At the foundation of all businesses are relationships, just as in life. Organizations understand and seek to create emotional connections via their branding efforts with customers to create loyalty and satisfaction, why don't they take the same approach with employees? My own research is focused on how organizations can make emotional connections with employees, for I believe that is the foundation for all future 'engagement'.

To Judy's reply concerning our challenge to get Leaders/organizations to really value employees, I'd like to hear from anyone making progress on that front.

[Jay Forte]

Lisa and Judy,
My perspective, coming from working with companies, is that more that we can show the correlation between the change in performance and a more inspire-and-engage (rather than the outdated and ineffective command-and-control) method of management, the more existing management will see the need to emotionally connect to their employees. The reluctance for older management to "coddle" employees (aka treat them like humans - allow and encourage passionate performance and emotions in the workplace) can only change when they see the connection to engaging and caring for employees and the resulting improvements in performance. Though it truly makes intuitive sense that the more your care about your employees, the more connected they will feel and the more inspired they will be to perform, there are still many managers who believe that emotions belong at home, not at work. The tough sell is that soft skills are "in" - because they activate performance. For so many years, soft skills were not linked to performance - so my perspective is that we continue to cite successes in lower turnover, greater innovation, better service and greater performance as the reason to activate the humanity of the workforce. This is the way to win over the holdouts that have not yet learned to care about their employees as people.

[Terrence Seamon]

Judy,
In your excellent blog entry, you write: "Everyone is working on engagement, yet we are NOT moving the needle."

I love that metaphor of "moving the needle." It's about change in a desired direction.

How often do we trudge into the bathroom, flick on the light, step on the weight scale, look down at the needle...and sigh that the needle is not moving in the desired (downward) direction?

So, to lose weight, or to raise engagement, the question is: What do we need to do differently?

There is an old but evergreen model for initiating productive change --Start, Stop, Continue-- that tells us that "doing differently" can take different forms.

- What can we Start doing that would increase engagement?
- What should we Stop doing?
- What should we Continue doing?

Terry

[Judy McLeish]

Terry - I think you captured my thinking exactly. Companies are obviously working on things that aren't moving the needle enough. Frankly, I think that this once a year measurement of employee engagement is not enough....we measure our customers every 24 hours and yet we only measure the pulse of our employees once a year! So how can we ensure that we are really working on the right things?

[Jay Forte]

Hi Judy
My perspective that more fundamental than engagement is culture. Take a highly engaged employee and place them in a lack luster (non employee-focused culture) and the engagement wanes. To me, that must mean that culture is more fundamental than engagement.

I have written extensively on employee-focused cultures and offer the following list of 10 culture components (when these are in place, they invite the best and if already employed, they keep the best):
A focus on the organization:
1. Clearly defined vision and mission, supported by objectives and goals
2. Clearly defined ethical standards and expectations
A focus on the employee:
3. A competent, talent-based and bias-free employee selection process
4. A dynamic orientation and inclusion process
5. A fair and attainable reward and incentive process
6. A fair and recurring performance review and feedback process
7. Regular and recurring skill development (education)
8. Regular and recurring career development and counseling
9. Dynamic succession planning and mentoring
10. Inclusive environment that supports free exchange of ideas and performance ownership.

To me that means that we focus on engagement by creating the components of an employee-focused culture. Items 3-10 definitely drive engagment but moreover they indicate a workplace that truly values employees.

Thoughts?

[Michael Kanazawa]

Judy,

Good question. Herb Kelleher was once asked how Southwest Airlines was able to get all of their employees to sing songs, tell jokes, and have fun. His response was that they simply hire people who are happy, like to serve people and have a song in their hearts. Then, they let those people be themselves on the job. So, maybe it is less about what we do and more about who we choose that leads to having a highly engaged organization. I do believe there are other things you can do to impact engagement through leaders, but perhaps making great hiring decsisions is the most sustainable solution in the end.

Mike

[Judy McLeish]

Mike,

I agree with you. I think more and more companies are focusing on hiring the right people which should help significantly. When you look at the whole notion of hiring the right people - maybe we should not only look at who we are hiring and their inate traits, but also look at who we are promoting and whether or not they have the right traits to engage a team and a company.