EMPLOYEES ENGAGEMENT IS A TWO-WAY STREET, IT'S NOT THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE EMPLOYER.

[Jacqueline M. Walters]

 

Engaged employees wants to be challenged, to learn and grow, have stability and security in their jobs. The five best practices to achieve this:

 

1. The engaged employees needs to know themselves and their coworkers.

2. Grow themselves and their coworkers.

3. Inspire themselves and their coworkers.

4.Involve themselves and their coworkers.

5. Reward themselves and their coworkers.

 

The results will be a fully engaged workforce, that delivers outstanding performances, critical contributions to organizational performances and enhanced cultures.

 

Share your opinion of this article.

[Craig Althof]

OK I'll bite, Jacqueline...

This is OUTSTANDING news...we don't need managers anymore!!! woo-hoo!! (OK, just funning) Seriously, looking at the list I can't put my finger on even one of the five that each person could not have some degree of impact on. Just not enough to deliver the results you're noting in my opinion.

I don't know if you are espousing total abdication of the leaders' / managers' role in nurturing an environment conducive to high engagement. If so, I have to respectfully disagree. But if the right environment is there, each of us certainly has control over our own engagement....to a degree.

The same with empowerment needing a two-way street: engagement has to be made available, and then it has to be taken.

One key point...managers need engagement too. If a manager knows what engagement feels like, are they not more likely to do what is possible to provide the same for their team? They would know first-hand what the result could be.

[Jacqueline M. Walters]

Craig the Leaders and Managers are the key sources in learning, teaching to foster employees engagement. Engaged employees are fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work. They will act in a way that furthers the Organization's interest. The extent that the employees stay motivated, fullfill and challenge is up to the employees. The article did not indicate that Leaders and Managers be excluded from employees engagement. It's not the Employer's sole responsibility, employees should share the responsibility and contribute to their own engagement. As in self-enrichment and performance enhancement.

[Craig Althof]

Is there supposed to be an article linked? I don't see it, only the text you entered (looks pretty exclusionary to me but I really was kidding!).

No one motivates "me". They may try to push the right buttons but I am the only one who decides whether or not I am movtivted.

[David Bowles]

Well its nice to come here and agree with everyone! Jacqueline I think its very important to make the employee responsible for their own choice to engage and everything which goes into that. I agree that too little time is spent here talking about that. Craig I agree with you, as usual....and not just because you say nice things about my posts here at the EEN... :-) I used to think, too, that management was obsolete, but I have listened to others and been convinced that that is not true. We need great managers like football teams need a manager, coaches, a masseur and physical trainers. I have also done too many surveys and seen first hand that management is the key to morale and engagement. Its great to do everything which J suggests, but when a highly self-actualized worker meets the boss from hell (or worse, the culture from hell), it can all come to naught.

Finally Curtis I agree with your point that people get heavily criticized here, including myself (often by uptight Brits, which is interesting, given that I was born and raised there....are they mad that I left that cold and crowded island for sunny California 30 years ago?), but I think we do not need to be "stifled" by that...we can shake it off and keep on expressing our opinions. That's how progess is made...

best to you all

David
www.moraleatwork.com

[Ben Simonton]

Although a manager using the right tactics can achieve engagement by 80% of employees, individual employees can decide on their own to become engaged.

The process for most individuals starts with understanding that about 95% of us are followers, more or less, meaning we do what we "think" we are expected to do. We do this, more or less, because when we were little our parents told us what to do. Then we were told what to do by our teachers, our churches, the media, the government and finally our bosses told us what to do. In short, we learned how to follow and how to detect, without being told, what was expected of us. Thus we are followers more or less.

Followers can join a new company and within a week know just how industrious, honest, enthusiastic, open, cooperative, compassionate, friendly, etc to be in performing their work. They do this by carefully watching what is going on and converting that to a set of value standards which they then use to do their work.

5% or so of all people don't do this. They do what they think they should do based on their own value standards. These standards are all of good values, never the bad ones because no one believes that the bad values such as dishonesty or indolence are good.

The performance difference between these two groups is huge in terms of productivity and overall performance simply because followers must spend a huge amount of brainpower to figure what is expected of them by watching others and then converting what they see into value standards, This can be as high as 5 to 1. As if that isn't bad enough, followers often follow bad standards since if they think management is not being honest then they feel justified to also be dishonest about something or maybe several things. All of this makes a huge difference in the work performance of the 5% versus the 95%.

Obviously, the 5% are fully engaged because that is what they think they were hired to do. Converting the 95% to being like the 5% consists of getting them to use their own value standards to decide what they should do and not worrying about what the boss might or might not think. Of course, the boss must commit to not savaging them for errors, only to helping them to learn how not to make that error. After all, error is our best friend and success is an enemy. The more practice in deciding what to do and figuring out what is the right thing to do any person gets, the more they feel in charge and the more productive and engaged they become. This process is greatly uplifting. We simply don't have to feel bad if we are caught in a traffic jam or a rainstorm.

Best regards, Ben
http://www.leadingtoday.org/Onmag/jan03/bs-jan03.html

[Scott Messinger]

Here's my issue with this. All these points require a high degree of proficiency in people skills, above the average person. Unfortunately, most of us don't know how to inspire ourselves, much less our coworkers. This is especially true of people in the technical professions.

However, managers ARE supposed to have better people skills than the rest of us. So that is why the responsibility for the above points falls more them than their employees.

[Peter A Hunter]

Scott
Are you sure that managers have better people skills than the rest of us.
A survey conducted by the HR Review revealed last week that 94% of employees thought that their bosses lacked leadership skills.
Couple that with the understanding that the vast majority of people who leave their jobs do so because of the way they were treated by their bosses, and we have a group of people whose people skills seem less than impressive.

We don't need highly developed people skills to know what annoys other people.
What does appear difficult for many managers is how not to annoy other people.

Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk

[Scott Messinger]

You actually made my point for me. Most managers do not have the skills but they should.. What we need is fewer articles about dumping these responsibilities upon employees, and more articles telling managers to actually do their job.

[Peter A Hunter]

Scott
One of the things that managers do that prevents their employees from doing their jobs is that they feel that it is the managers job to tell every body else what to do.
If we then start telling the managers what we think they ought to be doing then we will create exactly the same resistance in the managers that they create in their employees.

To break the destructive grip of Command and Control we have to understand how to allow the managers to discover how to do that for themselves.

Peter A Hunter
www.breakingtheMould.co.uk

[John W Hall]

Is there not an issue with management training here. One in five managers in the UK get professional training; the rest learn by experience or network haphazardly learning of other people's experience.

Skills training is essential. (Unfortunately it is needed most during times of difficulty when most training budgets are cut). Managers also need to be trained in using simple leadership tools such as how to create an inspiring purpose for their team or how to turn a negative situation into a positive strategy, or how to positively get detailed feedback on how good they are at empowering, delegating, communicating and how to deal with dis-engaging influences within the team.

Perhaps more emphasis on management and leadership training is what we should be campaigning about!

John
www.engagewithpurpose.co.uk

[Scott Messinger]

I agree that the strict Command and Control form of management doesn't work anymore. The problem is that I feel we have swung too far in the other direction. Employees are told they are 'empowered' but are given little instruction of training on how to use that 'empowerment'. Organizations are so flat, that employees rarely see their managers, much less get any leadership from them. Managers are so afraid of micro management, and have so little training in actually managing, that they stay completely 'out of the way' of employee and treat that as a good thing.

So I guess I have a very visceral reaction to any statements about employees being expected to take on another responsibility.