Imran the CEO of a large software company was wondering why employee engagement wasn’t sky rocketing at his company. His people were leaving the organisation no matter what he did. According to him he’s read loads of stuff on retaining and engaging talent. He’s tried to create a ‘Silicon Valley’ type of ambiance in his company. Employees are given free lunches, people have the best perks, there’s pool and table tennis at the office, there are inter-company sports leagues and most employees experience significant career growth. And yet, engagement survey numbers didn’t go up and the company was used as a stepping stone for employees to find better jobs at other companies.
According to the majority of ‘engagement experts’ Imran is doing all the right things including
- Creating an atmosphere where people can interact with other colleagues and build friendships
- Offering top-of-the-line’ benefits,
- Organizing ‘fun activities’ and provides people with growth opportunities
Imran says it’s not the work pressure or the way that line managers ‘interact’ with employees. Their values are very strong and widely accepted he claims and last but not least he’s convinced that an ‘engaged’ employees performs better than their not engaged counterparts. He’s willing to put his money where his mouth is and invest in it. So why does Imran still have engagement and retention issues?
Imran’s company is not alone. Despite investing around USD 720 million per year in engagement activities the engagement levels of US employees according to Gallup have remained practically the same over the last few years.
So if this isn’t working, what is? I don’t claim to have the million dollar answer to that question (if I did, I’d be very rich by now) but here are some thoughts that might help you move your organisation forward in engaging your staff.
Employee Engagement Isn’t a One-Way Street
The central theme of my eBook, Tricks to Achieve Employee Engagement was that employee engagement isn’t something that the company does. For an employee to be engaged the company can do a number of things, but first and foremost the employees needs to be ‘engage-able’. If an employee isn’t interested you can throw whatever solutions at them, but nothing will stick. Thus it’s important to ensure you hire people who are excited about what your company does, are driven by the same values and who want to make a different. And if your current employees don’t fit any of the above, then of course you have your work cut out for you.
Employee Engagement Surveys Alone Aren’t the Answer
Ann Latham in Forbes believes that employee engagement surveys should be totally scrapped and although I sympathize with many of the arguments she puts forward I still think there’s some value in them as long as you don’t do them mechanically. Surveys are never the one and only answer. They can only point you in a certain direction and they should be the beginning of the “talking to people” part and not the result of it.
Survey should also fit in what you as a company want to measure and not a ‘one fit for all’. Of course some standard questions help you compare how you’re doing compared to other companies. But the real power is to assess how you’re doing against the elements that are most important for you or the factors you are working on.
Employees Have to Be Aligned to Company Goals
A survey done by The Corporate Leadership Board, unearthed that the single most important lever for driving engagement is a strong connection between work and organizational strategy. The second most important lever is the importance of the job to the company’s success. This means that employees are engaged when they have a clear understanding of why their role is important and how it contributes to the organization’s success. That sounds simple enough, right?
However research published in an Harvard Business Review article shared that:
“On average, 95% of a company’s employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy.”
You can see where the problem lies. If someone doesn’t know where the company is going how can they emotionally associate themselves with the organisation? And as always, it isn’t about whether you think people know the strategy or whether you’ve told them. It’s about whether you’ve told them enough times in different ways for them to really understand and be able to reproduce it.
Finding Meaning
As Simon Sinek famously says:
“People don’t buy what you make they buy why you make it.”
The same applies for employees. People will not be motivated or engaged by what you make (it could be white cement for all that matters) but why you make it (cause you want to beautify buildings). Having fulfilled the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid people are more and more looking for ways in which they can contribute to a higher purpose – something that fulfills and gives a longer lasting motivation. As Alain de Vulpine so beautifully captured:
“The primary motive of the best talent is not to make money but to procure a life that they enjoy and which gives them a sense of meaning. And if there’s money in it as well, so much the better”
Autonomy and Mastery
Dan Pink in his by now classic book “Drive” argued that besides purpose it’s the ability to make your own choices, find your own way (Autonomy) and the possibility and ability to get better in a chosen field (Mastery) that motivates people. Unfortunately not a lot of companies have fully grasped the consequences of these statements and still treat employees as children, where as to truly engage them, you have to build an “adult-2-adult” relationship. Each side has to have responsibilities and opportunities – and trust must be placed on both sides to make the right choices for the collective purpose they share.
Employee engagement isn’t an easy game to be involved in at all. At this point, after all the excitement of whether it’s important has been dealt with (and we all agree that it is extremely important), we have to see whether the hype dies down, plateaus or it all goes down hill. There are major shifts in thought process that need to occur if we’re going to see employee engagement continue to rise.
Like what you read? Subscribe to the Keijzer Community and get updates to your inbox. You’ll also get a free download which will help you take your leadership teams through a growth model which will help them mature on a personal and professional level.