In the past two posts, we’ve looked at two aspects of this idea of “employee engagement:” Firstly, what exactly is it? And then: how do you hire for it? I’ll be fully transparent up front that employee engagement isn’t my specific area of business expertise, but I do believe greatly in its potential impact and want to help people that I work with get to that spot.
If you believe your company understands employee engagement and has somewhat successfully hired for it, well, now you have people in the door. How exactly do you manage for it? That’s what we’ll cover here.
The changing face of employee engagement?
There’s been somewhat of an interesting shift in the past few months in the broader business journalism / thought leadership community regarding employee engagement. That concept, and “work culture,” used to be the backbone of almost everything being discussed. Now, however, there’s starting to be more pushback. In the last week alone, we’ve seen Fast Company deem work culture “overrated” and had Harvard Business Review publish an article about “the dark side of employee engagement.”
I think this is worth mentioning because … well, to be honest, very few companies are doing this right, and that’s part of what we’ll be discussing here. The whole notion of employee engagement goes against many managerial tenets that we’ve held dear for almost a century, most notable among them probably being “what’s measured is what matters.” It’s very hard to measure employee engagement, per se. You can do net promoter scores -- typically 1 to 10 for a question such as “Would you recommend this as a place to work to friends/colleagues?” -- although net promoter scores have their own flaws, as do all surveys.
Because employee engagement is hard to measure and has a less-than-clear connection back to the bottom line -- you can find articles claiming it’s crucially important to revenue growth, and the same amount of articles claiming it makes no difference -- typically the most senior of leadership in a company doesn’t really care that much about it. In fairness, why should they? They are evaluated, compensated, and bonus’ed on other factors. Those factors will tend to be what they care about.
This is why “managing for employee engagement” is inherently a challenge. The top levels of a company tend not to care, especially if they come from old-school methodologies around products and processes being more important than people. When the top levels don’t care, the filtration system of any company means that middle managers won’t care, and then rank-and-files won’t hear about it.
The problem, of course, is that the basic term “employee engagement” refers to how happy and connected to the organization a person is. Even if no one higher-up is mentioning it, it’s still there. And that’s a rubber meets the road moment for a lot of companies as they begin to see high turnover rates,
In short: this is all a challenge, but you absolutely need to manage for employee engagement. Even if you totally ignore the concept or the wording, employees will still be either (a) engaged or (b) disengaged in their work, and that will impact what your business can accomplish.
Here are a few quick ideas for managing for employee engagement.
The organic revolution
We often tend to think technology makes work better, easier, and faster. In some cases, that’s true. 20 years ago, we didn’t have our banking info on our phones. Now we do. That’s great and makes life easier! But … there’s a problem, which I’m sure you all have experienced in personal and professional context. Too much technology means too many things to keep track of (Problem A), and it means less face-to-face interaction about important matters (Problem B). At work, both of these problems can become massive if you don’t manage for them.
By “the organic revolution,” I mean encouraging managers to go talk to their employees, take them to lunch, grab a beer with them, or whatever. Some managers won’t -- laziness -- and some won’t because they’re afraid of being seen as “friends” with someone they manage. There are dozens of excuses. But encourage the idea. If employees only hear from their managers via e-mail and Basecamp threads, they won’t be engaged. It’s that simple.
Technology works the best when it’s buffered by human interaction to provide more context. Many managerial training classes inside companies, though, focus on how great tech will be in terms of productivity relative to cost. That’s somewhat true, but tech can cause barriers to pop up that reduce context and create the need for more tech (the simplest version of this is receiving 89 e-mails about a project where one conversation would have worked just as well).
Promote authenticity
This is hard for many companies because the old-school model of work was always “heads down” and “don’t discuss personal or political topics.” That’s evolving, and people want to discuss their lives and views. You spend hours of your week at work. You want to be yourself. Some great research from Kellogg (Northwestern) has shown that when we force employees to be inauthentic, it drastically reduces employee engagement.
This has many repercussions, from how we treat minorities in the workplace to what we’re allowed to discuss. Authentic cultures will be healthier, though, and traditionally healthy cultures produce more and make more money. (That won’t always be the case, but I’d bet my own money that it mostly is.)
Create feedback loops
This ties into the “organic” idea above. We’re all human beings. We’re social animals. We want to know where we stand and believe we’re relevant at work. This idea of competence and importance is high on our list. Managers need to understand that.
Unfortunately, many do not. That’s also a link from HBR, and right near the top, a manager is asked about his plan (“plan”) for a feedback session with an employee. He responds “shock and awe.” When pressed, he basically explains he wants to get them in, yell at them, course-correct, and then kick them out. He seems pleased with himself for this answer.
He should not be, and that’s a terrible answer. You want to do real feedback -- I don’t mean hiding behind a once-a-year performance review. I mean when someone does a good job (more on that in a second), reward them. When someone does a poor job, talk to them.
I fully realize a lot of managers are uncomfortable giving feedback. Heck, I’ve been in offices in my career where it seems managers would list 171 things before “speaking to someone who works for me.” If you’re that type of manager or your company has many of those, consider this feedback-giving advice from John Wooden, who might be the greatest coach of all-time at anything.
Recognition and empowerment
This is a tricky one too. You need to recognize employees for good work, and you need to empower your managers to be able to do that.
The problem is: excuses abound. Many of them fall into two buckets. Bucket A is “We shouldn’t reward people for doing their job.” Bucket B is “This is an unnecessary cost.”
Both buckets have some truth, but also numerous flaws. I’m not arguing that you should give an employee $100 every time they complete a simple task. That’s ludicrous. But there are simple employee recognition ideas you can undertake. (A good book for all this is The Carrot Principle, if you’re ever on Amazon.)
So yes, you do need to recognize employees. And yes, when they consistently do a job way above the average, you need to pay them more and advance them. Otherwise, they’ll eventually find someone who will.
Now, the second tier of all this is empowering front-line managers to care about employee engagement. A lot of senior leaders and executives preach engagement and culture in all-hands meetings, but then tell front-line managers “That stuff isn’t important; I need you hitting revenue targets.” If that’s the message coming down, no front-line manager will ever care about these topics -- and thus, you can’t manage for employee engagement.
There’s research from Bain and Company in 2013, across 200,000 employees. This research showed massive levels of drop-off in terms of employee engagement, and caring/believing engagement to be your responsibility, as you move downward from the C-Suite. This is a problem, of course: the levels furthest from the C-Suite are often closest to the customer and the least engaged. Unfortunately still is typical org chart in many companies. See how that would be a problem for your revenue potential?
In a simple one-sentence summary, then? Managing for employee engagement must begin with caring and communication. All the processes, money output, and other ideas will flow from that.
What else have you seen successfully done around managing for employee engagement?