4 things many organisations get wrong about Engagement and 1 thing they can do to get it back on track

The concept of Engagement and its growing influence on the workplace has grown tremendously in the last decade. Increasingly, organisations are starting to realise that it’s no longer something that’s optional for them to measure and tackle, it’s absolutely crucial in the modern working environment. Especially when you consider some crucial numbers coming out of research-based global performance management firm Gallup, which states that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. If you culminate these numbers with the fact that they also report that 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged at work, it starts becoming pretty clear that the great untapped frontier of workplace performance management may just be Engagement. 

But yet, either due to the lack of depth of knowledge on how engagement should be driven or perhaps the lack of knowledge on what the modern employee wants, many organisations seem to still do certain common things wrong in their pursuit to drive up engagement in their work environments. Here are some common mistakes that many organisations make. 

Things they get wrong

1.      Focusing on participation rates during the survey

It’s fair for a company to start their engagement journey being a little hung-up about their participation rates because you need some data to crunch to-begin-with and also, it’s part of the maturing process in creating awareness on how important engagement is to an organisation. But assuming your organisation has had a few years running engagement surveys and building action plans around areas that require improvement, it’s really time to start letting go of that 100% participation mark. If your employees are uninterested to take the survey, that’s all the data you need on where their engagement is at. You don’t need a survey to confirm it for you. In fact, making it basically mandatory for them may plummet their engagement even further.

2.      Thinking it’s all about events

It’s rather lazy thinking for organisations and employees alike to think that the only thing that will engage and disengage them are events, or the lack thereof. Events are at best, the stardust you sprinkle on top of well-oiled Engagement machine but in most cases it does not have the ability to engage or disengage us. Everyone appreciates a nice barbecue party, but when the meat’s digested and the beers dry, the work issues that have been disengaging you such as your condescending boss, or unmanageable workloads or the complete lack of person development still remains very much at large. Which is why organisations who think throwing money at parties can create an engaged workforce are very often doomed to fail in that venture. They are a great marquee ‘cherry on top’ when you’ve already done everything else right and have an engaged workforce. But they are hardly going to be the swing vote between your employees being engaged or disengaged.   

3.      Shooting for only a score

The cardinal sin of engagement and yet the one committed most often. We can all understand the need for a score, because all organisations require some empirical measure to hold their stakeholders accountable. To have the score is not wrong. To desire to score well is not necessarily wrong as well. The mistake is when an organisation makes engagement all about the score. Engagement efforts cannot be treated like a training session to achieve a desired score during survey time. Why? Because you then end up doing these things:

• Focus on short term action items that are unsustainable and produced no lasting impact on an employee’s engagement over the long term.
• Concentrating efforts on engagement-related action plans only during the lead up to the opening of the survey and have it tapper off right after. Your employees are not children and are certainly not stupid. 
• Create a culture of apathy about engagement for the rest of the year in both managers and their reports when there isn’t a survey looming.

4.      Treating it as a separate agenda

The promised land for Engagement is not to hit a desirable score after a survey. A lot of organisations and managers may have you believe that but it really isn’t. Instead it is to create a sustainable working environment that engages employees without the word ‘engagement’ ever being mentioned. Many organisations treat engagement as a separate agenda to everything else that’s happening. We get the dreaded meeting invite titled ‘Team Engagement Meeting’.

But yet at the core of Engagement, it’s about having employees who are managed in an empowering way, it’s about having employees feel inclusive towards efforts in achieving the team’s goals, it’s about having employees who feel cared for, recognise that they are being developed accordingly and know that they are doing their best work everyday. These are not things that need to be treated as a separate agenda. They are things we can tackle in our management team meetings, operations meetings and leadership forums. Engagement does not have to be ‘marketed’ for employees to feel engaged.

Try doing your best to successfully create an environment that can foster the example of an engaged employee above without ever mentioning the word ‘engagement’. If your employees really feel empowered, cared for and driven towards success, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a single ‘Team Engagement Meeting’ for the year, they will still be engaged. Not treating it as a separate agenda is what all organisations should be working towards.   

What should they do?

So we know what they commonly get wrong, but what should organisations do then? Is there a magic bullet to making engagement magically work for you? Actually, no. Engagement has so much to do with the emotional investment of an individual that it’s always going to be a little difficult to make it work for everyone. But it is possible to get a lot closer, and it starts with doing the thing below.

Make Engagement less about ‘Engagement’

Organisations need to start maturing with the concept of Engagement. If it’s no longer a new concept and employees are starting to be more knowledgeable and wiser to it in your organisation then it’s time to approach it differently as well. With the ‘education phase’passed, the next phase is really about ‘sustainability’. How can organisations create working environments that can foster and retain engaged employees? It starts by making engagement less about ‘Engagement’. The tenets of Engagement is not incredibly different no matter what tool you choose to use to measure it or what philosophy you subscribe to in attempting to implement it. What most employees want to be engaged does not differ that greatly from one employee to the next.

Which is why organisations have to start paying less attention to carving out engagement as a separate agenda to manage but really start owning and internalising the things that drive and sustain an engaged workforce, into their day-to-day operating processes and organisational culture. Your organisation may be at a stage of its engagement journey where employees need less conversations about engagement and more decisions that will go into creating an engaged working environment for them. If employees show signs of high engagement despite never having a single ‘engagement conversation’ in the year with their managers or colleagues, then you know your organisation is well on its way to being sustainable in regards to its plans of creating a working environment that can foster and retain engaged employees. 

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