By Doing This One Thing, Managers Are Destroying What Little Engagement They Have
Around half of workers are looking to leave their current jobs. Less than 15% of employees worldwide are engaged and almost half of employees feel that their leadership does not contribute to a positive company culture. People are jumping ship in droves, and those who stay are only partly “there.” The exact stats are appallingly easy to find from one day to the next, even though they change very little. Those selling solutions to the problem want to drive home the gravity of the issue and have many alarming figures on hand.
The trouble is, low employee engagement is a genuinely big problem - engagement is becoming more imperative to competitive advantage. More than ever younger generations factor emotional fulfillment into their choice of career and employer. Whether it is due to layoffs or job dissatisfaction, people are changing employers more times in a career than ever before. They have more options.
The bigger problem is that most organizations don’t know how to fix poor engagement. Some throw rewards and recognition at it. (AKA carrots) Some tighten their grip.
The complaint from management is that the team doesn’t get it. The economy may have had good times, times of prosperity, but those days are over. Nothing but bleakness is ahead, and employees need to get off the Smartphones and Twitter and Instagram and get the work done. You need to start at 8am sharp, play for fifteen minutes over coffee at 10:30am, then a little more over a half-hour lunch and push through ‘til the whistle at quittin’ time. Then you can go home and enjoy what’s left of the day. Otherwise, we want to see you taking this seriously. Sound familiar?
These are the same managers who want to install cellphone blocking devices on every floor. They want to restrict access to social media on workstations. They want under-managers to enforce strict starts and stops. They want all the chit chat to stop, even imposing no-talking periods throughout the day. When they walk through the office, they want to see nothing but serious people at their desks doing serious work. This reassures them that the company will survive the rough patches. They can take comfort in the knowledge that they run a tight ship. When the boards and EVPs ask them what they’re doing to last the economic “winter,” they have a solid answer. They’ve “brought down the hammer,” as it were.
Studies have shown these measures to be highly de-motivating. Adding more structure, enforcing more rules, and otherwise stifling any freedom in the way employees apply their energies, will produce results opposite to those desired. If you think about it, you’ll realize you are taking away choice to compel employees to exercise greater self-control. See the contradiction? You want them to make the right choices on their own, so you remove the opportunity to make choices at all. That’s like teaching a little boy not to wipe his mouth on his sleeve by cutting all the sleeves off his shirts.
Have you hired adults? Maybe you could give them targets and goals and let them reach those targets and goals using the skills you found on their resume when you hired them?
For a moment, however, worker bees, let's have a little empathy. In their defense, these taskmasters from management have seen the market forecasts. They know what’s coming. They’ve seen times when they had to send good, hard-working employees, with families, home because there was no more work for them. They know this might happen again if the team doesn’t pull together and deliver on deadlines. These things keep them awake at night. They walk through the office and see people lallygagging on their phones, reading text messages or worse, playing games, watching videos. Then they come to you on the day of a deadline and ask if you finished that project, and you reply, “I didn’t have enough time.”
For managers tense from worrying, the suggestion that letting go of control might make a team more productive is a scary pill to swallow. Instinct tells them it will only make things worse.
People don't respond well to programming. They don’t like to be fixed or calibrated or adjusted so they function more efficiently. In fact, they fight it every step of the way. The best way to make life perform at its best is to create an ecosystem in which it can obtain mental, physical, and relational nourishment, then grow and thrive. This might require a little patience and letting go.
An engaged person has bright, focused eyes. They don't turn away to look at their phones. Engaged people lean forward on a meeting room table. They smile and laugh.
Some leaders believe that if employees are enjoying themselves, they're not getting anything done. One of the gravest errors managers make is to remind people of this belief - that fun can't happen during work hours. Remember: every employee has options. All things being equal, a talented professional chooses an employer because he or she believes working there will be more emotionally rewarding than what they'd have with your competitor. If you operate as though work can never be emotionally rewarding, you're taking away the one motivation they have to work for you.
One company I worked with began a cultural shift, albeit starting small, with a puzzle game in which the images of employees were Photoshopped into the images of Marvel superheroes as part of an optional engagement survey. The survey contained the standard engagement questions, but also the opportunity to guess the identities of the superheroes.
Some were quite challenging, nicely blended in by the Photoshop artists. The exercise got people talking, asking questions, and having fun. They even made new friends in the office when they had to search around for the people they didn't recognize in the photos. Everything was going swimmingly until someone in management asked the HR team to send out an ALL CAPS email reminder to employees that they were NOT to engage in this puzzle game during hours they were supposed to be working. The HR team caved to the pressure and sent said reminder.
The game died a quick death. This office had been leading the company in responses to the survey because of the game, but the ALL CAPS (aka yelling) email put an end to all that. Not a single person in that office engaged with the survey after that email. Rival offices caught up in the stats and left them in the dust.
To all leaders who care about authentic, sustained employee engagement: when you remind employees that they're not allowed to engage in creativity-inducing and community-building activities on the clock, and then try encouraging them instead to use their own time to make themselves into more engaged employees, you have attempted to steal their precious discretionary hours for something that further benefits the company. And you've offered nothing in return.
Not very engaging of you.
Andrew Carnegie once said, “You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.”
Employees are shrewd investors of their emotional energy (passion, interest, enthusiasm). They invest where they are sure of returns. If employees don’t believe what they say about their place of work, they can’t effectively sell its products or services. To truly believe, they must be engaged with the company’s vision. Their hearts must be “in” what they do every day, or they won’t be as loyal or productive. They won’t be fulfilled or enthusiastic. They won’t be generous with their time or quick to solve problems. They won’t bother to communicate well. They won’t contribute useful ideas. They'll show up. And that's about it.
Employers apply resources too and their employees notice where. If employers are stingy about small things that will make daily work life better, employees will be equally stingy about engaging. It's that simple.