Employee Engagement Isn’t Working. Now What?
Marshall Goldsmith
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Every company and leader wants the answer to this “Now what?” question. Engaged employees translate into a productive and successful organization, which is the goal of most every leader and organization I know. And, engagement also translates into a great place to work, which is what employees want.
As a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources, the highest award that can be given to an HR professional in the US, I’ve been to many HR conventions. At these sessions, incredibly smart, prepared HR professionals declare that to increase employee engagement we need more rewards, recognition, training, and empowerment in organizations, that companies need more and better programs to engage their employees.
And yet, these programs are not working. In the same speeches suggesting more employee engagement programs, HR professionals state that employee engagement is at an all-time low. Something is not working!
Perhaps we can take a lesson from Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford, on how to address this challenging and significant issue.
A Lesson from Alan Mulally
In 2006, when Alan assumed the role of CEO at the Ford Motor Company, Ford had just posted the largest annual loss in their 103 year history.
As his first official act at Ford, Alan brought his leadership team together and asked them to share their top five priorities for their companies, and assess the progress of each priority using a green-yellow-red scoring system for good-concerned-poor.
At that meeting, the entire team assessed each of their priorities as green (good!). This would be great, but the company was headed towards a record $17 billion loss! (This is similar to HR’s employee engagement issue. If all of the employee engagement programs are working so well, why is employee engagement at an all-time low, unless that is the goal?)
Alan told the team that if a $17 billion loss was their plan, then they were right on target. Recognizing the incongruity between their goals and reality, the team tried again and came back the following week, but still all priorities were green. It took some weeks before Mark Fields finally stood up and said “Red”.
This was a turning point for Ford. Someone had admitted there was a problem! Alan applauded Mark for standing up. He facilitated a team discussion and they worked together towards a solution. It worked! Not only did that red eventually become green, but in the coming weeks, more team members brought their challenges to the group and they all worked together in one of the greatest turnarounds in history.
Back to Employee Engagement
This to me is where we are with employee engagement. We’ve got to be able to admit that something isn’t working with all of our rewards and recognition programs, and work together towards a solution. This means everyone – not just the leaders and companies, but the employees too.
When I listen to the presentations at these HR conventions, everything that these great HR leaders talk about is focused on what the company can do to engage the employees – absolutely nothing that they discuss is focused on what the employees can do to engage themselves. These presentations are incredibly effective at describing half of the equation.
They are very persuasive at explaining how the company can increase the employee’s engagement and they completely ignore how the employees could increase their own engagement.
On American Airlines alone, I have over 11 million frequent flyer miles. Most flight attendants do a great job. On the occasional flight, there are two flight attendants, one is positive motivated upbeat and enthusiastic – while the other is negative, bitter, angry and cynical. I’m sure you have been on this flight before.
What is the difference? The difference is not what the company is providing. Both flight attendants may be making the same pay, with the same uniform, with the same customers, on the same plane, with the same employee engagement program.
What is the difference? The difference is not what is on the outside. The difference is what is on the inside.
While I respect and appreciate everything I hear from the HR leaders at these conferences, I believe we are missing the most important factor in employee engagement – the person who is doing the work.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can engage ourselves at work. If we work together, I know we can come up with solutions to this significant challenge of low employee engagement that address the other half of the equation – you and me!
PS - Dear Readers,
Greetings from Rancho Santa Fe!
Thank you so much for all of your thoughtful comments. I totally agree with you - companies should do everything that they can to increase engagement. I also believe that, at the same time, employees should do all that they can to engage themselves!
Life is good.
Marshall
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Leadership Coach & Founder @Performance Enablers I Advisor I Growth Enabler I Honorary Member Institute of Directors I Ex- L&T, Sun Pharma, TCS, JBIMS, IIM Ahmedabad
8 年Dear Marshal, Greetings from Mumbai ! Sorry about the late response but I just cannot help presenting my thoughts to you since this subject is so close to my heart. Also, because I see A) a strong need for coaching support if the engagement programs have to succeed and B) because engagement is an aspect of HR that has tremendous potential to contribute to business success. At the outset, my compliments to you for some plain-speaking. Guess this is what is called courage of conviction. It’s only when we face up to the way things are that we come up with better response. I see a larger opportunity to make engagement efforts more effective, in the way we define and address engagement. The core of an engagement effort, to my mind, has to be to develop a sense of ‘shared purpose’ and connect with the organizational goals, challenges. It is engagement with these issues that brings out the best from people and obviously impacts performance. The good news that is that a very large proportion of the workforce is only too keen to be high performer and be recognized as such. Some of the key practices and processes that support and enhance such an engagement are communication (beginning from the very top to the first line managers communicating with their teams), building an engaging approach (sharing, appreciating, empowering and constructive feedback where necessary) in day to day work , ( rather than driving and controlling ), role modeling by the senior team and reward & recognition of the desired behaviors. And believe me, in a couple of programs that I have driven and managed to do some of this ( certainly not all ), the impact on performance has been significant. I am not sure how many engagement programs have this as their core objective. Also, we notice many of us (HR folks) wanting to drive such interventions all by themselves, whereas all the action has to be with business heads and the managers down the line. HR’s role is to be an enabling partner for the managers - to institute required processes, build skills as necessary and remain engaged with the managers to ensure that desired people management style and practices get institutionalized. Some of my fellow HR colleagues equate any employee well being , ‘feel good’ events (picnics, birthday celebrations/ get together ) as engagement programs. Not that they do not have any value, to expect any sustainable linkage of such activities with performance is obviously not tenable. I believe it is for some of these reasons that you notice what you have stated in your article. Now to coaching and it’s role in making engagement programs effective. My observation is that all these long years of management education not withstanding, a large no. of managers across the levels still do not have what I call ‘’ engaging style of managing people’’. They still rely on driving and controlling people to get results. While workshops and training programs as part of engagement interventions set the managers thinking, these are obviously not enough to bring about a shift in such deeply held beliefs / mindsets. It is an intensive intervention like coaching that can support a sustainable shift. I have no doubt that with coaching of the business heads and managers added, the effectiveness of engagement program will increase many fold. So I am broadly in agreement with what you have written,. ‘Individual employee’ is and will remain a factor in engagement efforts. One of the sources of this difference, are the factors that motivate a person. Other things being equal, a general observation is that employees who are ‘intrinsically motivated’ are more engaged than those driven by extrinsic motivators. The challenge is that an employee is ‘given’ to you when you are trying to enhance engagement in an organization. So while you do make a case of how engagement benefits both- an organization and it’s employees, the impact seems to be different on a ‘intrinsically motivated’ employee and on the one who is extrinsically motivated. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this write up. They would guide my future work in this area. Incidently, I was also a participant in the day long workshop that you conducted for the senior team of L & T in Mumbai, way back in 2011. I am now on my own and employee engagement is one of the primary services I offer. Looking forward to your comments.
Software Engineer at Daud Yakobus Mengga
8 年salam sukses
Freelance journalist & sub-editor
8 年Let's not forget that charming phrase 'your position has been disestablished'.
Building Influential Tech Pre-Sales Leaders | Coaching Psychologist | Favikon #1 UK Meditation & Mindfulness | Salesforce Leader
8 年Interesting post Marshall. I saw lots of good points here. I see one of the core problems been a real lack of understanding of what employees truly want. Times have changed. Yet, you read about corporates labouring inflexibility, limitations to development practices and embracing traditional stances of 'experience is everything'. All to supposedly drive results and increase profits. Yet I see a stark contrast