Engaged employee are Loyal Employees?

Employee Engagement and Passion for Business are buzzwords in the corporate sector these days. Organisations strive hard to retain high employee engagement numbers as these are directly linked to the leaders’ annual appraisals.  It’s also understandable that consistently low employee engagement figures occur in trying economic times. It's also clear that engagement hinges on the way leaders lead and the kind of culture they create and promote in their respective organisations.

Studies consistently find that employee engagement hinges entirely on the way leaders lead and the kind of culture they create, said Patrick Kulesa, global head of employee research for Willis Towers Watson in New York. “The numbers show that how leaders inspire people with their strategy and mission determines whether employees will be engaged,” Kulesa said.

The problem is that leaders rarely take responsibility for employee engagement. They see it as a people issue, so they assume HR will fix whatever is broken. This is one of many mistakes leaders make when it comes to engagement.

Here are some of the other mistakes leaders make that damage employee engagement and how they can do better.

1. Comp & Ben not a differentiator  

Offering free or discounted meals and coffee, 2 weekly off days and other cosmetic leisure tools may deliver short-term positive vibes for employees but if you aren’t also addressing the deep rooted cultural issues i.e. lack of acknowledgement for work well done, managers who can’t be trusted or limited opportunities for development — no amount of free snacks will solve your employee engagement problems, Kulesa said.

2. Talking and listening go hand in hand

Some managers assume that they are God’s supreme creature sent on the planet earth just to talk big, not to listen. “Employees don’t need to be told what to do. They need to be encouraged to trust their instincts”, said Kevin Hancock, CEO of Hancock Lumber in Casco, Maine and author of The Seventh Power. Hancock learned this lesson after acquiring a rare voice disorder in 2010 that made it difficult for him to speak. To protect his voice, whenever anyone asked him a question, he responded with, “What do you think is the right answer?” He wasn’t trying to improve engagement, but that’s what happened. Over the course of a year, engagement levels rose as employees gained confidence in their ideas and became more innovative and invested in their work. It made him realize the power of distributed leadership, and giving everyone a voice.

3. Identify your purpose of business 

When leaders start making financial performance the top factor in every decision, employees become slaves to business outcomes. “But what if you rethink the purpose of work?” Hancock said. When leaders prioritize improving the lives of employees, improved employee engagement is the natural result. That leads to better performance, higher revenues and other business benefits that every leader wants, he said. “When the company exists to serve the employees, it creates a stronger company and a better future for everyone.”

4. Number Driven culture sucks

When leaders only care about achieving the right employee engagement survey score, they lose focus on the ultimate goal, said Jim MacLennan, founder of Maker Turtle, a digital transformation consulting firm, and author of Don’t Think So Much. “Once they reach the target metric they move on to something else.” That makes employees cynical about their motives and can cause any short-term improvements to quickly sag. Instead, he suggested using employee engagement surveys to identify the biggest problem in your culture, then to spend the year solving it. “Keep it simple and define what ‘better’ looks like so it doesn’t get diluted,” MacLennan said. Once you see improvements, move on to the next thing. When leaders focus on outcomes rather than metrics, continuous improvement becomes part of the way things are done.

5. Surveys are rituals? 

If want engagement to improve, leaders have to take this rituals are bit more seriously. They actually need to communicate with the employees, listen to them in an uninterrupted manner and build a corporate culture that inspires trust and respect. “You can’t do that with a survey” MacLennan said. “Once you wade in and start having conversations, you’ll be amazed at what you learn.”

Last Word 

Precisely, it is often said that one of an organization’s greatest assets is its employees, yet many employees are unwilling to reciprocate by swearing unwavering loyalty in exchange for a pay-cheque. A million-dollar question is: why should they do it? It is hard for employees to feel deep loyalty when, for many, investment in Learning & Development (L&D) and equipment has withered, salaries have either been frozen or cut in the aftermath of the Pandemic.

Organisations must assess the overall cost incurred instead of putting a straight cut on payroll cost. They must reward fairness and not fidelity to get the best out of their employee in order to settle an argument over whether loyalty in the workplace is a virtue or merely a distorting bias.

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Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder, Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan. At Evolve HR, him and his team thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.