Listening and management behaviours can fix disengagement
HR Magazine?posted an article yesterday titled, "Employee disengagement is costing the Australian economy $211 billion per year." I noticed McKinsey had a similar piece recently about the US. With, of course, much bigger numbers.
The HRM account is based on research from Gallop, and the argument goes like this.
People are emotionally detached from work, and it's getting worse. This is costing businesses and society a fortune.
It's partly caused by increasing stress, a lack of listening to employees, and poor management behaviours.
So we should listen more and change management behaviours for the better.
I agree with the broad sweep of this argument. But for me, two parts are missing: we need context to understand what we're listening to and a process for changing management behaviours.
The article references four types of listening, but it misses an effective but under-utilised technique: story listening (OK, I'm biased. But hear me out.).
Here are some of the things employees wanted to see in their workplace
The problem is that it's hard to make sense of these one-liners without the full story.
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But imagine if you ran some anecdote circles with employees and had a story-eliciting question like, "When has something happened at work that made you feel, 'What's the point?' or at the other end of the spectrum, when did something happen that totally energised you?"
You would get a great set of stories that you can use to really understand what's happening at the coal face. Better still, you could organise for your leaders to make sense of these stories and start designing initiatives to make a change. Then they own it.
And these same stories can help you change management behaviour.
We run a leadership program focussed on changing management behaviours. Part of the initiative starts with the leaders in a room with a hundred or so stories of good and bad management behaviour on the wall. One of their jobs is to decide as a group which ones are the most significant and why.
Leaders find this fascinating because it's their employees' stories, and it's about them. More importantly, they get to discuss what these stories mean and what they need to do to reinforce the good behaviours and disrupt the bad. I learned this from Dave Snowden when we worked at IBM in the Cynefin Centre. Thanks, Dave.
Psychologist Maria Konnokova puts it this way in?The Biggest Bluff: "here’s what psychologists find, over and over: you can show people all the charts you want, but that won’t change their perceptions of the risks or their resulting decisions. What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has."
People change their minds and behaviour by experiences they have or others have had (i.e., stories). And one story is not enough. But if you hear 10, 20, 50 stories with a similar pattern, what's happening in the business is irrefutable. The evidence is too much to resist.
We love running these types of programs because it's full of insight because people unexpectedly come to a better story.