The Number One Tool For Fixing Your Employee Engagement Problem
by Christopher Wickenden FRSA , Chief Creative Officer FROM:TODAY
What are the roots to high performance?
An absolutely foundational component to building a high performance culture is a willingness to invest in the REAL conversations. Every day.
Those conversations that are driven by genuine care and a real desire to understand.
In business, when it comes to conversations around performance, we often end up talking about symptoms, as opposed to the root causes.?
Conversations about policy or strategy are easier and require less emotional investment than conversations about feelings - which are pretty fundamental to performance.
We’re good at distracting ourselves from the deeper work.??
In the UK, the level of engagement is one of the lowest in the world at 10%.
Globally, a lack of engagement accounts for $8.8 billion in lost productivity. That’s 9% of global GDP.
So often, the natural response to this impact is to ask, what do we do? What action do we need to take?
But you can’t short cut building up engagement with programmes or policies.?
And you can’t short cut the learning and understanding that needs to be developed over time through genuine investment in relationships from leaders.
Take an example from your personal life.
Maybe you have a friend that’s struggling. In recent years they’ve gone through significant trauma which has left them feeling overwhelmed and pretty disconnected from everything.
How do you approach this??
Would you be thinking about policy, action plans or strategy??
Or is it more about being there. Certainly in the first instance. Listening. Caring. Not jumping to solve the problem. It’s more complex. More nuanced. People need to feel that you’re THERE for them. Sometimes there will be advice and guidance that surfaces from the deeper understanding fostered by these real conversations of care. But sometimes, simply showing up and being there fully is what’s needed more than anything else.
As a leader, how do you do this for your teams?
Especially with something like engagement. It’s more complex than simply paying people more, giving more holiday allowance, getting people back into the office with the promise of various social events, free pizza, drinks, gym membership or pool tables.
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Something like 59% of workers could be described as neither engaged, nor actively disengaged - neither driven nor triggered. How do you work out what’s going on for these “quiet quitters” that represent a huge untapped potential?
Leaders need to think more about how work feels for their people.
”We’re feeling beings that think, not the other way around.” - Antonio Damassio.
Why do we spend so much time ignoring emotions in our working worlds or dismissing them as distractions??
It doesn’t stop them being there and being KEY drivers to our behaviour and performance. We can choose to acknowledge, accept and address them, allowing us to manage them - individually and collectively. Or we can pretend that they’re not there, ignore and suppress them - which just means that they manage us and our organisations whilst we remain unaware or in denial.
Conversations around how people are feeling take high levels of EQ, warmed up by the right intentions.
And it’s not enough to simply ASK your people how they’re feeling. You need to lay the groundwork. People will only be inclined to share openly and honestly if they feel that:
The only way that we can truly engage our people? is to work harder to get to know and understand them first.
Action needs to be driven by deep understanding.?
Deep understanding comes from conversations fueled by genuine care.
Leaders, managers - how will you get to know and understand your teams better?
How will you create the time for this relationship building which is not a distraction from but an essential element of our work?
Here are just a few quick wins to affect right away:
You cannot have a conversation about productivity at work, without having conversations about engagement.
You cannot have conversations about engagement with having conversations about feelings - before you get on to policy, strategy and action. And conversations about feelings are hard, need high levels of EQ and need to be happening all of the time.
If you want to carry on this conversation, we want to hear from you so please get in touch!
by Christopher Wickenden FRSA, Chief Creative Officer FROM:TODAY
Cultivating belonging, growth and flow. Chief Creative Officer at FROM:TODAY
11 个月Quick fixes are incredibly appealing and deliver that instant gratification. But fixing engagement levels in your organisation is a little too complex for quick fixes. And, on reflection, perhaps "fix" is the wrong language. It implies that there's a thing that you can do that solves it, and then you're done. Engagement is not a finite problem with a finite solution. It takes daily investment - a willingness to show up authentically, listen, understand and respond. Rinse. Repeat.