Stop Trying To "Do Employee Engagement;” ---- Start Managing Instead!

Someone shared a recent article from Blessing White with me about the results of a mini-survey that they had conducted, asking employees about employee engagement surveys (https://blessingwhite.com/article/2016/05/31/new-pair-jeans-may-compelling-employee-engagement). I am not surprised by the results. The three main points directly from their article are:

• Only 45% of individuals surveyed* are very confident they know what an engagement survey is. Given the amount of money invested in employee engagement—approximately $74.3 billion based on recent estimates by The Starr Conspiracy Intelligence Unit—the hope is that awareness would be higher.
• 50% of those asked would rather complete a survey about an online purchase than respond to their company’s engagement survey. And nearly 25% of those surveyed didn’t even know what an Employee Engagement Survey was. The average person spends 35% of their life at work, yet they’d rather take the time to answer questions about a pair of jeans or a new restaurant than share their perspective on their job.
• A mere 39% don’t think their company’s engagement survey impacts long term organizational priorities.
  o   If you break that group down further, results reveal that, 22% don’t think it impacts anything they do and 17% believe it’s only important at survey time but not the rest of the year.

The article goes on to share some ideas on how to better approach engagement surveys, including taking action on your findings. That last part seems to be rather important to me; otherwise, why go to the trouble and expense of conducting a survey in the first place? Yet, all too often this is a frequent occurrence; surveys are conducted, but nothing happens. What is worse is that most of these engagement surveys seem to really be an employee satisfaction survey, rather than trying to uncover the impacts on the real drivers of employee engagement. Satisfaction surveys which are renamed to be engagement surveys seem to be rather rampant in that $74.3 billion market.

Simply focusing on what makes employees happy will not necessarily get them engaged. Instead, we need to focus on those things that do get employees engaged: Trust; Vision; Strengths; and Personal Responsibility. These four elements are part of the Seven Elements of High Performance?, and when put into action they work together to unleash an employee’s inner drive, their intrinsic motivation, allowing them to do good work.

I suppose that we could go about measuring these four elements, but if managers are doing their jobs of engaging in two-way communication, and coaching and mentoring their employees, then I’m not sure it is needed, especially if managers are focused on the foundational element of Trust. Trust is not something that just happens, nor is it “earned.” It has to be built, and is a collaborative effort between two people. Building Trust is hard work, but once built then you end up with a fantastic network of information between the people in the community of your organization.

As you Build Trust with employees, you can now begin communicating about the organization’s Vision, as well as how to help employees leverage their Strengths to both perform better, and to enjoy their own jobs better. And as employees develop their skills and experience through their training and the coaching of their manager, they can take on more Personal Responsibility by making more and more decisions about their jobs.

When managers take the time to build that foundation of Trust they can then connect the employees to the organization and its Vision, helping them understand that their work is important, and keep them focused on those things that contribute to the success of the organization. Through coaching and support, managers can help employees develop mastery in their Strengths, and as they gain experience and mastery, allow them to take control of their jobs and make decisions about their work, allowing them to be Personally Responsible. These are the things that employees engaged.

By doing these things managers will easily and quickly discover when there are roadblocks or other impediments that are getting in the way of good performance, and will be more readily able to take action. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that managers can support the actions of their employees as they take responsibility for identifying and solving these problems that are getting in the way of the organization's performance.

But it takes an entirely different mindset by managers to accomplish this. One where managers actually place the role of being a leader as a priority and then do those things that will get their employees engaged. It is the difference between just measuring employee engagement and actually doing those things that result in engagement, and a higher level of performance for the organization.

From my over 15 years of research on the Dynamics of High Performing Organizations, and the over 1600 research documents that I’ve reviewed, I have learned many things.  One of them is that while employee engagement is a driver of performance in high performing organizations, it should not be the focus of our efforts. We should not be setting out to “do employee engagement.”

Employee engagement is simply the natural outcome of managers exhibiting good management practices that Put People at the Center. Focus on doing these practices; focus on being an exceptional manager who makes their role of Leader primary; not on “doing engagement.”  Do this and engaged employees, along with higher levels of organizational performance, will follow naturally.

To learn more, you can download the whitepaper Maximizing Your Human Capital Investment: Research Based Strategies for Increasing Organizational Performance from the Whitepaper section at www.ResourceDevelopmentSystems.com. There is never any registration required to access our research reports.

Gary Lear is a bestselling author and a modern 21st Century theorist on the Dynamics of High Performing Organizations. His extensive research has opened new doors and new ways of looking at the concepts of organizational culture, leadership, and employee engagement. His Seven Elements of High Performance? model has been adopted by such organizations as the US Navy’s Center for Naval Leadership, the Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Canada, and AFOA Canada, and his books and whitepapers are being used as resources in many college and university business programs.