Who is to Blame for Employee Disengagement?

I recently met with a CEO and among other things, we discussed issues with engagement on the Board level of his organization. He was finding it difficult to get them committed to showing up, participating, and doing the work that was required. Ultimately, it was resulting in more work on fewer people's shoulders. When he discussed this with other members, their feedback was, "well, they are volunteers, we can only expect so much."

He said to me, "when I make a commitment, I follow through." I told him I agreed and that's how I operate too. I've had the same experience on Boards that I've been on and it's disheartening. I said, "I think it's up to us to make sure the team knows that engagement IS the expectation and that nothing less is acceptable. We need to look at the process, not the people. Our recruitment efforts should weed out the right people, but we need to look at our process around engagement too."

When I hear Employers, Managers, and other Leaders tell me they are experiencing "engagement issues" saying the team is not engaged in meetings, or participation is just not at the desired level they often follow it up with one or two reasons why they think it's happening:

Hypothesis 1: We have the wrong people/ Our people aren't committed/ It's a generational issue.

Hypothesis 2: We have too high of expectations, the world of work is just different these days and we need to adjust.

I have another Hypothesis.

When I ask Leaders what their employee engagement process consists of, I almost always get a blank stare or some fumbling of information about how they host company-wide team-building events, do surveys, gift cards or other incentives.

Those might be a PART of the process, but my follow-up question is, "what is THE process for getting and keeping employees engaged? And, is it documented and communicated with the right people on the team?" Rarely do I hear, let alone see, a great employee engagement process.

Hypothesis 3: Our Employee Engagement System needs an update.

Leaders, remember that you must set AND hold the standard for all expectations in your organization, including engagement. When engagement is the expectation, and you have a process to support that, you will have no choice but to have engaged team members. You'll know when you have it right when the feeling is... Engagement is our culture - it's just the way it is around here.

When you're faced with a problem like employee dis-engagement, approach the problem systematically... state the problem, get clear on the specifics of the problem and revisit your process (define and document it).

When we can clearly identify the problem, and commit to doing something about it, it's already half solved.

Here's an example of an issue-solving process for solving the issue of employee engagement.

Here's an example of an Employee Engagement Process (as part of your Employee Journey Process).

Here's an example of how to set and keep a standard of engagement inside your organization with an Employee Engagement Process.

HR (or someone responsible for this function) owns the process.

1. Starting from the Interview Process- check in with the applicant to gauge their interest (monitor the follow-through of candidates in the hiring process as a KPI).
2. A warm welcome in Onboarding Process.
3. Set the expectations for engagement in Orientation and all Meetings.
4. Have a process for gauging training success and onboarding satisfaction within first weeks of new hire onboarding.
5. Monitor Meeting attendance and Average Meeting Scores (if you're not scoring every meeting, you're missing a real-time opportunity for engagement feedback).
6. Formal and informal employee/ manager feedback process.
7. Recognize engaged employees company-wide (positive feedback loop).

The result? Engaged employees, by design. Don't blame the people if engagement is off, blame the process. A well-designed process will help you identify if you have the wrong people.

After this conversation, I've been inspired to revisit Member Engagement on the teams that I serve. I know that I'll be streamlining the processes that I own to re-engage my teammates this Quarter.

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