Bringing Employee Engagement to Life

Picture this: You come to work on a dreary Monday morning, only to have your spirits uplifted when you see your team members already hard at work. As you take a seat at your office desk, your product manager wheels his chair over and engages in an animated conversation with you. As it turns out, he had spent the entire weekend thinking of a new concept idea for your company's latest product line without being asked to!

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As you boot up your laptop to take down some notes of your discussion, you notice that the IT team had run the latest suite of anti-malware tests ahead of schedule! Pleasantly surprised, you stand up and try to look for a member of the IT team in the office to thank them. But they are nowhere to be found, and your gaze falls on the office janitor clearing the trash. Having witnessed his commitment to his work for the last five years, an inexplicable feeling struck you: you had no doubt that he would clear every single rubbish bin in the office even if nobody was watching.

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Make no mistake, this is no hypothetical scenario. You’ve probably met some of these gems, whom we call “engaged employees”, over the course of your career. Employee engagement, the emotional commitment that employees possess towards the organisation and its goals, has been the buzzword for some time now and has become increasingly important in today’s unprecedented environment. After all, who wouldn’t want an employee who doesn’t just work for a paycheck or the next promotion, but with the bigger picture in mind?

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The Understated Importance of Employee Engagement

It has been proven and rightly so that engaged employees are more productive. Did you know that according to research from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), employees who are more engaged actually put in 57% more work effort than employees who are disengaged? Do not confuse this with running a sweatshop, however. These engaged employees are voluntarily contributing to their organisation’s success.

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The key differentiator between engaged and disengaged employees is that the former category will go the extra mile to define and shape the role that is given to them. In contrast, disengaged employees tend to barely scratch the boundaries of their assigned role. Engaged employees will also step up to become the positive voice for their organisation when the situation calls for it. Although not very quantifiable, it is still a good point to take note of if you are looking for people to champion your organisation’s cause. This category of employees also experiences higher retention rates and the benefits that emerge as a result.

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Not Everyone Can Be Engaged

I believe that employee engagement does not happen automatically. The only way that an employee can be automatically engaged is often hinged upon the organisation’s brand or, its strong purpose. Even then, this utopia seldom exists. Or, even if it exists, it is short-lived. This is because the needs of the organisation evolve as frequently as the needs of the individual. On occasions, when the organizational direction aligns with the employee’s professional goals, magic or resonance happens. But once the two are out of sync, dissonance sets in, and people start leaving or feeling disengaged. As the tenure in the organization increases, in most cases, the degree of engagement tends to wane or, some disillusionment tends to creep in. This is exactly why even the best of employers have some natural attrition.

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This is where most leaders should start making an effort to engage their employees. But, not all employees can be engaged. If I were to use the employee net promoter (eNPS) concept to illustrate this situation, it can be broken down into three distinct parts. Upfront, you have a bunch of extremely engaged employees, then you have a bunch of people on the fence who can either be engaged or disengaged depending on the context, and finally, the last group which is entirely disengaged.

There are only two good scenarios in my opinion: the first scenario is that you focus on retaining those who are engaged. The second one is that you convert those employees who are on the fence to becoming more engaged. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely to bring those who are totally disengaged into the neutral or engaged zone.

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What Do You Need to Successfully Engage Your Employees?

There are two key attributes a leader needs to have to successfully engage his or her employees. Firstly, you need to be able to iterate, to learn and to adapt. Managerial practices that were relevant yesterday may not be relevant going forward. An iterative approach will help you understand and appreciate what’s working with your team members and what’s not.

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Secondly, leading by influence has become increasingly important, particularly with Generations Y and Z joining the workforce. Your employees will want to understand the rationale behind the decisions made. Rather than deciding unilaterally, every time there is a critical decision to be made, take a step back, think, and put certain options in place so that your employees potentially end up making the right choices. Nobody likes it when a decision is shoved down their throats. Give your employees the freedom to choose from certain options and they’ll be more engaged. Leverage the power of ‘choice architecture’.

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Four Tried-and-Tested Ways to Boost Engagement

Firstly, heighten employee engagement through improving your team’s dynamics. Help your team members to settle into their work environment, from welcoming them on the first day of work to involving them in the day-to-day decision-making on aspects impacting their work and success in the organisation. Today’s teams are multi-functional, multicultural and multi-geographic. Hence, it becomes vital for you to ensure that your team remains a cohesive whole.

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Secondly, ensure fairness and transparency. It is not the fairness of the decision that you take but the perception of fairness of the decision that matters the most. A case-in-point is the recent communique from Airbnb's Chief Executive Officer on his decision to lay off 25% of the workforce due to COVID-19. While that email may not have addressed specific questions about his decision, at least there was an intent on the leader’s part to share the rationale behind that decision. This was probably why it created a lot of positive buzz despite the news itself being negative.

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Thirdly, provide regular and comprehensive feedback to your employees. Regardless of what the formal feedback cycle is, I feel that feedback on the go is the most valuable gift that a manager can pass on to the employee. Imagine the irony when one of your employees is looking to be promoted but ends up being placed on a performance improvement plan! Such situations exist because the feedback was not actionable, not specific, or was never given.

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Lastly, do not shirk off your responsibility as a leader by claiming that employees need to own and take charge of their own careers. While encouraging employees to own their career is the right thing to do, it is equally important to share perspectives and to show your employees the possible career paths that they can explore. As a manager, your intent and support for your employee’s career shows how much of your skin is in the game.

Engaging employees takes place at three levels: at the organisational, team and individual level. At the organisational level, we typically gauge attributes like organisational values, culture or, organisational strategy. Since these don’t change overnight, an employee satisfaction survey, conducted every six months or annually, should be able to give you a fair perspective on how engaged the employee population is in these areas.

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However, for attributes that are relevant at the team or individual level, they need to be gauged more often. For attributes like managerial effectiveness, organisations conduct three-monthly or six-monthly surveys to gauge what’s working. As for individual-focused areas like career, performance management, etc. you need to gauge them on the go and as often as possible.

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This is simply because whatever constitutes hygiene factors today can become motivational factors tomorrow, with the converse also holding true. Take for example, the current COVID-19 situation. Work-from-home was a motivational factor, often offered as a benefit by many organisations before this pandemic struck. But, work-from-home has now become the new normal. If you are not offering work-from-home in the current situation, you are the odd one out. See how work-from-home is no longer a motivational factor, but a hygiene factor?

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Mistakes to Avoid

Did you know that the first most common mistake that leaders make when engaging their employees is to not act on the feedback they receive? Not often appreciated by many leaders, there are actually three parts to gauging employee sentiment: measuring, sharing and acting.

Firstly, measure. There are many good off-the-shelf tools available with a high degree of reliability and validity that you can choose from to conduct your surveys. So, the measure part is usually covered. The differentiating factors are the other two parts. Number two is share — how often are you disseminating the results amongst the larger employee population? The third and most critical stage is to act.

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The importance of the latter two stages cannot be overstated. You can measure as much as you want, but your hard work will ultimately go to waste if you don’t complete the loop. What employees don’t want to do these days is to give feedback and not know what is happening to that feedback. This is also where the biggest opportunity lies for organisations to move the needle by sharing how the feedback is acted upon and the progress being made on the focus areas. I distinctly remember Google laying special emphasis on action planning. Feedback received from the Googlegeist survey became the foundation for all levels of leadership, including the first line managers, to act upon.

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The second biggest mistake that leaders make is to perceive employee engagement as HR’s job. In many cases, the role of the HR team is that of a facilitator. HR teams help to run surveys and then serve as custodians of that data that is obtained by running those surveys. The responsibility then falls on you, the business leader or the line manager, to assimilate that feedback and to do something meaningful with it.

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Granted, there may be areas like career development or performance management where HR may be playing a more active role. Having said that, whether an employee feels that their career is developing or, the process of performance management is fair, is ultimately determined by how effective the line management is. Of course, partnering with HR may potentially help you in addressing dissatisfaction in some of these areas in a more meaningful way.

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Thirdly, avoid spreading yourself too thin. The cardinal rule for success while deciding on what to action upon is to focus on a couple of areas only. Remember, more wood behind fewer arrows. Focus on those areas where you can bring about traction and enact meaningful change and leave those aside that are beyond your purview. For example, if there’s a theme around organisational strategy, that’s not something that can be addressed at the managerial level. Leave those to be taken up at the organisational level instead.

Challenges You’ll Face

Firstly, acknowledge that there are as many solutions as there are team members. Imagine having only one shoe size and then wanting the same shoe size to fit everybody! Catering to specific needs of individuals does not necessarily equate to spreading yourself too thin — this is where the astuteness of the manager comes into play. How you exercise the resources and flexibility made available to you by the organisation will play a large part in determining your team’s engagement levels.

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Challenge number two is that the goalpost is always shifting. You should always try to score as many points as possible. You need to focus on employee engagement all the time. If you become lackadaisical, you won’t be driving the employee engagement mandate forward.

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The third challenge is figuring out how to heal the healer. People managers struggle at times because they are dealing with a lot of things at the forefront. When you board an airplane, you are told to put on your oxygen mask before helping others in an emergency situation. Similarly, organisations need to provide for a robust support framework for their people managers. Many organisations today are lacking this support infrastructure. As a result, their people managers run the risk of burning out.

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Lastly, organisations need to have a strong way of cascading down relevant information to people managers for them, in turn, to cascade down to their teams. Too much information will leave the people managers overwhelmed and too little will leave them feeling inadequate. Hence, too much or, too little is equally bad.

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Catering to the “Moments That Matter”

During the employee journey, there are crucial moments – moments that matter – that go a long way in defining an employee’s experience in the organisation. In my opinion, if you have a very fixed set of policies, you are not giving the line manager the flexibility to cater to these moments that matter. People have very different needs and one type of employee engagement policy will never be able to cater to everyone.

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When dealing with a large employee population, having guardrails may be a good idea. It's a bit of an art where you don’t go laissez-faire, instead establish guidelines for managers to operate within. The idea is for these guidelines to allow room for people managers, who are dealing with employees on a daily basis, to exercise some discretion and judgement. This allows for managers to deal with employees’ unique needs in a manner consistent with the organizational culture.

However, guidelines can be a two-edged sword. Managers need to have the maturity to deal with guidelines appropriately to start off with. They need to be perceived as being consistent in how they interpret a situation. The last thing you want in a team setting is for people to wonder whether the decision of the people manager is fair and transparent.

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Let me illustrate this with an example. Many organisations have a loosely defined process for work-from-home arrangements and often the ultimate decision rests with the direct manager. When I was leading a global portfolio at VMware, there were times when I used to have early morning and late evening meetings. This required me to keep my schedule flexible and therefore, I couldn’t show up in office at regular hours. My manager was supportive as he realised what I was dealing with. However, some people in the team felt that I was being given preferential treatment. Bear in mind, it was not the fairness of the decision on my manager’s part to support me in working from home that was questioned; it was their perception that the manager’s decision was unfair or preferential. Therefore, managers need to work towards nipping any false perceptions in the bud. Sharing the rationale behind the decision and setting context goes a long way in driving fairness in a team setting.

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Now That My Employees are Engaged, What Next?

Employee engagement is not a binary construct. Don’t expect things to become clear overnight or your team to remain engaged forever. Engaging employees is a dynamic process and the situation will continue to evolve over time. A positive intent and a dedicated approach will ensure that you don’t throw in the towel in this constant endeavour.

1. Act on the Feedback That You’re Receiving

Focus on one or, at maximum, two areas at any given point of time. Be diligent about sharing periodic updates and how you are moving the needle in those areas. Remember, acting on feedback is more important than soliciting feedback.

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2. Embrace an Iterative Mindset

As these are ever-evolving times, having an iterative approach to lead and manage your team will go a long way in improving the effectiveness of your employee engagement efforts.

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3. Prepare, Preempt and Pursue

As the goalpost is always moving, you need to be prepared to deal with unique situations when engaging your employees, preempt some of the challenges and see through the solutions to these challenges.