Why is engaging knowledge workers so hard? And it’s not because knowledge workers are hard to engage.

Why is engaging knowledge workers so hard? And it’s not because knowledge workers are hard to engage. Gallup recently published a summary (State of global workplace 2013) of their many survey’s on employee engagement. Which they define as “employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company, they drive innovation and move the organisation forward’. Globally only 13% of employees were engaged. The numbers for Australia are slightly better at 24% engaged, 60% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged, the actively disengaged workers actually sabotage their employers and work colleagues. Why do most companies get engagement so wrong? Even Taylor’s studies back in the dawn of scientific management showed engaged workers are more productive, and that was on assembly lines where knowledge was not the premium human resource it is today.

I have written before at my bemusement of watching senior management struggle with engagement and plan more meetings, more incentives and if that fails more beatings to improve ‘engagement’. I have always had a pretty simple measure of engagement “if you leave the office feeling you have achieved something that day, then you are engaged”, the problem then is how to get employees to feel successful and valued. That is why engagement scores of divisions in a company that are meeting targets and gaining positive attention are always higher than divisions that are viewed as not meeting targets or ‘just cost centres’, it’s not that hard.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter a Harvard professor has recently added more depth to the concept of ‘feeling you have achieve something’. She identifies 3 factors strongly linked to employee engagement, they are:

Mastery: Developing and improving deep skills, being challenged to do things betters and faster.

Membership: Create community by honouring the individual, allowing the whole person to surface. Encourage people to communicate and form bonds across the company.

Meaning: Emphasise the positive impact each employee has, along with a bigger purpose that everyone is working towards. She argues that a mission and larger purpose can make even mundane tasks meaningful.
Kanter concludes that “highly engage people who contribute more of themselves can recite Shakeshpere to win customers, weddings in the lobby that create community, or the ultimate prize: innovations that change the world.

It is time we as managers had a really good look at how we organise and manage staff, and make engagement an embedded factor of organisational life not a side goal to be agonised over annually to meet my KPI’s.

References:
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/three-things-that-actually-motivate-employees/
www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-global-workplace.aspx

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

Ownership of IP a big issue for knowledge workers

I have recently been involved in a very interesting discussion around ownership of IP in the knowledge economy, is the industrial model of all IP being owned by your organisation appropriate or should a more sharing based model be used? Should Facebook, Google, Woolworth's and other corporations be able to harvest your data and sell it without any compensation to you.

A relevant article was recently published by Wharton School of Business, interview with Felicia Day , it is an interview with Felicia Day, an American actor, writer and producer who got frustrated with Hollywood and pioneered the creation of a "TV like series" on YouTube in 2007 called "The Guild". What is interesting is that she was able to keep IP of the project because she partnered with IT companies who did not have a business model that demanded ownership of content the way the movie industry does. One of the conclusions of the article is that this ability to maintain IP ownership on the web may be fleeting as traditional media production companies move into web production and bring their business models with them.

If you are interested in more discussion around IP and knowledge workers I can recommend the Linked-in discussion group initiated by a colleague at University of Technology Sydney Building the Organisation of Tomorrow.

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

The key to employee engagement – allowing your employees to be successful

Over the past 2 decades it has become popular to measure employee engagement. And the results are always the same, senior management declare that employee engagement needs to rise to x% and the Human Resources team will help you develop a plan to ‘engage’ your team which usually involves increasing the number of ‘communications meetings’ as the only actionable questions ever asked in the standard surveys such as Hewitt’s Best Employer survey are around “has your/senior management communicated enough”. This focus on communication, a ‘nice’ working environment or other small changes has always seemed to miss the point to me. In my observations over three decades of management I have seen highly engaged teams who are working in poor environments, working huge hours, who are under paid and who are under constant pressure and stress in rapidly changing and highly uncertain environments. The common thread to the extremely high levels of engagement I have observed in these employees is that “they go home every day feeling that they have achieved something of value” yet this is so often missing from discussion around employee engagement.

This is the focus of a recent McKinsey Quarterly article by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer who phrase engaged employees as those to whom “work has meaning”. Amabile and Kramer’s study focused on how senior executives can destroy meaning for employees and list four key meaning destroyers (they call them ‘traps’):

1. Mediocrity signals – everyone wants to feel they work for the winning team, however top management can often become focused on ‘me too’ management such as cost cutting and other reactive rear guard strategies that devalue the lofty goals of most strategies and devalues the work that employees are doing to achieve those strategies.
2. Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder’ – Most strategies take many months or years to fully implement and see the benefits from (and the employee satisfaction that comes from achieving those strategies). It is almost impossible to get employees to support a strategic direction when it changes every month or is unclear, again devaluing an employee’s efforts to make a difference.
3. Corporate Keystone cops – displayed through complex reporting structures, empire building, rogue departments, rushed analysis, failure to reward success or enforce accountability and results in organisational chaos (or should that be KAOS).
4. Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’ – in many companies these are so grandiose to be meaningless. BHAG’s only have meaning if employees believe that the BHAG has relevance to the organisation and that senior management truly believe in it and behave accordingly.

Amabile and Kramer conclude with a series of actions designed to avoid these ‘traps’. I feel the recommendation fall into a bit of a trap themselves but the overall article is excellent and well worth the time to track down and read.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Governance/Leadership/How_leaders_kill_meaning_at_work_2910

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/