Thursday 10 January 2013

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/

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