Wednesday 4 December 2013

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/