Engaging Employees and Empowering Your Workplace by Improving Your People Dynamics

What manager, team leader, co-ordinator or supervisor doesn't want enthusiastic, energised, loyal and committed people to work with? Who wouldn't want passionate people who make things happen every day in their workplace, who not only make the workplace a great place to be but who also co-operatively produce the results and outcomes that the company and organisation desires? When companies and organisations engage their employees in their workplaces, this is what they get.

Engagement is a two-way process in which employees and their companies or organisations make commitments to one another and align their goals and aspirations. It is about making, what the Hay Group calls, an "emotional investment" in one another. Companies and organisations endeavour to give their employees meaning and purpose when they come to work and employees reciprocate by bringing the whole of themselves to their work, embracing it with enthusiasm and passion.

Enhance Workplace Performance with a New "Psychological Contract".

Companies and organisations need to offer their employees "a new psychological contract", says the Hay Group. "We'll make your job (and life) more meaningful. You give us your hearts and minds".

Hewitt Associates, a global HR outsourcing and consulting firm, works with companies and organisations to research and analyse employee engagement. They have come to believe that increasing employee satisfaction, traditionally used to measure the quality of workplace culture, does not translate into better results and outcomes for companies and organisations. They say it is not enough for employees to feel "satisfied" in their work. This is not enough to engage them. Rather engaged employees consistently demonstrate three ways of being:

• They always speak positively and with affirmation about their company or organisation to clients, customers, co-workers, and friends.
• They are committed to staying with the company or organisation, even when they may be offered a higher salary somewhere else. It is their employer of choice.
• They enthusiastically give the whole of themselves - their hearts and minds - to the company or organisation wanting to be part of its success and to do whatever they can to make that happen.

Disengagement is epitomised by employees physically being at work, but leaving at home that part of themselves that brings value and quality to their work - their hearts and minds.

Relationship Between Engagement and Productivity Outcomes.

• Management Today, September 2005, talks about the Gallup Organisation in Australia study that found "that 20% of employees are actively disengaged at work with an estimated cost to the economy of $31.5 billion per year.......Only 18% of Australian workers are engaged". 62% are in "bland no-man's-land of being just 'not engaged' ".
• The same journal refers to a 2004 Gallup study that showed that "it takes four fully engaged employees to counteract the impact of one disengaged person".
• A Hay Group Engaged Performance Diagnostic Survey of 10 offices of a particular professional services firm showed that the five "most engaged" offices generated $238,000 in revenue per consultant. Those in the five "least engaged" offices generated $166,000 per consultant. This was a 43% difference.
• The Hay Group Working Paper on Engage Employees and Boost Performance (2001) talks about how General Dynamics Defense Systems in Pittsfield, Mass. re-engaged the hearts and minds of their devastated staff after a restructure of their company in 1997 when they let go 550 of their 1600 employees. Their "attrition in software engineering dropped from nearly 20% in 1999 to 2.4% in 2001. Confidence in management shot up and commitment rose. Union grievances, which had cost the company as much as $10,000 each, dropped from 57 in 1999 to none in 2001, saving thousands of dollars. Best of all, earnings and profit margins doubled."

What was especially significant about what GDDS did was the reflective approach that management used to look at what management itself was contributing to the disengagement.

Research and studies that have been done in recent years leave us in no doubt that there is an integral relationship between employee engagement and the degree to which companies and organisations achieve their goals and productivity outcomes.

Engaging Employees Needs Leadership from the Top.

What's most decisive here is whether employees feel that the contribution they are making to their company or organisation really makes a difference. If they know that it does, if their leaders tell them it does, if their contribution is valued, then their engagement is assured. They are then not just working for their company or organisation. They are working with it. Its success is their success and they are constantly being told that by managers, team leaders, co-ordinators and supervisors.

How this is done is the issue. Do managers have to go around thanking people for every little thing they do? No! But the leadership that sees engagement become reality in workplaces does come from the top. Unfortunately some managers don't have the interpersonal and leadership skills to make it happen.

"I was meeting all my targets and doing a good job. Every year I received a bonus, some stock options and a salary increase. Strange though it seems, I walked out of every one of my annual reviews feeling empty. The reward I wanted most was some positive feedback from my boss, or for that matter, any feedback. It would have been good to know that what I did was being noticed and making a difference. I wanted him to say that he really appreciated me and my contribution to the business. I never really felt recognised. That's why I left the company for another job." Manager, FMCG.

This appeared in an article in The Networker of The Australian Businesswoman's Network, September 2004. It clearly makes the point that it is not necessarily salary increases or stock options (or even a new coffee machine for the staff room or flat screens for computers) that employees want. What they want is to feel they are a significant contributing part of this company or organisation.

Processes of engagement have to filter right through to the grass root staff. No matter how small their contribution, they have to be empowered to see that they are building cathedrals, not just laying bricks.

It is often something quite ordinary - but very real - that makes a difference. A manager can come through the front door of the building and walk to his/her office meeting and greeting employees on the way, rather than park at the back of the building and slip into the office unnoticed and have or no relationship with employees. His/her attention to them makes them feel valued.

Does Your Company or Organisation Make an Emotional Investment in Your Employees? 

• Does it try and meet their needs for work/family balance?
• Does it provide flexibility of working hours to provide for their specific short or long term needs?
• Does it engage new employees right from the start by spending time with them in a meaningful and empowering orientation to the company or organisation?
• Does it use its performance appraisals and annual reviews to affirm employee's contributions and to plan their further engagement with the company or organisation?
• Does it encourage and support the professional development and career goals of employees?
• Does it have a culture that "breeds" valuing and appreciation?
• Does it inspire and motivate employees to want to do the best and be the best?
• Does it take their ideas and concerns seriously and engage in a mutual interchange to address them?

In other words, is it a place to which employees want to bring their whole selves, including their hearts and minds, because they know that its values and culture will enhance their professional and personal identity? Or do they leave at home the part of it that is most important to them to protect it from being damaged and destroyed by their workplace reality?