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This post is from my news column in the Metrowest Daily News this week. What do you think? Are you engaged? Are your team members?
Do you know whether your team is engaged in their work? Is your organization working at peak capacity? Might you lose some key employees to competitors in the coming year?
According to a research report by Blessing White Inc. released this month, these are questions that should be at the front of each manager’s and leader’s mind. This comparative research indicates that fewer than 1 in 3 employees are engaged in their work and nearly 1 in 5 employees are actively disengaged.
In addition, more employees will be looking for new opportunities at a different organization in 2011 than in 2008, before the economic malaise really took hold.
These findings represent either a significant challenge, or a great opportunity, depending on how you approach the issue of engagement.
Employee engagement is a rising topic in the performance literature of the past few years. There have been several different definitions of employee engagement, but to be consistent, let’s use the definition Blessing White Inc. uses in their report: Employee engagement represents the alignment of maximum job satisfaction with maximum job contribution.
That might seem like a high bar to jump, but consider: in an economic environment where effective and efficient work is a key to sustained success, cultivating engagement makes sense.
I am frequently consulted by leaders these days who recognize they need to figure out how to turn a good team into a great team. They can’t simply throw money at hiring new people to expand capacity; they need to be sure they get full capacity from their existing organizational members.
The recent research on employee engagement finds that the roles immediate managers and executive leaders play in cultivating engagement are different. Direct managers are well positioned to help with engagement.
The Blessing White Inc. research tells us there are four activities managers can conduct that seem to build engagement among directly supervised teams and individuals.
1. Assess and develop your own engagement. This activity makes intuitive sense, and has a significant impact on team members. Disengaged managers are not in a position to build engagement in others.
If you are a manager, one hopes you have been recognized as someone who has high levels of job satisfaction and job contribution. You need to monitor and develop these for yourself before you are likely going to make an impact with others.
2. Develop relationships. In our culture, relationships matter. When cultivating engagement in direct reports or supervisees, you will need to share some of your personal interests and motivations to build relationships.
What do you find compelling about the work you do? Personal knowledge and trust of one’s manager is correlated with engagement; you don’t need to be everyone’s best friend, but you do need to know them.
3. Coach your people. Two of the most important factors that contribute to engagement are being able to regularly use one’s talents and skills in one’s work, and career development.
Today more than ever, employees want to do work that has meaning to them and to their organization, and they want to develop their professional skills, talents and responsibilities.
Mentoring and guiding your team members to develop the specific skills and talents they possess raises engagement.
4. Pay attention to team dynamics. Individual levels of engagement can be somewhat contagious – for good or ill. It is nice when a team “comes together” to make a project happen. However, when a team member or two turn disengaged, the poison can spread.
Don’t ignore folks who seem to be disengaging, or you risk others falling off the mark as well. Use the engagement of others, your relationship skills and your coaching skills to see if you can mediate the problem.
What about organizational leaders? Do CEOs or organizational leaders need to spend any of their valuable time working on engagement? Aren’t they supposed to focus on vision, mission and direction? The truth is there is some compelling data that connects organizational effectiveness and financial success with employee engagement.
Next month, we will explore the cultivating roles organizational leaders need to play – and why these folks need to care about employee engagement.
