Culture to Engage

Engagement and the FGQ

We engage in what we feel good about.

Agree? Disagree?

A manager's job doesn't include seeing that her employees feel good about what they do. After all, we call it work.  Not play, not recess, not funtime. Right?

But suppose this: the manager who--spending not a lot of time, energy, or stressful effort--provides "feel-good potentiators" for employees, increases their engagement potential.

Agree? Disagree?

I'm betting that you agree with both:

1. The better we feel about what we do, the more it engages us.
2. The more chances we have to feel good, the more we seize them and so the more we engage.

Increase your people's Feel Good Quotient (FGQ) and you increase their engagement. (We already know why that's good. If not, check the list of posts at the left. Dig in!)

So I offer three easy, low-effort suggestions any manager can use. The purpose is to generate feel-good opportunities.

• Agend-ize Sharing. Start or finish every meeting you have among your staff with a two-minute share. Here's all you have to do:
  • Have them pair off or form triads.
  • Invite them to think of a time in the past few weeks or months when they experienced success, were scared, learned something new, made a mistake, had a good time....
  • Engage them in recalling what led to the experience.
  • Encourage them to recollect emotions the experience created.
  • Request that they condense their memory into a brief sentence expressing only the experience and the emotion. (I felt good when I taught my granddaughter to tie her shoes.)
  • Members then share their brief statements and make simple, accepting responses (That's interesting. Thank you. I'm glad to know that.)
• Ask and Answer. Make conversation about FGQ commonplace. Initiate informal conversation by sharing what(ever) has recently made you feel good. Not all of these conversations need be about work or performance. In time and a sufficient percentage of times, they will. After sharing your FGQ item, always invite the other to share (I'd like to know what's made you feel good lately.) Thinking about one's FGQ brings focus to the feel-good. It's almost impossible to talk about something without thinking about it. (I said almost.) If your people think about feeling good, they will look for and create ways to feel good.
• Team the FGQ. Community motivates. Team(s) in your organization are mini-communities. Encourage your teams to recognize, discuss, and even publicize what makes them proud and so what makes team members feel good. Consider presentations or posters or skits or debates or poems or whatever works to communicate teams' FGQs. Appreciating the causes of team FGQ brings individuals' attention to their own FGQ. That ramps up an individual's FGQ. When I see my team feel good and ways I (can) contribute to that FGQ, my FGQ escalates.

Where did this come from? It was what I call a duh!scovery. Something so obvious I couldn't see it but had to learn it from someone else.

I'd love to learn from you. Please share your comments, ideas, successful practices by clicking Comment below.

Thanks for being engaged...and engaging me!

What'd You Expect?

A few postings back (10/19/07) I maintained that an organization's Engagement Culture promotes and increases its employees' engagement. It does this by applying at least 5 practices. I promised techniques/suggestions for each of those practices.

Here's the 3rd of the 5 ways an Engagement Culture builds greater employee engagement:

• An employee is provided clear information of her job's, manager's, and organization's expectations.

First of all, this information is likely already in your "toolbox" and you don't need it.

Second, you have so much on your workbench that seems more urgent than being sure each staff member knows what is expected.

So, third, you may not make the time to use the tools in that toolbox.

Reminder #1: the employee fully engaged in her function, responsibility and job more fully contributes good for the company.

Reminder #2: the engaged employee credits her manager with clearly communicating expectations, while the disengaged employee blames her manager for not clearly communicating.

Here are 3 suggestions that may simplify providing that "clear information of her job's, manager's, and organization's expectations."

• Distinguish types of expectations. For example: performance (accuracy, productivity, etc.), conduct (attendance, punctuality, attentiveness), development (training, education, mentor relationship). Identifying categories of expectations will assist in your clear description and his clear understanding.
• Invite employee's input. The simple question, "What are your expectations  concerning _____?" Fill that blank any number of ways: your job, this project, performance improvement, for example. This provides ample conversation opportunities to clarify more what is expected.
• Create and use an Expectations Scorecard. You and your staff member separately rate her fulfillment of expectations. (How about in separate categories?) Paying attention to expectations as an evaluation tool (informal and formal) increases attention to expectations as an every day practice.

Keep in mind: a little time making sure expectations are known and understood produces big results in employee's engagement...performance...improvement...success.

What to Say?

Let's look at another of the ways an Engagement Culture actually increases each employee's engagement in her/his performance. (From the previous post, What Happens when....) 

• A manager communicates continuously and for a variety of reasons (work and not work) with the employee.

The idea of a manager/supervisor making time available "just to talk" to staff may seem contrary to a less talk, more action policy. But if more talk produces more action towards improved engagement, enhanced performance, greater results achievement, who's to argue? Not I.

Do not equate manager-employee communication with micro-management. While some of the talk will invariably be about work, the conversations can (should) range far and wide and not all be about work, certainly not all about the employee's job or performance.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Ask, ask, then ask some more. One determinant of employee's degree of engagement in his work is the manager's level of interest. That may be interest in the worker, the worker, the worker's outside life, and more. One well-proven way to demonstrate interest in someone is to ask questions. As you and he know one another better, the nature of the questions will change.
• Be ready to answer. Successful communication is two-way. You make it clear that you are truly involved in a give-and-take conversation by inviting questions. You invite questions (and more questions) by demonstrating comfort as you answer them. A manager I reported to 20 years ago  always asked, "What would you like to ask me?" near the end of the conversation. She had truly engaged people working for her.
• Formally schedule informal conversations. The formal part of scheduling is that you assign and announce a time, date, and place. Suggestion: try to find a time convenient for all and make it a regular event, i.e., lunch on first Thursday of each month. The informal part is that these meetings have neither required attendance, set agenda, nor defined guidelines. These are the opportunity to sit down and talk. Over time the confidence to speak up and the quality of content improves.
• Never be 'too busy.' Think of how often you pass someone in the hall, each of you says, "HihowareyouI'mfinethankyou." By the end of the run-on sentences, the backs of your heads are saying goodbye to one another. The extra 15-30 seconds individuals spend stopping, looking one another in the eye, and sharing a few words have human meaning. When either of those persons is a manager/supervisor, the meaning increases.
• Speak with your eyes. Every day early in my commuting days, I purchased coffee at the train station's Dunkin' Donuts. I picked it up from the counter and walked out, saying, "Thank you" over my shoulder. Then one day, Jean-Paul held onto my coffee as I reached for it. I asked why. He commented, "In my country, we say 'thank you' face to face. Not as we walk away with our back turned." Lesson learned.

I know you have communications practices like these in your organization. Very possible some that are better.

Please feel free to hit Comment below and share your successful ideas.

Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

Since its inception in 1997, The Gallup Organization's Q12 Survey has surveyed more than 4 million individuals. The baseline results:

• 29% of employees are actively engaged in what they do,
  
• 55% are not engaged, and
  
• 16% are actively disengaged.

Those 29% engaged in their functions are more productive, generate greater revenue, and increase customer loyalty. When employees become engaged and positive results are achieved, issues like patient satisfaction and employee retention get resolved.

...Gallup research shows that the overwhelming contribution to the organization's success is produced by engaged employees and that actively disengaged employees actually reduce the performance of the organization in the aggregate.
(2002, Michael Echols, PhD., Bellevue University)

Here's the most significant fact: an employee's relationship with his/her manager is the primary driver of her/his engagement.

Research proves the familiar statement - people join companies but people leave supervisors and managers. The manager stimulates and continues employee engagement. The uninspiring, disinterested, and/or ineffective manager contributes directly to the absence of engagement.

It is old news that results come from performance and performance comes from engagement. It is perhaps newer that managers are the engagement catalysts for their people.

The more expertise a manager has with the following, the more readily that manager contributes to employees' engagement:

• Trust-building techniques
• Activities to generate true commitment
• Spontaneous leadership skills and attributes
• Communication and listening excellence
• Coaching abilities
• Conflict (esp. Generation) preclusion

How does your organization insure continuous development of your managers--seasoned and incoming--in these areas that are critical to engagement by your entire employee base?

Expressing Value

The 10/19/07 post, What Happens when..., listed one of the key ways an organization increases their people's engagement as:

• The organization demonstrates awareness of the employee's value to the organization.

Why does the organization's visible awareness of the employee's value matter?

First, employees respond favorably to praise for doing good work. Workers are pleased to be commended for a job well done. The human ego appreciates strokes. As Sam Walton has said:

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Second, people are pleased that their work contributes to the organization's success and well-being. One makes an automatic connection between his work's value to the company and his personal value for performing the work.

Third, an employee enjoys knowing others recognize she is a contributor. If she knows management views her performance as part of that contribution, she feels valued for her contribution to the company's success and well-being. This naturally reinforces the "my work is important, I do my work, therefore I am important" mindset.

These three factors are not hard to understand. Nor is it hard to understand why an employee then more readily engages skills, abilities, and energies.

You've heard, I'm sure, of the now-famous 29% of employees who are actively engaged in what they do. (Cumulative statistics from Gallup's Q-12 Survey of the past 10-plus years.) They are the probably ones who begin their jobs with their engagement mindset already in place.

But, I suggest to you that

• Those 29% should not be ignored. Engagement Maintenance is a necessary consideration.
• The other 71% (allegedly, 55% "neutral" or not engaged and 16% "negative" or actively disengaged) do warrant attention.
• Potential ROI is lost by not making an engagement effort with those two groups.

Taking a look at the statement at the start of this posting, it's obvious that managers/management are responsible for communicating the organization's awareness (and appreciation) of individuals' and teams' value.

I know there are those who will say all the organization has to do is hire the employee. It is then up to him to get engaged, to stay engaged, and to be happy with his engagement. If the Gallup figures are accurate, then that must be true for about...29%.

Concerning the ROI loss mentioned above, Investment is the total personnel base. Consider the significant budget invested there. Return is the performance improvement that produces benefits to the organization: productivity, profitability, market share, customer loyalty, community recognition, employee recruitment and retention, and more. Employee engagement generates that performance improvement by the employees.

Management can leave engagement up to the employees and leave a lot of ROI untapped. Or managers can take on communications such as these:

• Speak "do" not "is." When speaking to an employee, introducing an employee, discussing an employee (in her presence or not), refer to what they do rather than their job title. The more you address the actions they perform, the more they know you focus on (and appreciate) their performance.
• Ask employees about their jobs: what they find exciting, difficult, rewarding, essential, superfluous. It is assumed you know their work and they know their work. Talking about it does not negate the assumption. It does show interest, concern, respect, and value for the work they do. Since you're talking to them about something you value and they do, it shows you value that they do it.
• Write articles for the company newsletter in which you interview and quote employees about their jobs. That you're willing to take the time to write the article, to publicize individuals for the work they perform, and to involve them in the composition of the article demonstrates respect with a capital R.
• Include as a regular company blog posting, newsletter article, or lunch brown bag meeting: "What I do for the company." Invite your people to provide their perspective of the work they perform in their own words. The more people you involve in this the more talking about (and valuing) "what we do" becomes part of the culture.
• Encourage teams' saluting other teams. Teams certainly provide you valued performance, as well as do individuals. Make the effort to discover and publicize effective interaction and coordination between and among different teams (units, departments) in your organization. Allow the teams to determine how they will salute one another. Publicize the salutations.

These are just a start. Your creativity is already thinking of variations on one or more of the above. That creativity is also generating completely novel ways you and other managers can demonstrate to employees the value they bring to your organization.

I encourage you to share such ideas in your response. (See Comments, below.)