Culture to Engage

Getting to the CORE of Employee Engagement

The most requested area of information concerning employee engagement is how to. Respondents to my management survey in December 07 overwhelmingly want to know

• How to increase engagement
• How to sustain engagement
• How to engage personnel if/when enthusiasm wanes
• How to personalize it for each employee
• How to foster a culture of employee engagement
• and more right along these lines.

I offer you ways to build the CORE of your Employee Engagement Culture. Be sure that acronym and its components excite me so much you'll see recommendations, suggestions, guest writers with an abundance of how-to in each area.

Communication: the responsibility to be present and prepared to share and receive communication continually. Whatever you call it, however you view it, communication is a must-do to build a true Employee Engagement Culture. Think of specific verbs: asking, answering, listening, updating, explaining, inviting. Find ways to plan specific communications in each of those and other modalities. Think of a monthly town meeting or a weekly e-mail news. Include an office walk-around in which you stop and "just talk with people" for 30 minutes (or 60 or 90 or whatever it takes) every week. Make communication a regularly planned action and it will be(come) a successful action that contributes to successful engagement.

Opportunity: the commitment to create, recognize, and endorse situations that give employees reason to engage. Kevin Costner demonstrated that if you "build it...they will come." You may not get 100% success, but you'll certainly have more people engaged if you put the opportunity right in front of them. Consider projects and development incentives. Think of team competitions and publicly celebrated performance goals. How about forums in which people can demonstrate success and accomplishments? Keep in mind: one can engage to the job, personal/professional development, career, network, company, and community. Any and all of these benefit your organization.

Resources: the decision and design to make available resources that expedite an employee's taking on engagement. When one cannot find the tools, information, instruction, assistance, equipment, time, or other resources, she might not get to hot about the assignment or project. Fear of failure combined with fear of the unknown can stop potential engagement dead in its tracks. Make the decision then commit to designing and making available for your people such resources as training and learning, coaching and mentoring, cross-department projects and efforts, championing and sponsoring, and much more. How about this: a "resource development team" whose members have ownership of identifying, locating, recommending resources?  You would have a steady source of resource recommendations/creation and a unique engagement opportunity for members of this team.

Encouragement: the freedom to support an individual's and a team's engagement with your enthusiasm. You can assume your folks will engage in their work, their job, your team, the company. Or you can seize every opportunity to encourage their engagement. Psychology says it is easier to inspire someone already moving thanks to just-experienced success than to motivate someone standing still. (Newton said it, too, in his s First Law of Motion). You may have to practice becoming a cheerleader. It's worth it. The more you offer congratulations, host celebrations, hand out recognition and (deserved) praise, the more often you will have cause to. If it's engagement you encourage, it's engagement you will get.

Take it to the CORE.

5.5 Secrets to Titillating...er, Engaging Managers

The previous posting explored how and why managers may have no higher Engagement Quotient than than employees. What is wrong with that picture?

Every employee owns the responsibility for being engaged. But it is the manager's job--as a manager of people--to provide encouragement, resources, opportunities that stimulate the employee's engagement. But how can a manager who's not engaged stimulate engagement?

So whose job is it to stimulate management engagement? Likely the manager himself.

Here are 5.5 ways the manager (is that you?) might attend her Engagement Quotient.

1. People: Determine your Attentions Ratio: the ratio between your Attention to People and your Attention to Task. Are you more a manager of people or a manager of work? Do you give more time, energy, enthusiasm to developing your people, or do you give more to seeing that their work gets done? No matter what the ratio, determine how you can shift the ratio: less attention to work itself, more attention to people development. You'll find yourself engaged in manifesting that shift.

2. Learning: Set a learning objective or goal for every week or every month. Keep the objective simple so you can be sure you'll achieve it. This tip helps your engagement in two ways. First, you'll engage in reaching your learning goals. Second, your learning objectives can focus on engagement: how to promote engagement, how to manage "engagementally," how to engage yourself.

3. Network: Commit to some time at least once a month when you network and socialize with other managers. Doesn't matter whether these are manager from your company and/or in your industry. What matters is that you talk to them about whatever turns you on, whatever engages you, whatever will get/keep you thinking about the how-to of engagement (for you and your employees).

4. Performance Improvement: Pick one specific part of what you do. Set a performance improvement plan for that specific part. Don't make it too big; make it a doable improvement. Note: this performance improvement does not have to be specifically about engagement. If you set a performance improvement plan that has meaning for you (and why wouldn't it?), you will become engaged just in carrying out the plan. Ta da.

5. Innovation: What do you do now you can do differently? What processes currently at work could work better, in another way? Where can you innovate, create? If you allow yourself to imagine, design, suggest, create something new and different--and it can be something simple!--you are taking ownership. You will engage in what you own. Remember, engagement is the reason for these tips.

5.5. Take Notes: Carry a notebook. Any time you realize you are engaged, write it in your notebook. Any time you think of some way you might engage yourself, write it in your notebook. Any time you see someone actively engaged in what they are doing, write it in your notebook. Get the idea?

So, Managers Aren't Engaging?

For more than a decade all the energy and eyeballing has gone to employee engagement. We either praise or blame or warn managers of their essential role in creating the environment (I call it culture) for employee engagement.

Seems to me no one has considered that managers are probably just as engaged (or not) as the employees, figure-atively speaking. I mean, if the oft-cited Gallup figures are accurate, 29% of employees are engaged and 71% are either unengaged (neutral) or disengaged (opposed). Have we any reason to assume the manager persona has a higher Engagement Quotient than others? Any reason to assume it's more than 29% (14% if  you use Towers Perrin's global figure) engagement among managers? Not that I can see.

I can already hear the answer: "Engagement is one of the traits that gets noticed and gets you promoted to management." Some might even assert that promoting the engaged is what leaves only 29% on the work floor.

Can you hear me chuckling? Here's why I think managers--no matter how many demonstrated their high EQ in earlier assignments--can still fall prey to the down-engagement syndrome:

1. A manager's job is completely different. What stimulated engagement in pre-promotion assignments no longer exists or doesn't have the same effect. In fact, the work that inspired an individual's engagement may be completely missing from the work before that same individual wearing manager's shoes.
2. No one has ever--to my knowledge--quantified how many have been boosted to management with engagement as a promotion criterion. I'm not so sure all managers were more engaged than their peers before becoming managers. The truth of the Peter Principle supports that. How often is one promoted for excellent performance alone...and not necessarily for true management potential? In other words, re-read #1.
3. Management is too often a misinterpreted responsibility. Manager's task is often seen as seeing that employees' work is done as required (efficiency, productivity, error-rate...). That manager likely engages in micro-managing and micro-measurements and continuous validation. That manager engages in attention to results.

Manager's task can (should?) be seen as developing better performers who provide better performance. This manager engages in attention to process that leads to results. This manager sees engagement by the employees as a meaningful component of the process, whatever the process may be.

Here's my disclaimer: Management engagement deserves no more criticism than does employee engagement. However, if engaged employees provide better performance and produce more valuable results, then engaged managers provide a better engagement culture and generate more engagement among their employees.

More on this tomorrow.

5 Secrets about Expectations and Engagement

As soon as I hit the "publish" icon and posted these "secrets," they were no more...secrets, that is. That is fine with me. The best thing about a secret is sharing it with someone who can benefit from knowing it, using it...and passing it on to someone else.

So, enjoy these ways to help your people get engaged in their work, its nitty gritty, and its relevance to the entire organization. Do that by working with each individual so she knows clearly what she is expected to be engaged in.

That last statement, however, lacks necessary clarity (as so many statements of expectation do). Here are components of expectations:

1. Definition and clarification of what engagement entails.
2. Expression of results desired from the engagement.
3. Assurance that manager and employee have similar perceptions of engagement.
4. Recognition that expectation is not only "top down" but that employees have expectations of their managers.

Your and your employees' attention to each of these components enhances expectation awareness.

One question to ask, then, is how can I generate employee engagement by giving attention to these components of expectations? 

Here are 5 suggestions:

1. Create a How Am I Meeting My Own Expectations? forum. The intention is to keep expectations and awareness of expectations in the front of people's minds. Get team members suggestions for the format and pizazz of a regular opportunity for people to share how they are meeting their self-expectations. You'll find in time that this becomes a great opportunity for people to discuss that they are not meeting all of those expectations. That's when the sharing or ideas and insights and resources becomes so valuable among team members. (Allow your people to help make this forum more than "just a meeting." After-work discussion groups, pizza lunches, talk-and-walk sessions...)
2. Hold Am I Meeting Your Expectations? meetings. This can be the flip side of #3 or it can be completely different in format. The purpose is for people to ask the question, Am I meeting your expectations? And, of course, to receive honest answers. The power of the question removes the threat of unwanted criticism. This becomes, in time, an outstanding trust-building resource.
3. Generate What If We Expect More? discussions. Businesses change. The economy changes. Markets and customers change. Change is the norm. And so expectations change. Often, the change in expectations is that they get bigger, higher, tougher. When such changes occur without time for preparation, they can be tough to take. By asking What if we expect more...? fairly frequently --even when there are no changes on the horizon--your organization can exhibit a more calm and comfortable readiness when changes do appear.
4. State You Meet My Expectations in different, creative ways. Close behind clarity of expectations on the "What Engages Employees" list is recognition by one's supervisor. Couple the two and increase the engagement power of your communication with your people. Carry a notebook with you. Jot down anything, everything that crosses your mind regarding how you might--in a unique, different way--show or tell someone he is meeting your (and the job's and the company's) expectations. Review the notebook regularly. The more you allow yourself to jot down even the most far-fetched ideas, the more you will find ways to use some of what goes into that notebook. For 7 starter-tips...
5. Create YOUR OWN ways to bring expectations to everyone's front-of-mind. Get rid of your inner voice's whispered objections:

• "I don't have time." It doesn't have to take much time, and the more you let yourself do it the less time it will take.
• "My people (should) already know what's expected of them." Your people probably do know what is expected of them. However, continued attention to expectations bolsters the employee's desire to fulfill the expectations. That desire is engagement's start point.
• "My job is to manage." Managing is developing people. People develop (themselves) as they fulfill greater and greater expectations. Developing your own ways for people to think about, talk about, laugh about, and learn about expectations...another good reason to carry that notebook.

Give one or more of these a try. Give yourself an A for your attention and initiative. Give this posting a comment!

7 Ways to Increase Your Employee Engagement Sex Appeal

So, maybe these 7 tips won't really ramp up your EE Sex Appeal. But, I'll bet you they will help you (and your people) accomplish the following:

• Improved morale and motivation.
• Stronger, more successful communications within your team.
• Increased suggestions, recommendations, and innovative improvements.
• Greater employee, customer, and manager satisfactions.

Try 1, 2, or all 7. Check the results. Let me hear from you.

Town Hall Meetings. You may not have time or reason to hold a true and complete Town Hall Meeting. But you may want to include a "town hall segment" as part of your regular staff meeting in which everyone is invited to ask questions, offer feedback, and air concerns . It's a lot like an open-door policy, but it happens at a certain time and you don't have to be in your office. You don't even have to have a door--open or otherwise.

Go Beyond "How are you?" When you greet a staff member first thing in the morning or pass someone in the corridor, bring what you know about the person, her work, her personal life to the fore. "Janet, how did your presentation to the PTA go last week?" will mean a lot more to Janet than the perfunctory, "How are you?" (This may require continuous homework by you.)

Make Obvious Time to Understand. If a staff member brings an issue, a concern, a suggestion, a fact of information to your attention, never rush past it, hurry through it, or hasten around it. Make it clear that what he thinks is important enough to bring to you is important to you as well. Phrases like, "tell me more," "let's talk about that for a minute," "I'd like to spend a little time on that with you" underline the value you give the employee.

Recognize Contributions to Process Value. In addition to formal celebrations of achievement and accomplishment, make it your personal business to acclaim when/where/how members of the team have contributed to process(es) utilized by the team. It may be an innovation, an improvement, a correction. Be specific in the recognition by specifying the contribution. Mention it in passing. Discuss it over lunch. Make it part of how you introduce one person to another.

Seek Continuous Input. It will take repetitive invitations, but you can have your people offering suggestions for improvement constantly. To do this, create/select your preferred question that invites such input: "How can we...?" "What might we do to...?" "What ideas do you have that...?" Make the question your spoken mantra. Ask it all the time, in all situations, to all members of your team.

Admit (or Pretend) You Don't Know It All. One of the first managers I worked for used this action to let his people know they -- and their ideas --  mattered. Often when I mentioned something to him, he commented, "Hey, I want to know more about that. Walk with me and fill me in." Then he rose from his chair and we walked to the coffee pot or around the office or out to the parking lot. This action demonstrated how important time with me and my ideas was for him. (And he did it with everyone who worked for him!)

Be Spontaneously Happy. Using e-mail or whiteboard or Post-it(tm) Notes, communicate even minor good feelings about specific employee actions and achievements. Recognition does not have to be a Big Deal because simply recognizing the value people bring to their jobs is a big deal.

These 7 Ways to Increase Your Employee Engagement Sex Appeal have one thing in common: communication from the manager/supervisor to the employee. That one commonality spreads over three types of communication:

1. Communication that the manager cares about the person.
2. Communication that the manager receives and values the employee's opinions and ideas.
3. Communication that the manager recognizes and appreciates good work that is valuable to the company.

What employee, given these communications sincerely and continually offered, would not be more ready to engage in what he does, where he does it, and for whom he does it?