When Time and Place Become the Opportunity

Working with clients who want higher levels of employee engagement, I've learned...

You can tell your people you need to see more engagement. Those already engaged will satisfy your request. The others will look engaged for a short time, then return to previous levels of engagement (non-?)

You can offer an engagement incentive. Many will actively engage to earn the incentive. Once that's done most will return to previous levels of engagement (dis-?) You can do that over and over and over, but do you want a culture based on incentives...or engagement?

You can threaten to bring performance evaluation into play. You can mark down those who demonstrate less than satisfactory engagement levels. But if you hold your evaluation meetings only at year's end, many will forget your threat. The ones who remember the threat are those you did not need to threaten in the first place.

So you ask, "For crying out loud, what am I supposed to do to engage my employees?"

Nothing.

OK, that's a cute answer and only partly true. You are not supposed to engage your employees because they must be responsible for their own engagement.

You are, however, supposed to make engagement available, attractive, appealing. That's the manager's job: provide situations that make the employees want to engage. By the way, these situations can stimulate engagement while having other objectives: performance improvement, learning appreciation, community respect, for example.

You can provide your folks ample opportunities in which they can experience engagement.

The secret to making an opportunity available is not its topic or theme or content or activity. The real key is the opportunity's timeandplace . Commit to a specific time and a specific place every _____ (fill in the blank with week or month or quarter) that you will dedicate to an engagement opportunity.

When you schedule the Time and the Place, you actually put them "in the way." it will surprise you how quickly ideas about what to do, to discuss, to explore, to engage come to you.

After just one or two repetitions of regularly scheduled Opportunities, you'll discover you can invite your people to suggest content for Opportunities. I/O/W you can engage them in planning Engagement Opportunities. How cool is that? 

A Challenge: Commit to providing one Engagement Opportunity every one of the next six months. Schedule the day/time. Select the place. Then watch the rest of the planning fall into place easily.

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10085373@N08/