Culture to Engage

Do You Dare?

 As Independence Day approaches, I wonder how much freedom we can stand and how much we can stand to allow our employees.

Within appropriate limits (your definition) what would be your 5 answers to this question:

To make your work more interesting and more enjoyable, what changes would you make?

1. .
2. .
3. .
4. .
5. .

Now, without any limits except that you fulfill expectations and time requirements, what 5 answers would you give the same question:

To make your work more interesting and more enjoyable, what changes would you make?

1. .
2. .
3. .
4. .
5. .

Those questions were meant just to warm you up. Here are the real thinkers:

• Would you offer those two questions to your reporting employees?

• Would you discuss and consider their first set of answers? Their second set of answers?

• What benefits might come from this activity and its discussion...for you, your employees, your team?

I hope you'll comment...and comment on the comments.

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.

How to Hire a Candidate (You Want) to Stay

The cover story in the November issue of Talent Management magazine focuses on the importance of "Finding Candidates with the Right Fit" for the job. In a sidebar Manny Avramidis of the American Management Association makes this observation:

A challenge an organization faces is it never establishes a foundation--they just go out there and say, 'I need a marketing professional,' and they don't tie it in to the other pillars...that are important to make sure the person will fit into the organization.

An organization increases its chances for successful hiring when it knows what it takes for the candidate to fit the job/organization and for the job/organization to fit the candidate. Avramidis suggests hiring professionals should ask three questions (italicized). I offer comments.

Does the organization have identified corporate values?
Those values should have been identified long before the current hiring situation. Seriously, the values should be shared with the candidate, discussed with the candidate, and scenario'd for the candidate to consider and "play with." How much will that show and tell the hiring professional about the candidate's talents and the candidate's fit? My 10/21/07 posting, Expressing Value, presented how corporate values are relevant to an employee's engagement in her work and how managers can convey those values to the employee. What's said there applies to job candidates as well.

What are the core competencies most jobs would expect?
You cannot assume this "goes without saying." Assuming you and the candidate know the expected competencies makes it possible that, in time, you will not pay attention to the core competencies during the candidate search. Assuming may reduce speaking explicitly (and listening just as explicitly) to the candidate about what skills, abilities, and talents he brings to the job. The candidate should not only fit the job; the job should fit the candidate. He deserves the chance to excuse himself from possible failure by seeing up front the absence of fit. (B/T/W, a manager's core competency must be communication with his personnel.)

Is it clear into what absolute role the job candidate will fit? Does that align with the corporate vision?
The significant phrase in this pair of questions is corporate vision. It is important to know that the individual applying her specific talents to a specific job role. I believe it is just as important to know if the individual and the corporate vision meld. That means the corporate vision warrants being open discussion during the interview process. Avramidis states the candidate should be allowed to ask questions. My hope is that those questions are about more than job expectations, that they extend to Big Picture areas like corporate vision. The hiring professional does everyone good service by conducting interviews that encourage such questions.

Interesting Reading

I will have more (much more) to write about several articles in the most recent issue of Talent Management magazine.

In the meantime, you may wish to click that title. You can peruse the current issue on line.

A good bit of interesting in articles such as

• "Finding Candidates with the Right Fit"

• "Training the Ethical Workforce"

• "The Art and Science of Influence"

• "Making the Best Managers"

See you tomorrow.