Culture to Engage

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/

The Opportunity to Engage

Managers and supervisors do not engage their employees. Employees engage themselves. Managers and supervisors can (and should) give employees abundant opportunities to engage. That engagement, please remember, can be in related areas: job, career, networking, company, community, and possibly more. All engagement benefits the business.  [If this sounds familiar, you read something very much like it in my Cutting to the CORE posting, 02/05/08.]

Some employees find engagement even without persuasive opportunities . However, a significant number of employees need the persuasion engagement opportunities provide.

Engagement opportunities produce “engagement benefits.” As you read each engagement benefit in the following list, pause a few seconds and consider how this can occur for your company.

Engagement Opportunities will

•  Generate employee engagement in general.
•  Generate employee’s engagement in a specific area.
•  Stimulate communication between employee and manager/supervisor.
•  Enhance teamwork among employees.
•  Improve customer/client/patient satisfaction and loyalty.
•  Encourage creative and innovative thinking.
•  Improve employee performance.
•  Provide tactical benefits: recruitment, retention, productivity, safety, and more.

So, what type of engagement opportunities do I mean?  Here are a few:

• Projects: Invite individuals/teams to involve themselves in job-related, career-enhancing, company-promoting, network-building, or community-supporting endeavors. These may be activities suggested/created by employees themselves. These should not be merely "add-on" assignments.
• Incentives: Material rewards for meeting performance goals stimulate short-term engagement. (See this posting.)
  
• Team Competitions: Human nature is competitive. Team involvement is motivational and fun. Create--or allow your teams to create--healthy competitive involvements.
• Celebrate Targets: Recognition of achievement can be its own reward. A visual display of progressive goal achievement, for individuals, teams, departments provides the opportunity for engagement.
• Forums: Meetings allowing individuals to share experiences, accomplishments, difficulties, etc. can serve any/all of the engagement areas: job, career, company, network, community. See the Opportunity Knox posting, for examples.

What else comes to your mind? Remember, your ideas are the best ones. You already own them.

Check out this Engagement Opportunity Template (pdf) for an easy-to-use tool.

Opportunity Knox

Employee engagement comes from within the individual. Opportunities to focus thinking and feeling about engagement can come from management. Provide sufficient, valuable opportunities and enjoy a Ft. Knox-worth of engagement.

What would happen if you

• offered a monthly forum for your employees
• that was totally voluntary,
• lasted no more than an hour during the workday
• to let employees share with one another what they do well?

How would it look if this forum

• featured up to 5 employees
• who each spent 10 minutes
• sharing what they do,
• including difficulties they encounter
• and pleasures they receive from doing it?

Would it increase the "engagement value" if

• employees spoke of specific functions, specific projects,
• cited strengths they call on to do their jobs, and
• spoke from feelings about how (well) they perform?

What might be the value-add if you

• gave the forum a name, a theme, a banner title, a personality,
• made it fun and festive, perhaps with refreshments, and
• tied on some informal, post-forum recognition and appreciation of those who share?

Such a forum is a plain and simple Opportunity for you and your employees to talk about, to know, and to appreciate one another's engagement in what you do.

PS...Who is to say

• managers and supervisors cannot take part and share their engagement as well?

Cutting to the CORE

 
Last posting took a first look at the CORE of Employee Engagement Culture. This posting bites deeper into the fruit of that culture.

I hope you will comment! That leads to sharing thoughts, ideas, arguments, opinions. And that leads to conversations. And wisdom.

If you and your organization hope to build a culture stimulating employee engagement, communication cannot  escape your critical attention. It contains too many aspects. No matter how expertly and excellently you and your personnel communicate, there is always room for, value from, and improvement thanks to doing it even better. Consider that communication involves expressing, listening, monitoring, editing, reframing, retaining, verifying, asking, answering, clarifying and more.
Communication Question: Which area of your communication would you most enjoy improving? Is this the area that most needs improvement?

Managers and supervisors do not engage their employees. Employees engage themselves. Managers and supervisors can (and should) give employees abundant opportunity to engage. That engagement, please remember, can be in any of several related areas, and all such engagement benefits the business: job, career, company, networking, community and possibly more. You can make available even more opportunity forums to increase the likelihood of real employee engagement.
Opportunity Question: Are you willing to introduce and implement one new engagement opportunity forum every month for the next three months? The next six months? The next 12 months?

Just as engagement causes performance improvement, fear causes some to avoid engagement (and improvement). Fears of failure, the unknown, and no positive reinforcement start the list. My clients are teaching me the list goes on (and on!) from there.  Resources assist your employees in getting past those fears. By having information, assistance, equipment, instruction, tactics and techniques immediately at hand, employees find it easier to get past such fears.
Resources Question: How might you configure a line item in your budget for "employee engagement resources"?

Certainly C, O, and R of CORE offer encouragement in and of themselves. This encouragement component is icing on the cake. Encouragement--formal and informal; spoken, written, and demonstrated--keeps your (and your company's) commitment to engagement in the front of everyone's mind. Hit and miss invigoration says, "This isn't so significant" too loudly. Encouragement should be continuous. Continuous encouragement requires self-awareness coupled with advance planning.
Encouragement Question: What are your skills at encouraging individuals? At encouraging teams?

Communication. Opportunity. Resources. Encouragement. These are seeds from which to grow your Employee Engagement Culture. They are tools with which you promote rapid and healthy growth of the culture. And not finally they are nutrients that allow your culture to continue and to thrive.

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.