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.

A Vision: Something to Focus On

Recent work with several clients has taught me a lesson. Encouraging leaders and managers to help employees maintain focus on organizational goals and objectives may be premature.

 

 

If the organization doesn't have a clearly defined vision, what is there to focus on?

I offer three quick, simple steps you can use to build a true and clear vision for your organization, your department or your team. For more more information, click here.

1. Articulate. Build your own picture of where you want the organization to go, what you want it to become. Without describing your picture to the extreme detail, share it with your team in clear, everyday language.
2. Allow. Hold several discussion sessions. Invite people to express their perceptions of the vision fulfilled. Ask them for specific examples of what they "see." Encourage them to be more and more specific. (Prepare to ask repeatedly, "What does that look like?)
3. Actualize. Using images suggested by team members, construct a true and clear organization vision. You may translate it to a verbal vision statement. However, a "visual vision statement" will have true value in its visibility. Consider a poster filled with scenes and situations representing the vision achieved. (Bonus: use pictures of your team members in that poster!)

The cost: probably less than $200 for a "visual vision statement". Otherwise, just a bit of your and your people's time.

The reward: increased engagement by the employees who know their foresight contributes to their organizations vision of the future.

Engaged in Engagement

Managers see their people get the job done. Managers direct their units or teams to fulfill their responsibilities. When managers do their jobs, teams fulfill their assignments. When teams fulfill their assignments, the organization achieves its purpose.

That makes the manager's role seem simple. It ain't necessarily so.

Consider this statement from Agha Hasan Abedi:

The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.

I agree completely with Abedi's statement. However, I offer it with these qualifications:

1. I found the quote as lead-in to the article Making the Best Managers by Nancy Thomas and Scott Saslow of The Institute of Executive Development. Credit to my sources.
2. Abedi, as founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, was "accused of perpetrating the largest financial fraud in history." So, the man had doubtful ethics...but good sense about the manager's true role.

I offer my co-premises:

The manager engaged in providing opportunities and situations that generate development also generates engagement among employees.

The employee engaged in his work, his company's purpose, and the connection between the two, develops and improves his skills, knowledge and abilities.

More and more management skills are required by today's complexities. Yet, the specific engagement attributes too often escape attention. These attributes allow managers to

• Increase engagement among their people,
• Stimulate continuous development by those people,
• Exercise management skills with greater ease and confidence,
• Lead teams to fulfill expectations,
• Contribute to achievement of company goals and objectives.

A manager engaged in promoting development among her people typically exhibits some or all of these interests:

• People Interest: curiosity, listening, empathy
• Company Interest: commitment, "ownership," innovation
• Growth Interest: leadership, performance improvement, personal/professional development.

And it is accurate to say the employee whom such a leader engages demonstrates those same interests.

I/O/W, engagement breeds engagement.

Learning's Role in a Culture of Engagement

November issue of Chief Learning Officer includes Dianne Durkin's How Loyalty and Employee Engagement Add Up to Corporate Profits. For the entire article click the title. For its heart and soul, the gist of Durkin's article follows.

Her words are in italics. After some points I've placed links to earlier posts in this blog, Culture to Engage. I'm including the links to give you added information about building a culture of engagement and so building customer and employee loyalty.

• Put your purpose out there. This means establishing organizational purpose and values and communicating them clearly with employees. Please see What'd You Expect (10/28)

• Clearly articulate your company's values. The more an individual feels on the same page in terms of what has meaning, what gives worth, and what propels the organization, the more she is willing to engage her time, energy, and effort in that company. Please see Voicing Values (10/20) and Expressing Value (10/21)

• Establish a culture of trust. Strong agreement. I should have made the time to post just a fraction of the info I have regarding trust and its power (and powerful absence) as a positive factor in an organization's culture of engagement.

• Align and communicate. OK, Durkin and I diverge slightly. Her article stresses communication regarding alignment with company strategy and direction. I stress communication regarding the interpersonal, to build stronger relationships among members of the organization, which I believe is fundamental engagement. Please see What to Say (10/26).

• Listen to employees.There are thousands of ideas sitting in employees' heads, but many companies suppress them, which brings down employee morale. Once morale is down.... Well, you know what happens. Listening is more than just hearing. Listening benefits (and so do the employees) when a number of forums that encourage employee expression exist. Please see If I May Make a Suggestion (11/05).

• Engage people in solutions. Durkin's refers to allowing employees to work the suggestions you've listened to them present. There's powerful ownership in this. Please see If I May Make a Suggestion (11/05).

• Learning is the new 401(k). Here's Durkin's point: Employees want to be in continuous growth and learning mode, and learning is a benefit to them, as well as the company. Give them the opportunity to continuously learn, and they will be forever loyal. (I like that I'm not the only one to shamelessly split infinitives.)

• Celebrate successes. Sometimes we place too stringent or too high a definition on "successes." By recognizing, discussing, and appreciating even the minor "feel goods" we can celebrate what makes the organization successful. Please see Engagement and the FGQ (10/31).

• Leadership and management training. The influence of an employee's manager on her engagement is proven. Durkin states, An employee's manager, supervisor or leader is the most important person to him or her. This person is an employee's lifeline to information, recognition, challenges and future vision. Please see Engaging Leadership (11/19) and Whose Job Is It, Anyway? (10/23).

• Create a caring corporate culture. The surest way to let employees know their company (and its culture) cares for them is to communicate the value they bring to the company. Not only when they are hired. Nor upon their 5th, 10th, and 30th anniversaries of service. Please see Expressing Value (10/21).

It must be obvious that I'm in pretty complete agreement with the points Durkin has researched and assembled.

And you?

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.