Culture to Engage

You Can Make Your Resources Sizzle!

With Resources* one of the CORE elements of employee engagement, it's time to ask, "How do we know what resources we need and where do we find them?"

Answering will take a bit of time. Working with the answers you generate will take some more. Let's get started. The three most likely approaches to identifying and garnering employee engagement resources are listed below...in descending order of (my) preference.

Purchase Resources. The Internet offers abundant lists of providers, suppliers, and vendors that will take you buy the hand, walk you down their virtual aisles, and point out exactly what you need in terms of books, training programs, surveys and polls, measurement tools and more. Potential downside is the ROI. Will what you pay for provide you the long-term (better yet, continuous)engagement benefits you want? Materials (i.e. training programs) have a very short half-life if your management team doesn't "own" the concepts and know how engaged employees will transfer them to their work.

Outsource Resources. You may contract with an external provider (training vendor, survey/poll provider, coach/consultant) who will provide ongoing availability and supervision of the resources. This may extend the lifespan of resources you purchase. However, a potential downside is the "foster parent" image. Outsiders offering the resources will not likely seem full and true members of your organization's culture. They may demonstrate outstanding content credibility. They may not insure culture credibility because they are guests invited into your organization's culture.

Plan and Build Resources. Make time and team member involvement part of considering your resource needs, and you create ownership from the get-go. That makes decisions and resources more valued and more respected within your organization. Here's the 7 Step Plan for Planning and Building Employee Engagement Resources:

1. Confirm leadership's commitment to employee engagement as a true element of the business's culture. Is engagement a high value for them? Will they look to engagement as cause to generate desired results? Are they on board with communicating continually commitment to engagement?
2. Verify management core competencies include engagement. These competencies refer to the manager's promoting his employees' development through their engagement. The competencies also refer to the manager's paying attention to her own engagement as a developmental factor.
3. Identify desired engagement. Here you want to exercise resource management and control by determining which engagements are (most) valued in your organization. Job engagement? Company engagement? Career engagement? Network engagement? Community engagement? Each involves different resources; each adds more costs (time, energy, money).
4. Work with employees to identify types of resources valued and desired. Your employees--the ones who will use the resources to increase their engagement--are among the best to tell which resources they want, they need, and they will access.
5. Involve employees in testing, evaluating, recommending potential resources. Obviously, this couples with #4. Here you're investing your employees with a degree of ownership-by-participation. By the way, these need not be the same employees who served on the team to suggest and recommend types of resources.
6. Institute an ongoing Suggestion Box. Over time additional resources will be desired. Your employees will stay active in the Resource factor of your engagement culture if they have an ongoing opportunity to suggest resources that contribute to further engagement. If you want the Suggestion Box to remain viable, demonstrate  publicly attention to and respect for suggestions offered.
7. Create Resource Management as a job description or job function. To recognize the merit of resources that promote employee engagement, designate someone with formal and official responsibility. This gives engagement resources value at the culture level.

*Resources are the materials, information, instruction, coaching, equipment that employees utilize to enhance their engagement. Coming soon are Culture to Engage postings about specific Resources categories, providers, and recommendations. Promise.

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.