Fostering a Culture of Engagement
By John Bradford and Scott Hamilton, PH.D
– Profiles International
Are your employees engaged in their work? Are they loyal to your business? How do you know these things? And if you don’t know, how do you find out? If you strive to create a culture of engagement in your company, this is a great place to start.
Engaged employees are excited and enthusiastic about their jobs. They resist distractions, tend to forget about time and routinely produce significantly more than the job requires. They enjoy searching for ways to improve circumstances and they volunteer for difficult assignments. They also encourage others to higher levels of performance. Finally, they are proud to be involved with their organizations and are more likely than their unengaged peers to stay with the company.
There are many benefits and advantages to understanding engagement levels. Companies with this knowledge have higher retention rates, superior customer service and realize enhanced bottom-line results. Leaders at all levels of the organization strive to create a work environment that results in highly engaged employees.
This briefing will identify actions organizations have taken to begin the improvement process. Research shows that there is no one general set of actions that will guarantee your success in raising engagement in your company. Raising engagement is a function of several very important ideas. The first thing you need to decide before moving forward is where you want to attack the problem. Proactive companies have chosen to take action at the organizational, managerial or employee levels. Some companies have chosen to isolate one area while others have chosen to take action simultaneously across several areas.
Organizational Level
Working to improve employee engagement at the organizational level is both strategic and tactical. The organization is a direct reflection of its leadership. You will need to identify opportunities, simplify solutions, take action and hold people accountable. Accountability often enhances breakthrough thinking and results. Take a good look at your work culture. Are you fostering a “people culture”?
Your company’s “culture” is the unique personality of your company’s core values, ethics, and the rules that guide behavior. Take a close look at your vision, values and strategy to make sure there is alignment between how you want to shape your company and how your company is being shaped. Communicating a clear vision of the future is very important.
Do not get stuck in “paralysis by analysis” by trying to figure out what the are saying. Your strengths and areas for improvement will jump out at you. Keep it simple and remember that if you want to solve a problem once and for all, the solution has to be embraced and integrated so that it becomes embedded in how you do business. When you do this, you are demonstrating commitment to what you believe in. Your actions will speak louder than your words.
Commit to developing your people. Results are achieved through the actions of each employee working individually, in teams and across functions. Talent will be your competitive advantage for the future. Are your employees appreciating or depreciating in value?
The average employee wants to look beyond her current job and focus on developing skills for a future job. develop your employees by first making sure they are in the right jobs. You can do this by using predictive performance or job matching technology. This allows you to strategically invest in your people, so they are fully developed for the jobs they are in. at the same time, they will see that you are laying the foundation for their career advancement.
Managerial Level
Recognize that the actions of senior leadership, managers and supervisors are the key drivers of your engagement. The act of engaging is a part of every leader’s job profile and leadership skill set. You can get a good idea if this is your leverage point by asking three very important questions.
Do I have the right people in the appropriate leadership positions?
Is leadership development an issue?
Do both of the above questions apply?
The right leadership position for an individual can be determined simply by assessing his or her leadership abilities. Appropriate assessments will tell you about the job fit of your existing leaders. By assessing each of your leaders and identifying a group of top and lesser performing employees, a proven predictive performance pattern can be developed. Think of this pattern as a means of identifying the best worker for a position.
The next step is to compare your leaders’ results to the appropriate predictive benchmark. Now you can accurately and reliably tell if your leaders are in the right jobs.
If you want to solve a problem once and for all, the solution has to be embraced and integrated so that it becomes embedded in how you do business.
Having this information helps you decide whether this is a selection issue or a development issue. If selection is the issue, you can redeploy to a more appropriate job. If development is the concern, you will need the data and coaching tools to correct any gaps your leaders have in matching your predictive performance benchmark.
Satisfaction with employment can be directly linked
to job fit…this will result in greater productivity.
Are you like most organizations that recognize good job performance by promoting top performers to positions of leadership? Did the leadership position require your top performer to use the same skills he used to achieve previous success, or did he need to use new skills? If new skills were required, what did you do to identify those skills and did you help your top performer fully develop those skill areas? Were the new skills leadership skills?
Many companies fall into this trap every day. If you want to help increase the effectiveness of your leaders, you need to identify the leadership skills that are most commonly used when engaging employees. Seek feedback for this leader from his peers and direct reports. Align the leader’s behaviors and leadership skills to the expectations of the organization and of his boss. Then close the leadership gaps through on-the-job performance, feedback and coaching.
It is important to equip your managers with data so that they know the basic behavioral tendencies that people have concerning productivity, quality work, initiative, teamwork and problem solving. Provide your managers with the information that will help them understand how to deal with their employees and their tolerance levels for stress, frustration and conflict.
Help your managers learn how to motivate their employees. Empower your managers to maximize employee performance by understanding whether an employee is internally motivated or needs a little external inspiration. Effective assessments are available for you to use to evaluate existing employees or team members. The resulting information will significantly increase the effectiveness of your managers. When the employee can see that her manager is working to learn more about her, satisfaction with the manager will increase and so will engagement.
Employee Level
Research has not identified one “right” way to increase the level of engagement in an organization. What works in one company may not work in another. Satisfaction with employment can be directly linked to job fit. One way to increase engagement at the employee level is to make sure you have the employee in a position where he can thrice and grow. This will result in grater productivity.
We are facing a talent shortage of unparalleled proportions. The Baby Boomer has been retiring and at the same time, declining birth rates of preceding generations mean a deficit of younger workers. With these demographics, companies have been faced with an unprecedented “brain drain”. To survive, you have been forced to rethink your workforce strategies and transform your management and human resources practices to attract, engage and retain workers of all ages. What has worked in the past will not work in the future.
The best way to keep your
stars is to know them better
than they know themselves – and then use that information
to customize the career of their dreams.
Understand your target employees. It is time to apply what we learned about customers and customer segmentation to employees and employee segmentation. Successful companies identify their target customer; the time has come to use science, technology and data to identify our target employee.
A target employee is the one who has a good fit to her current job, is fully engaged on the job and whose performance exceeds your expectations. The target employee not only achieves goals, but has the ability to elevate the performance of other employees, teams, and departments and divisions.
To identify your target employee you must first assess all your employees. You will want to use the same process recommended for assessing your leaders. Appropriate assessments will tell you about employees’ cognitive skills, job-related behaviors and occupational interests. Make sure you have the data to identify those target employees who stand out, as well as those employees who are doing a good job but may not have emerged as a target employee yet.
The days of compensation and benefits standardization may be over. You are not going to be able to be all things to all people. Talent recruitment and retention of top performers are about to change how we think of the employment deal. Take the time to identify where you will need to utilize variation in order to meet the needs of your target employee. With flexibility, creativity and a willingness to change, you will be able to recruit and retain top performers.
You may also need to think differently about challenging your employees. Research shows that managers are up to four times more engaged than frontline employees. That is due to the additional challenges managers face. Provide your employees with stretch goals, avoid micromanaging and let them learn from their mistakes. This will have a positive effect on employee engagement. In order for employees to remain engaged, they need to be continuously stimulated. Every new experience you create for your employees is an opportunity for growth. These experiences can include involvement in projects, additional responsibilities, further career development and anything that will challenge their abilities. Training also improves employee value.
Employee engagement increases when employees receive regular training, especially if training is focused on soft skills rather than technical skills. Ironically, when you provide employees with more qualifications to add to their resumes, they are more inclined to stay with your company.
When challenging, training and coaching an employee, be sure to allow time to get her feedback. Such information can be extremely important in helping implement solutions. A good approach is to work with the employee to identify:
What can be improved?
What does she need?
What can we do more or less of?
What should we start or stop doing?
Research has shown that success on the job has little to do with experience, age, race, gender or education, and everything to do with job fit. Ensure that your employees have a good solid job fit. The level of engagement is directly related to employee job fit, and job fit is the number one ingredient to the individual success of your employees.
According to the article “Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People”, from the Harvard Business Review, “In these days of talent wars, the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves – and then use that information to customize the careers of their dreams.
The level of engagement is directly related to
employee job fit, and job fit is the number one ingredient
to the individual success of your employees.
Final Thoughts
A company’s brand creates customer loyalty. Your recruitment, selection, onboarding, coaching, development and succession planning process is part of your brand. Think of each of these processes as a means of retaining top performers and developing future performers. When you enhance your existing processes with the use of predictive performances patterns and job matching, and then empower your managers to use these data, you will accelerate performance and build your employee loyalty.