Employee engagement is involved in every board-level conversation, even if they don’t realise it. As senior leadership tackles some of the main challenges of the next few years, they will need a fully engaged workforce to grow and change. You are probably already aware that employees will be disengaged before you even begin to change and grow as a business or team.
How do you ensure these numbers don’t grow but shrink without a mass re-hire strategy? Raising or maintaining employee engagement is a strategic necessity, yet surveys report that few employees remain genuinely engaged in their work. Why? The simple answer: We’re going about it all wrong, and it matters!
Employee engagement what exactly is it?
Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. Engaged employees have a positive attitude towards their work, team, organisation, and values. In contrast, a disengaged employee will range from someone doing the bare minimum to an employee actively damaging the company’s work output and reputation.
Employee engagement is not what it should be
Employee engagement is a strategic resource that deserves more attention
When Gallup analysed the differences in performance among business/work units, the benefits of employee engagement were clear. Those in the top quartile on employee engagement significantly outperformed those in the bottom quartile on these crucial performance outcomes:
- 81% lower absenteeism
- 58% fewer patient safety incidents
- 18% less turnover (in high-turnover organisations)
- 43% less turnover (in low-turnover organisations)
- 64% fewer safety incidents
- 10% higher customer loyalty/engagement
- 18% higher productivity (sales)
- 23% higher profitability
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Investing in employee engagement will increase productivity, work quality and retain top talent
So, strategically, employee engagement is not a conversation confined to the HR team. It is a vital part of an organisation’s capability and capacity to deliver its core service to its clients and shareholders. Establishing a budget and getting a clear buy-in from the senior leadership team is a priority for all organisations.
Traditional methods don't do enough to improve employee engagement
Companies spend hundreds of millions a year improving employee engagement and experience. Yet, few employees remain genuinely engaged in their work. The simple answer: We’re going about it all wrong!
Traditional methods for raising engagement include:
- One-day workshops and mini-workshops
- Reemphasise core values and mission and remind leaders to model them
- Focus on internal communication
- Frequent employee engagement surveys
- Team away days
- Improving the onboarding process
- Offer professional development opportunities and carve out career paths
- Provide employees with flexibility
- Talk about enhancing connection, communication and collaboration
- Put the focus on leadership without offering sufficient training
Do these work? A little, but not really. Here’s why:
Occasional big positive experiences such as team away days and improving your onboarding process are great. They won’t make the necessary impact on people’s brains to override the daily adverse events in organisations.
The brain spends most of its time scanning for threat, risk or negativity, and these events are stored in a part of the brain for quick access – it’s a survival thing. When we experience positivity, the experiences get stored in more inaccessible areas, so positive events and experiences usually need to be experienced in smaller, more regular doses. This enables the brain to access them more readily and balance the effects of negativity.
The small daily gestures built around people’s habits and beliefs, like communication styles, register in people’s minds and counter the negativity. Employee engagement must go beyond a cool-looking football table in the break room or shiny incentives like flexible work hours or bringing your dog to workdays. It takes frequent small positive experiences to tip the balance toward happiness and not necessarily big irregular ones.
When we think about building engagement and a great place to work, having a large bonus, a promotion, or a big Christmas party will do nothing—it all comes down to people.
People drive real engagement
People’s habits, beliefs and behaviour. Whenever you want to focus on raising employee engagement, it has to involve a fundamental tangible shift in the way people think, feel and behave. Everyone in the organisation, not just leaders, managers, top talent and new joiners. It’s about the individual and how they interact as the collective. It’s all about your culture.
You have to start looking at people’s behaviours and habits within your culture, as they determine the experience of those working within that environment and, importantly, your clients. Those behaviours, mindsets, and thoughts either create a great culture or are responsible for creating a toxic one.
And if you think you’re already doing that by doing these:
- Building authentic relationships
- Encouraging collaboration
- Developing a people-focused culture
- Providing a nice environment
- Showing gratitude regularly
Think again. These are all great suggestions that miss one feature – action. These are all just words. How are you doing them all? Does it involve looking at how people think, feel and behave and getting your people to change? Or does it include lots of talking, policy changes and increasing knowledge? Programmes designed to get people to change require more.
Five policies to increase engagement in your organisation
1. Create a shared purpose and align it to company direction
No matter how large the number of people in your organisation, employees all need a shared purpose – not a mission statement but a purpose. Suppose you can find a way for them to be involved in that purpose statement and contribute to creating it – all the better.
2. Identity non – negotiable behaviours
As Royal Marines, we had values drilled into us from day one, but it was not just the words we learned. It was the associated behaviour we were expected to demonstrate that mattered. If we didn’t, it was challenged. Over the course of my eight years in the military, I rarely saw people get away with bad behaviour that was not aligned with the values of the organisation. It ensured standards and culture were always very strong and contributed toward performance and wellbeing, not impeding it, hence why it’s a very engaged workforce.
You can engage the majority to identify and establish a set of non-negotiable behaviours—not a bunch of meaningless values on the side of a wall but meaningful behaviours and actions that everyone can see happening. “This is how I’m supposed to behave at work, and this is how I expect my colleagues to behave at work.” It is simple but so important, and rarely is it done. It is often ignored but is the key to many high-performing, highly engaged cultures.
Reporting structures, management and operational processes, and measurement procedures will need to be consistent with the behaviour that people have embraced to ensure its maintenance and reward.
3. Regular 360-degree feedback for line managers and leaders with coaching support
People need to see the people they respect walking the walk rather than just talking about it. So, you will need to reinforce systems and structures to create a condition for real change and increased engagement. This can be achieved by using reporting structures that look down rather than just up. 360-degree feedback is vital to support growth, change management, and leadership behaviour.
4. Ensure engagement levels are owned by the leadership team and not an HR issue
Active buy-in is needed. Leadership and management must be aligned, and there must be complete “buy-in” and support from at least the senior leaders. If there is no full support, the program will be reduced to a sideshow, and employees will see little value. Point 3 will ensure that support is translated into action for you to see. Establishing a budget and clear buy-in from the senior leadership team is a priority for all organisations.
5. Invest in the right training programmes that deliver the skills, mindset and behaviour that drive engagement
The most important one. Any change needs more than vision and values on a wall—people’s instinctive repetitive habits, beliefs, and behaviours will either drive or drain energy and motivation. Growing engagement levels in your organisation and maintaining them is no different. It centres around the right thinking and behaviour. You have to give your people the skills to create the correct behaviour. We are all vulnerable to the same human factors that cause a drop-off in us all. To negate these human vulnerabilities, people need to be trained well.
By investing in employee engagement, your company will be able to increase productivity, work quality, and retain top talent while allowing your people to thrive professionally and personally and build happier, healthier, more-fulfilled homes and workplaces.
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Let me show you what I mean. How I would raise the engagement of my team?
1. Build team positivity and gratitude – it's a skill
Biologically, our brains are wired for the negative. Exposure to bad news and uncertainty means it can be even more challenging to focus on the good things we are grateful for. We have to work hard to beat our natural negativity bias and grab the good. Here’s how to do it:
Try opening your next meeting (either team or 1:1) by spending a few moments focusing on the good things that have happened that week. Ask people to share their thoughts first.
- “What are three things that have gone well this week?”
- “What are three things that are going well on this project?”
It is simple but highly effective. This is especially important if things are not going well. Bring the focus back to the good things that are.
2. Grow people's will to move forward
Different people put different amounts of energy into setting themselves stretched or challenging goals. Some people naturally like to push themselves, and others don’t. One person’s idea of a stretched goal is another’s idea of an impossible one. To someone else, it’s not stretched enough.
Setting stretched goals is a skill. Its benefits include higher confidence, the will to keep going and increasing their engagement. Critical in the face of change as organisations move from one milestone to the next. Get the stretch wrong, and people begin to disengage with stress, burnout and anxiety. It’s essential to recognise what each individual deems as a stretch and how it affects their response to change – for some, change is too big a stretch, and they suffer. For others, it may not be big enough.
Consider:
1. Do you set stretched goals for each person in the team?
2. Does the team have stretched goals?
3. Are they persistent, or do they give up too early?
4. Are they too big a stretch for some? If so, how can I better support them?
3. Spot and nurture team strengths
Within any team, there is diversity and a variety of strengths. Spotting and using others’ strengths allows you to capture team enthusiasm and confidence and help them realise their best. When a team works aligned to its individual strengths, it becomes less of a chore and a happier and more engaging environment to work in.
Strength spotting is not a process with a beginning and an end. Every day, people use a combination of strengths. Train yourself to always be on the lookout for the strengths others express and the strengths you notice in your interactions and conversations with them.
Strengths-spotting can happen at any time; the first step is to look out for them in others. This is a skill, and it needs to be deliberate. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Use a strengths finder – that’s an easy one
- Ask your team what their strengths are
- Look back at their previous tasks and activities. What strengths do you see when you take the time to look?
- Is there that “go-to” person that everyone takes advice from, or perhaps someone who always offers to mentor and train new people, or maybe the funny one?
Using and encouraging the strengths of others will build their confidence, self-worth, productivity and connection with you. Using people’s strengths to your advantage not only gets the job done quicker and to a higher standard, but it also develops stronger relationships. “My boss really gets me…!” In turn, they’ll become more engaged, more animated and happier. For example:
- If they like a joke, share a funny video with them
- If they have strong opinions, ask them their thoughts on anything
- If they enjoy things clean and tidy – do the washing up
- If you are doing something creative and you’re not, don’t just struggle; find someone who does!
These small things can make a big difference.
4. Communicate assertivley
Our communication styles consist of many different things: the words we use, our tone and our body language. But here is the thing: We’ve all been told the correct way to communicate, but knowing it is not enough. When our buttons are being pushed, it’s much easier to give in to our emotions, and before we know it, we either give in to someone else or become aggressive.
We all know the correct style of communicating is by being assertive. Polite yet firm and considerate of other people’s needs and emotions. The style gives us that essential win-win outcome. Communicating this way usually means saying to yourself, “I respect this person; we both matter, and we can work this out.” It shows inherently that you respect the individual, value their input and are committed to taking a genuine interest in what they say.
This mindset changes your behaviour, and communicating assertively comes naturally and easily. As a result of this mindset, your tone, the language you use and your body language will be non-threatening, reflect what you are saying to yourself in your head and enable a trusting, honest and strong relationship.
Use the table below to spot the behaviours associated with passive or aggressive communication in yourself and others. Once you spot them, you can stop them.
5. Ensure everyone takes regular breaks
Our brains don’t respond well to continuous data and stimulation. It becomes overloaded and impairs our ability to function and perform. It compromises accurate thinking, our ability to maintain perspective, our memory and even our willpower can go out of the window, and long-term planning becomes cloudy.
For some people, it can feel like the only way to get stuff done is to sit at their desk until they’ve done it—simply summon the willpower and crack on. But we know a secret: People’s brains can only focus on any given task for about 90 minutes at a time. Scientists call this the Ultradian Rhythm.
This is a natural rhythm that occurs throughout the day and affects everybody. Ninety minutes is about the amount of time someone can maintain high alertness, focus, and concentration before becoming less effective. Optimal performance requires regular rest breaks of 5-20 minutes every 90 minutes.
Want to keep people’s engagement high–ensure they have energy and don’t become too exhausted. Spending time and energy focusing on a task outside the 90-minute window becomes counterproductive. People get into a rut, and their inspiration and ideas run dry, often leading to frustration. They begin to lose focus and concentration and become much less effective. The signs are there if you choose to see them: irritability, the urge to fidget, lack of focus or clarity and even the odd tummy rumble.
Instead of pushing people into long periods of unproductivity, build their knowledge and confidence to get into the 90-minute chunk mindset. Leaders can model the correct behaviour by:
- Restricting meetings to less than 90-minutes
- Ensure they take lots of visible breaks
- Set realistic goals around the task in hand using the 90-minute chunks framework
You don't mess around with other strategic resources
Raising engagement is high on the agenda of many organisations as we face this period of uncertainty and change. It is a strategically vital part of an organisations capability and capacity to deliver its core service to its clients and shareholders. So don’t neglect it, underestimate it, measure it properly, and don’t opt for a tick box exercise.
