Employee Engagement - tips to empowering your employees to choose ‘engaged’

In my last article, I explored the need for a new, practical definition of employee engagement where the individual employee is the key component within the larger

employee engagement equation. I also explained how this definition has provided the focus for our approach to engaging employees and for the Etimes2 Engagement Building Platform.

I finished my article by talking about the importance of cultivating the ground on which you

intend to sow the seeds of engagement. In other words, we need to get each individual involved and taking some responsibility for their own engagement levels. This is not to say

the individual has caused themselves to be disengaged (the biggest causes are typically line management and organisational culture).

Why do you need to ‘cultivate the ground’ – you have an engagement strategy in place? As explained in my previous article, employees who are less than engaged have developed a set of learned behaviours and expectations at work. For example, if their experience is that they are never listened to, why would they expect this to change now? A top down engagement strategy, no matter how good it is, will struggle to change these perceptions. It is these very perceptions that cause the individual to look at the strategy and think something like ‘so what’, ‘another one, as if the last one made a difference’ etc. Only the individual employee can decide to give the top down engagement strategy a fair chance or to be more productive, or contribute more. This suggests that there is a shared responsibility in developing an engaged workforce – shared between the individual and his/ her employer. This shared responsibility is to build engagement. Responsibility for the cause of disengagement isn’t shared so readily, however. When employees are disengaged, the organisation needs to take this as very valuable feedback on various aspects of working there including management culture, working

environment, team/organisational identity and pride, and value among many others. We

will look at this closer in a future article because it is an important issue where your approach could either build engagement or drive it beyond recovery. The key point to make

here is that the organisation needs to take full responsibility for disengagement being present and seek to identify the causes – pointing the finger of blame is only going to create more disengagement. Then the organisation can start to put measures in place to rectify

the engagement issues and work on providing an environment where individuals can feel comfortable in taking some responsibility for their own engagement.

So, how do you create an environment where employees are able and prepared to take

some responsibility? The five steps outlined below are good first steps along this path as they outline how you need to approach engagement and how it needs to be embedded

within the DNA of your organisation rather than simply being something that is good to do for now. Your commitment to employee engagement will impact on the success of your

engagement strategies.

The bottom line of all this is you want as many of your employees as possible to choose “engaged”. This choice will be a decision to put in a little extra effort or, to approach work more positively and not focus on the negatives, or simply to view the company engagement

strategy without scepticism. There are many forms this choice can take. The form each person chooses doesn’t matter that much. What matters most is that the choice to be more

engaged reflects even a small step change in the individual’s perception of what it is like to work for your organisation, how they are valued and the role they play in its success. This

perception is key.

5 Steps to Cultivate the Ground

1. Engagement is an ethos, not a strategy

Building an engaged workforce is best when the commitment to engagement runs deeper within the DNA of the company. The engaged ethos is about an honest and

sincere belief in the value and ability of your employees and their commitment to the company. The building of an engaged workforce starts in earnest when

employees can see this belief. All the other things linked to your strategy – e.g. a pool table, hanging out together and so on – are fun and good. They don’t mean a

thing, however, if employees don’t feel valued.

2. Engagement is a personal experience

It is vital to understand and accept that each person’s engagement with their employer is personal. It is based on the individual’s experience of the working

environment to date. A successful engagement strategy needs to find a way to tap into these individual perceptions and feelings and enable the organisation to learn

from them. Etimes2 provides our clients with an engagement building platform that

builds engagement at an individual level, giving our clients the tools to tap into individual perceptions and impact on these.

3. Not a one size fits all Leading on from engagement being a very personal experience, it is clear that a one

size fits all engagement strategy will have limited impact. People are unique and a one size fits all strategy will have its impact limited by individual perception and

experiences. People also like to feel that they have some control over how we feel and how we work. Therefore, the strategy needs to consider how the organisation

can connect with individuals throughout the workforce and develop an approach to engagement that answers the “what’s in it for me?” question. If you can do this,

perhaps by giving individuals more chance to contribute to decision making and problem solving and enhancing how you communicate, then you are starting to tap

into the individual. We all want to feel valued, important and that our contribution matters. We all like to be asked.

4. The engagement ethos starts with communication

It is about honest and sincere communications and giving individual employees opportunities to get involved and contribute to success. Some of the key elements within your engagement strategy dealing with communication is how authentic and sincere communications are. Are you communicating what you are going to do? The authenticity and sincerity of your communications is the first step to giving individual employees new positive experiences. These positive experiences will build their efficacy at work and start altering their perception to one of ‘you know, this might just offer me something or I’ll give it a go’ rather than 'so what'.

5. Make it easy for people to get involved and contribute What makes people intrinsically engaged and happy at work? Is it a pool table? Or the permission to decorate their workstation?

Not really. These type of activities and provision are fun and add to a happy environment. However, if you are sitting at your brightly decorated desk looking

forward to a game of pool at lunchtime, but you still get the feeling that you are just a number with little value, then you are unlikely to be intrinsically engaged. These

activities don’t create an engaged environment.

Your engagement strategy needs to make it easy for people to get involved, to give their opinion, and feel that they make a valuable contribution to the success of their organisation – not just in terms of the work they do and number of units produced. But also in how they contribute to decision making and problem solving in the organisation. Your engagement strategy needs to exist for the purpose of intrinsically connecting your employees to your organisation and to empower them to make greater contributions to your success. Fortunately, technology, like Etimes2, has made this possible and relatively simple to achieve.

How does your employee engagement strategy connect individual employees to the

organisation and drive greater contribution?

Nigel McPolin is the creator and founder of Etimes2, an Engagement Building Platform that drives sustained behaviour, engagement and performance throughout the organisation. Visit www.etimes2.com for more information and a free trial.