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Employee engagement is relatively new to businesses and leadership through not as a concept but as a practice. This is one such topics where the industry studies, the findings and the research and all kinds of facts point to one direction whereas the practices that companies and organizations have are exactly the opposite. This is the gap that makes this topic so crucial and important to discuss, dissect and deconstruct.
A recent Gallop study pointed out that companies with higher levels of employee engagement are nearly 20% more profitable. So, if you are not focusing on employee engagement, you are losing out in the market. So, here is what I have to offer on this topic.
People feel engaged, employees feel engaged when they are challenged continuously to learn and grow, to solve better and bigger problems. Is this something that is happening inside your company, continuous learning, continuous growth or do you subscribe to “this is the way this is done here / there is no need to reinvent the wheel”?
People and employees also feel enabled when they know what is exactly expected out of them and they have access to the right tools, technology and resources to do their work to their fulfillment. Employees also feel empowered when they have the freedom to make their own decisions pertaining to their work and do not have to wait for approvals or green signals at every step of their journey.
Employees also feel enthused when they are not worried about failure. When they are free to explore new ways of doing things and experiment continuously knowing that their initiative, their curiosity is what is going to be rewarded always irrespective of the final outcome of the experiment.
Employees feel encouraged when their honest effort is appreciated and rewarded. And the reward need not be monetary all the time. A few words of appreciation, a constructive feedback delivered at the right time, with right emotions can go a long way in keeping the employees engaged.
Employees also feel engaged when they are influenced and not manipulated. Now a days a lot of managers use manipulation to get their jobs done. But the challenge with manipulation is that the results produced does not last long, because it is based on personal interest. Influence on the other hand produces long-lasting results because it is based on trust.
Another factor that is supremely important in terms of affecting the engagement levels and enthusiasm of employees is fairness. And I am sure a lot of you have heard about it and a few of you must have experienced the unfair practices some companies have. E.g. teams struggling continuously to meet a deadline that was promised to the customer by the sales team or the management team without consulting with them. Or e.g. a single team getting a lot of attention & recognition for a successful product launch, whereas the hard work & intensity put in by all other teams are either ignored or discounted heavily. Or a manager taking credit for his team’s hard work or initiatives. Or in general somebody else getting the credit for the work done by somebody else.
These are just a few examples, but I am sure there are a lot that could be added to this list. These small but seemingly insignificant practices have the potential to change employees who loved their jobs passionately to employees who hate their jobs passionately. And this in long-run leads to lower employee morale and performances that are not up to the company or the industry standard. Have you ever wondered how these seemingly bright and smart people who were offered to join the company after a robust and rigorous interview process became bad performers within a year or two? What happened here? What changed? These very people were star performers and top performers of the month or of the quarter when they joined and now after a year or two, they have become bad or average performers?
What happened here is they became disengaged. And probably this is the time where I should explain the three stages of employee engagement. Employees could be engaged at three different levels. First one is, the fully engaged employees, the second one is the partially engaged employees and third is disengaged employees.
Engaged Employees
These employees believe in the company, the work that is being done, in the company’s mission & vision, the customers, his team members & management. This is where he is totally engaged with his work. He puts in all the hard work required or expected from him. He wakes up every morning enthused and charged to go to office and impress by his work his team members, his manager at work. And in this state the duration of work does not matter – whether he is working 9 hours or 10 hours or 14 hours as the employee is in a state of complete engagement. In this state employees take initiatives and solve problems when they find one.
Partially Engaged Employees
In this state the employees do their work but their faith in the system is shaken. They bring themselves to work everyday but not their intellectual & emotional best, not their A game like the engaged employees. They also wake up every morning and go to office, do the work, but they are waiting for the 9 hours to end. Their focus is somewhere else which makes them distracted or disengaged from their work. They are doing their work but are not expecting any kind of help or support or feedback or appreciation from the system. Their faith in the system is shaken.
Partially engaged employees also do not take initiatives. They become problem reporters rather than problem solvers like the engaged employees.
In the engaged state, the employee believes that, “this is great, I should be part of this, I should be contributing to this” and he believes that my hard and honest work will not only be noticed, but also will be appreciated or rewarded. But in the partially engaged state the thought has changed to, “I am not really interested in what the management is saying or doing, I will just do my job and that should be it.” This is the shift that has happened from an engaged state to a partially engaged state.
The important thing to remember about partially engaged employees is that with a little bit of change in policy, a little bit of change in attitude of management, a little bit of change in the environment and a little bit of effort, partially engaged employees could be moved back to the pool of engaged employees. But if the employee has moved to the state of disengagement, then nothing can help.
Disengaged employees
These are employees who do not believe in the company any more. They are not worried about the company’s mission and vision, the management, the company policy, the customers, and even not in the work they are doing. These people have a lot of negative emotions inside them related to the job and the company. They wake up every morning asking questions like “why am I still doing this”? “How soon can I get rid of this job”? And these employees are actively looking for jobs outside.
Employee Engagement and Organizational Branding
Employees are the best brand ambassadors a company could ever have. In that context, engaged employees are your strong & positive brand ambassadors. These are people who not only discuss their work and their company in their sphere of influence, they refer the company in their sphere of influence creating new customers and bringing in fresh talent to the company.
Partially engaged employees are like neutral brand ambassadors of your company. They avoid discussing their work and their company in their sphere of influence.
But the disengaged employee acts as a strong negative brand ambassador for you. These employees talk everything negative about their job and their company in their sphere of influence, keeping potential customers and fresh talent out of the company’s reach. They are influential in creating a lot of negative publicity for the organization.
This is precisely why the leadership or management teams of organizations should be extra sensitive to the topic of employee engagement if they are sincerely concerned about the company’s brand image, its growth and success.
Now as a solution to all this what I propose is a simple and robust framework of employee engagement named, 5E Framework of Employee Engagement™. This framework plays a crucial role in attaining higher levels of employee engagement and retention. I believe that the job of the leadership/executive team of any company or organization is to create an environment where the employees feel Empowered, Enabled, Engaged, Enthused and Encouraged every single day.
Employees should feel engaged by getting to do things they love to do and things that are aligned with their strengths. They should feel empowered to make their own decisions pertaining to the work they are doing. They should feel enabled by having access to the right tools, technology, forums, and resources they need to do their work efficiently and effectively. They should feel encouraged to experiment continuously to find new, better, efficient & effective ways to solve problems and create value for their customers, management, team members and for the entire company. They should feel enthused by receiving words of appreciation and constructive feedbacks given at the right time, delivered with the right emotions.
This framework has worked for organisations of all sizes and across geographies leads to creation of hi-performing teams and culture within the company which translates into increased employee engagement, productivity, efficiency and profitability.
Hope you too can take advantage of this framework now and harness the standard benefits it provides.
I would love to hear from you about your experience around employee engagement. What does engaged employees mean to you? Have you ever tried to find out the engagement level of your employees or team members before? Have you ever noticed a disengaged or partially engaged employee? If yes, what are some of the steps you have taken to deal with disengaged employees, and have you ever successfully converted a partially engaged employee back to a fully engaged employee? What are some initiatives your organization has taken recently or in the past to improve employee engagement and what was the result of those initiatives?
Do share your thoughts and experiences below.
Credits
Photo Credit - Image bySebastian ŠoškafromPixabay
