Recognizing and Engaging Employees For Dummies. Nelson Bob

organization.

       Employee development

      Although all development is self-development – that is, employees have to have the ambition, motivation, and skills to want to learn new things in their jobs – your employee engagement strategies should incorporate development opportunities for employees. In most organizations, the role of employee development increasingly falls to one’s manager, with the human resources and training and development departments providing guidance as needed.

      

Employees are more likely to invest in an organization that invests time, energy, training, and so on in them. Career development is the way individuals manage their career paths. It requires the involvement of their managers and others in the organization to help structure opportunities for their learning and growth. Career development is thus a collaborative effort between the organization and the employee that, ultimately, creates greater engagement.

       Employee recognition

      Employee recognition is fundamental to ongoing support and motivation of any individual employee or group. As I explain in the upcoming chapters, the key to driving an engagement culture is to systematically recognize employees based on their performance. Although money and other forms of compensation are important to employees, what tends to motivate them to perform at their highest levels are the thoughtful, timely, personal kinds of recognition that signify true appreciation for a job well done. Yet managers and organizations struggle to create an organizational culture that systematically recognizes employee performance when it happens. This book will help you to address that challenge.

      Employee recognition programs are quickly becoming one of the fastest growing areas of talent management and a key driver of business success.

      I discuss employee recognition extensively throughout this book, and I examine the link between recognition and employee engagement much more thoroughly in Chapter 3.

Why Employee Engagement Is So Elusive

      As indicated in the introduction of this book, the percentage of engaged employees in the workforce has remained roughly constant at about 30 percent for at least the last 20 years, even though an increasing amount of time, energy, focus, and financial investment has been exerted annually to expand that percentage. Why is this?

      Assuming that organizations sincerely do care about their employees and not just about business success and profits, four reasons come to mind: 1) measured engagement variables are too intangible and subjective, 2) the focus of corrective actions are misplaced, 3) one size does not fit all, and 4) the management of change is too complex.

       Measured variables are too intangible

      Assessing engagement often involves measuring intangible variables, such as employee perceptions, and this may explain why engagement has lagged. Measuring individual perceptions is a slippery slope. The scoring is subjective and can vary due to many circumstances, yet the aggregate scores are treated as objective facts.

      How do you systematically impact employees’ perceptions of engagement variables like "At work, my opinions seem to count." A company can do 100 things that it hopes will impact employees’ perceptions with no guarantees that any of those efforts will work. Quite likely, the company would need to do different things for different people to get a more favorable response. One person may just need to have a comment validated by a manager or executive ("Great insight, Gary!"), while another employee may not believe his opinion counts until a manager acts on the input or idea that was provided.

      These observations may explain why organizations are moving away from traditional engagement surveys as the primary means of managing engagement strategies. Although surveys are a valuable way to gauge engagement levels, they do not always yield the kind of information that enables organizations to improve their recognition and engagement efforts. In Chapter 8, I talk more about how to measure recognition and engagement in meaningful and useful ways.

       Corrective actions are misplaced

      Measuring one set of variables but then focusing elsewhere to try to impact those variables seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly how most engagement strategies are structured. Placing the onus of action on the organization and its management rather than the employees themselves with managerial support is a no-win proposition.

      Suppose, for example, that you ask employees, “Are you using your full potential at work?” and they report, “No, I am not.” How can any manager alone fix that situation? Any potential solutions will at best be a guessing game, and it makes it a little too easy for employees to report, “No, you still haven’t got it right – try again” the next time they are surveyed.

      Notice how the picture changes if you recast the question to, “Are you taking measures to use your full potential at work?” The focus for change is now on those individuals whose negative perceptions were the driving force behind your decision to take action to begin with.

      A better strategy is to focus on the behaviors you want to see more of in employees. You can do that by systematically recognizing and reinforcing behaviors that have the greatest impact on this particular variable.

      

When writing your engagement survey questions, consider changing the focus of the questions from being passive to being active so that the questions focus more on your employees’ actions. Instead of a statement like, “I’m given adequate information on issues of importance to my job by management,” include this statement: “I seek the information I most need to do my job.” This rewording puts employees front and center in driving those variables you are most trying to impact. Unless you place focus on the actions of those who are reporting the need, you’ll end up chasing potential solutions indefinitely.

       One size does not fit all

      Another challenge of engagement programs is the tendency to have a one-size-fits-all approach to engagement and, particularly, to recognition. Companies put in cool programs to drive engagement that are created around the things the person or committee planning the programs finds motivating. Yet, research shows that no motivation strategy or incentive tends to appeal to more than 40 percent of a typical company’s employee population. And often, the organization only has the budget to create a recognition program that can appeal to 70 percent of the employee population.

      Engagement strategies thus need to be individualized around the personal motivations of each employee, and every manager needs to make the necessary connection with those employees that report to him or her. If you hire a workforce that is universally motivated and engaged by the same approach, that is great, but when does that ever happen in real life? Many companies assume everyone is motivated equally by the same things (such as greater pay), which we know is not the case at all.

       Management of change is too complex

      As you look at the key factors that impact employee engagement (refer to the earlier section “Looking at Factors Impacting Employee Engagement”), they are each relatively clear and are elements that you can easily focus on for improvement. Often, however, managers and executives make two key mistakes:

      ✔ Over-complicating these issues, sometimes to the point of measuring one thing but focusing on something completely different as a potential solution.

      ✔ Being too ambitious about what they can really change in any given time period.

      The result of these errors? The impact of any actions taken become blurred or diminished, and the degree of complexity explodes. The problem is compounded when you overlay the solution on your organization’s annual planning and budgeting process, and the speed of change grinds to a halt.

      To combat these tendencies, select one thing to focus on and do it right. Clearly focus on a critical area for improvement and then strive to make true inroads in changing that dimension. You’ll move much closer to being a culture of engagement if you do a deep dive on just one