The Best Day
why employee engagement is so important
I read the latest Gallup study on The State of the Global Workplace. The first page notes the bad news immediately.
Gallup finds 60% of people are emotionally detached at work and 19% are miserable.
But is that a surprise, or a statistical explanation of the obvious?
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the writings of Pat Lencioni. He mostly writes business fables, but his book, The Advantage shows the correlation between organizational health and business results and lays out a structure for building healthy organizations. The core of the message is that healthy organizations have a clear vision, a leadership team aligned on that vision, and people who care. The Advantage dives heavily into why clarity and consistency in communicating the purpose and direction of an organization relate to health and results - and in my experience as a leader, it’s spot-on.
In They Win, You Win, Russ Laraway references Gallup research (from a few years ago) that shows that employee engagement (typically measured in company surveys with questions like, “Would you recommend <company> as a great place to work?”, and “Do you see yourself working at <company> in five years?”) is 17% world-wide (and 33% in the US) - which is horrifying…but also maybe not surprising when you consider all jobs that measure engagement. But more importantly, the Gallup study found that companies in the top quartile in employee engagement deliver 17 percent more profitability than those in the bottom.
…employee engagement is…17% worldwide (and 33% in the US)
Gallup State of the Workplace Survey - 2017
There is a mountain of research similar to Lencioni’s and the study from Gallup that support this. When employees are engaged, business is better.
It’s That Simple…or is it?
We know from research that our companies (and organizations and teams) perform better when they’re engaged in their work - so as leaders who want results from our teams, it has to make sense that we start with engagement.
The bulk of Laraway’s book explores what drives employee engagement - and specifically dives into “The Big 3” - Direction (mission or direction -similar to Lencioni - people want to know why their work is important), Coaching (people want frequent feedback) and Career (people want to feel like their managers care about their career). Or paraphrased:
Employees want to know why their work is important
Employees want feedback on how they’re doing
And employees want to know their manager cares about them and their career.
That’s it. In practice, it’s a lot more difficult than those three bullet points. If it was truly as easy as filling out three check boxes, work forces across the globe would be crushing it, profits would be soaring, and layoffs would be a myth.
But that’s not what’s happening.
In their most recent (that I could find) survey, Gallup found that the things leading to burnout and poor engagement were “unfair treatment at work”, followed by “an unmanageable workload, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressure”
Yes, you’re right - those smell a lot like manager issues - and it feels like managers who are focused on everything but employee engagement.
Why is it so Damn Hard?
It’s hard because it’s a people problem. Leading effective organizations isn’t done via blueprint. In order to help an employee understand why their work is important, we have to take time to get to know our employees. We need to build trust with them and help them find connections from their own lives to their missions at work. It requires empathy and listening and a whole lot of people skills.
But when we develop a relationship with our employees - and build trust and that’s when our feedback becomes so much more powerful. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott says that we need to Care Personally, and Challenge Directly. Positive and constructive feedback both mean so much more when there’s trust in the relationship.
The career conversation can be the most difficult - but maybe the most important thing to address from an engagement perspective. It’s really difficult for a lot of folks to know where their career is going. More often than not when I ask people about their career aspirations, I get some flavor of “I don’t know - I guess the stuff I’m doing now is fine”. But - it’s our role as leaders to dig deeper. Draw on the relationship we’ve built and help our team members discover what direction they may want to head. Sometimes - and this can be hard - the right way to help someone’s career is to help them find their next role, even if that role is at a different company.
For most of my time at Microsoft, we were hounded to retain and “re-recruit our top employees”. While the intent was sound, the implementation from many managers was to do whatever they could to make sure that their top employees wouldn’t move to another team at Microsoft. A better approach is to take what Reid Hoffman described in The Alliance, and instead of treating employees like they’re in a lifetime employment contract, create a “tour of duty” - a mutually beneficial agreement that focuses on achieving specific goals and developing skills that benefit both the employee and the company. When that tour of duty is over, either create a new one, or go your separate ways.
Just Start
“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
Source Unknown
As a leader, there are arguably just two things you need to do - communicate alignment, and enable the success of your team. Or, put another way, make sure your team knows what to do, and help them do it (via coaching and feedback).
Again - sounds easy, but it’s not.
Start by creating a mission for your team. Help your team understand why the mission is important. Get to know them. Give them feedback. Trust them. Try things, be vulnerable, let them know you care.
This is important critical stuff. Study after study shows that organizations with engaged employees outperform those without. I think a lot of orgs screw this up because they think it’s easy - or they want it to be easy, but it’s not. It’s an adaptive hairy mess that needs effort.
Make tomorrow the best day for your org. Then do it again the day after that. It’s absolutely worth the effort - just start.