13 May TSLH #019: 4 Steps To Improve Employee Engagement
Read time: 4 minutes
In the recent months, I have witnessed many colleagues or friends quitting their jobs. In virtually all cases, what they described to me is a need to refocus on what matters to them, their values and beliefs. They did not find that kind of resonance at work anymore.
When I dug further, it struck me that the main reason behind their decision to quit their jobs is that they did not feel engaged, neither with their team, nor with their organization or their manager.
I cannot blame them. Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report” that measures employee engagement around the world highlighs very concerning data:
- Around the world, only 21% of employees are engaged at work.
- Numbers remain consistent if you look at male vs. female (20% vs. 23% feel engaged) or whether people are older or younger than 40 (23% vs. 20% feel engaged).
- The US and Canada are the countries where employees feel the most engaged, with 33%.
- Europe is the region in the world where employees feel the least engaged, with an average 14%.
And I could go on and on with statistics.
The dire reality is this: People do not feel engaged at work. Period.
The reason is simple: Leadership is failing big time!
Leadership is failing because we, leaders, do not do the right things to have our employees feel engaged at work.
The battle is not lost though. I am giving you 4 steps you can implement immediately to improve employee engagement in your team and organization.
Measure what matters. As leaders, we all tend to focus on and define metrics that seem to be the most appropriate for the team or the organization to achieve the goals that are set. The problem is that more often than not, these metrics do not align at all with what people need – what matters most to them – or with their performance.
I once took over a team from another manager and was shocked to see that the key metric the team was measured on was how many words each person could type on a keyboard per minute.
It may look like an interesting and motivating goal to have when you are a typist. My problem was, my team was a team of financial analysts!
Needless to say, engagement on the team was very low, only because the metrics used to define the team success were not aligned with people’s needs, nor what their performance goals were, i.e., to produce accurate financial reporting and analysis.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the idea is not to define goals or metrics that always align to what matters most to people. This is just not possible. Corporations have enterprise wide goals and imperatives and the metrics associated with them will not always seem inspiring to everyone. Nor will they always seem to tie to the team’s ultimate performance.
However, here are some things you can do to measure what matters:
- Translate any corporate-wide goal into something that is relevant for your team, that aligns with how their performance should be measured, and possibly that aligns with what matters to them when they work.
- Let the team and each person in the team have some more personal goals and metrics that can still be tied to their performance, but that will fulfill their need for growth and development for instance (e.g., training they need to develop a new skill, etc.)
Let me give you a quick example. In my company, one of the imperatives/corporate goals is to provide the best experience to the end customer. Now, when you’re in Finance, most people will initially feel detached from such a goal for multiple reasons: Finance is a back-office function, people are not dealing directly with end customers, etc. The key here is then to find a goal that ties to how the performance of the team should be measured and that indirectly contributes to improved customer experience. For instance, ensuring rapid turnaround time when preparing budgetary quotes.
Act swiftly. The #1 challenge I observe in many organizations is that employees are regularly surveyed and asked about what goes well and what does not go so well in the organization. Results are then analyzed. Leadership agrees that they are some pain points and talk about putting an action plan together. And then, efforts falter, nothing happens, and in the next survey cycle, employees report that nothing has changed.
Acting on things that people report don’t go well in the organization seems like a no brainer. Very few organizations act though. This is a pity, because Gallup found that employees are on average 1.9 times more engaged when their organizations act on survey results.
A typical example I see is employees giving feedback through a survey that they lack opportunities to learn and develop or they just don’t have time to train. I can guarantee that very often, one of the following two things will happen in these same organizations:
- People are laid off because the company does not generate profitable growth. And despite the usual motto “Employees are our #1 asset”, almost every company starts saving by doing massive layoffs. So now, the remaining employees have more things to do with less people, meaning they are even more remote from finding time for their own growth and development.
- When needing to generate cost savings, the first items that will be cut off or strongly reduced in many companies are leadership or other development programs. This means that employees will have even less opportunities to grow and develop.
Here’s a tool/model that you can use to act swiftly on any feedback that you get from your employees. I call it The Accountability Card.
Here’s how to use that model:
- Pick a pain point, challenge or anything that was flagged as a problem that employees have in the organization.
- Once you have identified the key pain point on your team, start a discussion with the people to ask for more feedback, get clarity on what is meant.
- Based on these findings, come up with 2 actions you will implement immediately. These actions are things that you must be in control of. An action cannot be “I’ll talk about this to our president.” An action must rather be “I’ll implement this from next week.”
- Set 3 progress checks to measure yourself against the actions you have decided to implement.
- After a month, do a feedback session with the team to check whether what has been implemented works. Gather feedback: What works vs. does not work, what are remaining challenges, etc.?
- Once you have achieved your goal with this pain point, start with the next one.
During that entire process, the key thing is to keep communication open – both ways – so people know what you do, and that what you do ties to their feedback in the survey.
Below is the template I use for The Accountability Card. Feel free to reuse it as you need.
Engage Regularly. One common mistake leaders make is to assume that creating engagement happens during the annual performance review or sporadically, through some meetings. The reasoning is we talk about engagement, people feel more engaged, and that’s it. Done!
This could not be further from the truth. Employees need to see ongoing effort done by their leaders to feel engaged. They need to feel an ongoing purpose and development opportunities. Just celebrating a few wins here and there, or giving some quick reasons to feel engaged once or twice a year won’t get you there.
One of the best ways to engage your people regularly is to ask them questions. There are 2 ways you can think of this exercise.
On the one hand, you can use any 1-1 meeting or any regular team meeting to ask a few questions to the people on your team and see how they are engaged. Some questions I recommend using are for instance:
- Do you know what is expected from you at work?
- What are you missing (material, equipment, etc.) to have everything you need to do your work right?
- How do you think the people on the team are committed to doing quality work?
- What do you need from me to feel more engaged at work?
The Gallup q12 questions from which I drew some of the questions above are a set of questions that Gallup says are very predictive of employee engagement. Use them as often as you can.
On the other hand, you can take a more coaching-driven approach. Marshall Goldsmith, the most reputable executive coach in the world, suggests to turn things around. He proposes that instead of asking “What has the company done to make you feel engaged at work?”, one should ask for instance “On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest), did you do your best to be fully engaged at work?”
Empower managers. The biggest misconception in organizations is that employee engagement is a responsibility of HR, or something that must come from the top. While the latter certainly has some truth to it (it is always better to see top executives leading by example), the reality is that employee engagement is largely the responsibility of direct managers. In fact, the Gallup survey finds that managers account for 70% of the variation in employee engagement.
If you have a team large enough that you manage other managers, then you should set clear expectations that it is the responsibility of any manager on the team to effectively interact with and develop each member of the team, to ensure everybody feels engaged. There is just no work around that. This is also not a quick fix. Engagement happens because a manager spends time with their people. If that does not happen, then engagement is not there.
This is largely the reason why I keep telling clients, other leaders, and anyone who does not want to listen to the message that a good leader is someone who spends at least 50% of their time caring for the people on their team. If you are a manager of a team, and you spend 5-10% of your time caring for your people – and you may have plenty of fallacious excuses for that: I have important meetings, I need to work on A or B, etc. – then, (1) you are not a good manager, and (2) you will never create engagement.
So, there is only one truth as far as employee engagement is concerned: Leaders are 100% responsible for the engagement or lack thereof of the people on their teams. There is nobody else to blame for the lack of engagement we are facing nowadays.
The question is: What do YOU want to do about it?
I wish you a great read. I’ll see you next Saturday!
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
4 steps to improve employee engagement
- Measure what matters.
- Act swiftly.
- Engage regularly.
- Empower managers.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
2️⃣ Hire me to help you build a high-performing team.
3️⃣ Start with my affordable digital courses on Mastering Difficult Conversations for Leaders and Goal Setting