Announcing our engagement

They say romance sells so to get your attention the title of this story was about as close as I could get to something racy without breaking our code of ethics.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an article about a love affair in the office but an article about employee engagement, which I find almost as exciting. I want to explore exactly what it is, why we hear about it so much, why it matters and what we can learn from it to help our own career journeys.

Employee engagement theory sets out what an organisation needs to do to attract people, retain them, develop them and then make sure that they do their best each working day for their colleagues and their customers by aligning every activity with the organisational strategy. Why? Because organisations that effectively engage their people consistently outperform their peers.

However, this simple idea has often become lost in the layers of initiatives that organisations pile onto their people. I also think we have never really paid enough attention to the power each employee holds to engage themselves, make themselves successful and, thereby, make the organisation that employs them successful. So, I want to introduce the idea of self-engagement and to start thinking about it as a tool for career success.

Back in 1994, when I was working at one of the UK’s first community-wide recycling centres and the Channel Tunnel linking the UK and France first opened, Harvard Business Review quietly published a transformational paper about a new concept called the Service Profit Chain.

The editor describes it as a ‘simple, elegant, and ultimately tough-minded way to build profitability in a service business.'

In a nutshell, this article, for the first time, set out overwhelming evidence that if you provide excellent internal service to your employees, you will be better placed to improve what they then called employee satisfaction, which then drives retention and enhanced productivity. This, in turn, generates value for customers - building customer loyalty, revenue growth and profitability. The organisation then has the resources to reinvest in further improvements to internal service quality. And so, the virtuous cycle continues.

For me, this is the birth of employee engagement, although we didn’t call it that until much more recently, and at the time I was too busy working out mechanical techniques for separation of mixed household waste to notice.

But, nearly 30 years on, employee engagement has become a thing. It’s real, recognised, valued and organisations invest heavily to improve it - often having people who are solely responsible for it.

In our modern world of work there is an undeniable logic to this model. Our instincts and everyday experiences in the workplace tell us this way of doing things must be true. It has, to a certain extent, become normalised. And that is testament to the robustness of the initial research.

But, sadly, this doesn’t mean that organisations know how to implement it properly. Employee engagement remains something most organisations are striving to achieve. For many, it remains elusive, not least because employee expectations are changing all the time and just when you think you have hit the target, it has moved.

Employee engagement today, in its simplest terms, describes the relationship between an organisation and its people. An engaged employee is seen as someone who is enthusiastic about their work and their employer and one who takes positive action to further the organisation’s interests, reputation and performance, knowing that these actions will, ultimately, be of benefit to them as individuals. By definition, a disengaged employee is one who at best coasts or at worst causes disruption.

Engaged employees will invariably share the same values as their employer. The motivations to do good work are born out of the fact that the employee cares about their work because their employer cares about the same things they do. There is a common cause. In practice this means engaged employees will, among other things, innovate more, take better care of assets, mitigate risk, look after customers well, be more productive, follow safety practices, stay longer and manage others effectively. And the ultimate prize, they will become advocates for their organisation, boosting the brand and recommending good people to join. Who doesn’t want people like that around?

On this point about employee referrals we need to explore why it matters so much. Recent research shows that referred employees have much higher conversion rates on application, their retention rates are higher and so are their engagement and, in turn, advocacy rates. People like people like themselves, so an organisation’s diverse people recommending their friends often leads to more good people joining. And the whole hiring cost, which can be expensive when agencies are involved, is much reduced.

So, engaged employees are good to have. Disengaged, not so much. Which is why organisations are focused on it. The organisation then rewards these people, not because they are engaged per se, but because they repeatedly make good things happen.

But at this point to provide some specificity and useful guidance we must ask the question, engagement in what, exactly?

My years of experience in this field tell me that it starts and ends with an employee understanding their organisation’s strategy and making sure that they know what actions they need to take to drive it. This applies to every single employee, no matter what their role. It applies to you. And if they cannot see how their tasks further the cause of the business, they should ask to be shown and if they are still not convinced, then they should stop doing them.

Many of us will have heard the perhaps apocryphal story of the cleaner at NASA in the 1960s, who, when asked what their job was, responded by saying that they were helping to put people on the Moon. If this is true, then we might say that this person was the model of an engaged employee who understood and was motivated by their employer’s higher purpose. My question to you is what is your ‘putting people on the Moon moment’? Because finding that and being motivated by it will be your sustaining nourishment through every trial and tribulation, we all inevitably face at one time or another.

Engaging employees in the strategy and higher purpose so they feel personally implicated in its success is the single most effective thing an organisation can do by way of engagement. And I am sorry to say that everything else is tinsel by comparison.

Let me give you an example. Through my time at work, I have heard much talk about internal customers. Let me tell you, no one has internal customers. We may have colleagues with whom we must work productively and for whom we must provide great service. But customers are the ones paying for the product or service. Many people in corporate functions, particularly, lose sight of this and think, mistakenly, that if they provide good service to their internal customers then their responsibility is done. It isn’t. They must do both: provide great service to their colleagues with a clear understanding of how this benefits the paying customer. Without that knowledge, they are not properly aligned to the organisational strategy or the improved performance of the organisation. The Service Profit Chain tells us this.

If you look around you, it is my assertion that you will see many similar such examples every day, all conspiring to tear you away from your direct link to driving strategy. It’s not deliberate, it’s just organisations tend to forget how important that link is and inadvertently put stuff in the way.

A final point on language. Satisfaction in the context we are discussing here is not the same as engagement, although often the words get used in the same breath. Some may seek my defenestration for saying so, but satisfaction matters not one iota at work. It is completely possible to be totally satisfied but utterly disengaged - think people who pick up their pay cheque each month but actually left years ago. In fact, the word ‘satisfied’ implies passivity at work. Who wants to just be satisfied? We spend so much time working shouldn’t we demand much more than that?

I want, finally, to explore what power we each have as employees over our own engagement. Organisations are focused on doing it to their people, when it seems to me that the real power comes when we take it upon ourselves to self-engage. After all, by self-engaging we can take back control of our own destiny.

Imagine, for a moment, working for an organisation whose values are different from yours. The organisation, for example, cares about and rewards speed, bravery, risk taking and profit. Your values are more aligned to ethical working, inclusion, sustainable performance and community. Of course, you might say this would never happen given such divergence. But it does. It happens a lot in the workplace, because these things get missed out in the recruitment process or one side or both convince themselves other things matter more.

Then one day, to better engage you, you are subjected to the dreaded change programme that aims to inculcate you, and everyone else, with the organisation’s values. At which point the psychological contract between employee and employer inevitably starts to fray. How could it not? Having values imposed on you can be a desperately uncomfortable and even damaging place to be in any walk of life. At work, it can quickly build disenfranchisement and resentment.

Unwritten psychological contracts are made through all sorts of things such as the recruitment process, opportunities for growth, the behaviours of line managers and leaders, the way in which the organisation communicates with you, how you are rewarded and how you are treated when you decide to leave. But the cause of disengagement, in my experience, is usually far simpler than this.

Someone once told me that people join an organisation but leave their line manager. I’ll let you ponder this thought for yourselves, as to its veracity. But what I would say is that a line manager’s poor behaviour or performance will disengage you faster than pretty much anything else. So, what to do if this is where we find ourselves?

If you feel disengaged, then you should revisit your original motivations and recognise that the higher purpose is bigger than any obstacles you will invariably find at work, including a dysfunctional line manager. However, if your higher purpose for coming to work is not enough to sustain you through challenging times, then you need to make sure you deploy your best followership skills to help see you through. And, if that fails, then you should think about moving on. We rarely talk about leaving an organisation as being okay, but it is a positive action which should be celebrated as a valid and proactive choice if all else fails.

So, in best followership tradition, engaging yourself means looking for that all-important link between what you do and your organisation’s strategy. I know it can sometimes be hard to find, especially in super-sized organisations, but find it you must.

It means looking for opportunities to align your values with those of your employer. To find your values, spend some time thinking about the things that matter most to you in life and keep asking yourself why they matter. And then ask why again, until you get to single words. Hopefully your organisation has clearly articulated values. If it doesn’t, ask why not. After all, values help organisations and people make decisions. How can they make good decisions if they don’t know what they value?

It also means speaking up when things don’t feel right and understanding the risks to which your organisation is exposed and doing your bit to mitigate them. These aren’t solely the responsibilities of senior leaders or risk management professionals. They are yours too.

Engaging yourself means supporting the corporate responsibility efforts of your employer and playing your part to support the communities in which you operate. It means doing what you can to include yourself in the fabric of the organisation and looking for ways to progress by deploying your skills and experiences. It means taking good care of your work-life balance and, ultimately, it means looking for ways for you to become an advocate of your organisation. What would have to be true for you to say to your best friend that where you work is simply superb and you would have no hesitation in recommending it as a good place to work?

In short, self-engagement means taking back control of all the key areas of employee engagement on your own terms and at your own speed. And ideally faster than perhaps everyone around you might expect.