Ever visited a business that has a buzz about it? A workplace where the managers and staff have a sense of excitement and commitment to where their business is heading; where there is a loyalty to the company, with a focus on satisfying the customer. It is rare to find, and often transient, lasting for only a short period in an organisation’s life. The challenge of building and maintaining such an engaged workplace has risen up the corporate agenda over the last few years.  According to recent research by Gallup, employees with the highest levels of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave. And that’s the aim of these corporations – to better engage their staff to achieve that kind of commitment.

Why? Over the last few years, in their quest for growth or turnaround, some businesses have re-engineered themselves whilst having a blind spot regarding human motivation. One consequence of this has been the emergence of overly narrow functional roles that provide lower job satisfaction, which in turn leads to lower customer satisfaction and, ultimately, lower revenues. The impact on employees has been to leave them disengaged and run ragged by changes to their work, which forces them to work harder and faster.

The rise and fall and rise again of employee engagement
For businesses that are feeling the consequences of their own actions through a demotivated, underperforming workforce, senior managers are looking at engagement strategies that will remotivate and retain them. But of course, this is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, especially when dealing with the younger generations x,y and z, who are demanding greater flexibility in lifestyle, and have less allegiance to any one organisation. This breakdown in the traditional psychological contract has been well-documented. But tapping into the potential energy and innovation of the newer generations can be truly rewarding, as Portia Hickey’s article on the intrapreneur testifies.

Senior management have long struggled with this.  Striking the right balance with getting their people on side and getting the job done is not easy. To rectify this imbalance, businesses have periodically attempted to engage staff in various ways to improve business success. The quality circles of the ’70s and the empowerment era of the ’80s were two examples that rose in popularity, only to gradually fade away. But it was only when the ‘Service Profit Chain’ research came out in the mid-1990s that we saw a further push for getting employees on side. This research quantified what common sense tells us: that employee satisfaction drives retention, productivity and service value that drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, which ultimately drives profitability and growth.

Getting the balance right
So what are businesses doing about this? We have observed a range of initiatives for improving business performance and engaging employees. Applying Peter Farey’s model described in Mapping the Leader/Manager to the engagement debate (see Diagram 1), we can map on the various attempts of engagement to the two dimensions of leadership style (transformational or transactional) and the manager’s focus (people or task). The leadership dimension questions whether you are seeking a shift in strategic direction and so need your workforce to understand and buy-in to this, or whether you are seeking to make continuous improvements to what you are delivering. On the other hand, the management focus dimension questions whether you are focused on your employees, or on the task. By looking at the four extreme directions that can be taken here, demonstrates where businesses can go wrong (see Fixing Common Mistakes below).

Applying positive psychology to the world of work
So how then do we gain that balance of people and task that engages in a more pragmatic way that in turn delivers financial value for the business? The more recent positive psychology movement encourages us to enable staff to find meaning in their work, and therefore life. This is achieved through enabling employees to see how they are delivering added value to customers and how this improves the life of others.  This can be achieved from one of two approaches that have emerged over the last few years:

Source: Adapted from Peter Farey - Mapping the Leader/Manager

Transformationally-driven
The transformational approach seeks to engage employees in defining the vision, values and strategic direction of the company, with a balance of people and task focus. Getting this balance right is not easy, as a company’s direction cannot be designed by committee. Determining the right mix of top-down direction and bottom-up contribution is vital for this – something that ER Consultants can help to deliver. The values-driven approach as described in Paolo Moscuzza’s article, All Aboard, is one way of delivering this.

Transactionally-driven
The main proponent of this approach is that of lean management. This seeks to create a management culture that supports continuous improvement, driven by the employees. This is achieved by applying change management techniques to ensure there is buy-in and understanding as to why the company needs to change, and providing a set of tools that enable teams to specify what creates value for the customer, remove non-value-added activities, and allows the customer to pull products through the system, rather than have them pushed out to them. This approach motivates employees to seek out efficiencies as they aim to benefit, rather than suffer because of them. Producing an environment that is conducive to encouraging continuous improvement is explored further in Chris Legge’s article, Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie! on discretionary effort.

Defining your engagement strategy
Before you can decide which engagement approach will work best for your organisation, you need to not only recognise the different groups of employees that may require different engagement strategies, but also be aware of what phase your business is in. In ER Consultants’ experience, the early growth focused phase often requires an innovative, dynamic leadership that engages with the workforce to ensure they remain singularly focused on driving that growth.  Here a more transformational approach that provides a strong sense of purpose in venturing into new territory, may work better. In the later market-focused phase, you’ll require a more sensitive understanding of your customer segments and how you can meet their needs. This may need greater engagement with staff in the construction of the strategy of the business, so they can understand the connection between vision, values and strategic direction. But in the mature operations-focused phase where you seek continual efficiency gains, you’ll require the workforce to be motivated to find, disclose and implement these improvements. Here a more lean driven approach may be more appropriate, as it requires the involvement of your staff in mapping out how work can be delivered more efficiently.

Creating a business that has a buzz about it, where the managers and staff have a sense of excitement and commitment to where the business is heading is, without a doubt, challenging. But by building and adapting your engagement strategy that matches the phase your business is in, ensures you will never be far from having that engaged workforce.

For more information contact:  gary.ashton@erconsultants.co.uk

Fixing Common Mistakes that Disengage Employees

Transformational & Task Focused – “Re-engineering the soul out of jobs”
With a passionate focus on taking costs out and radically improving efficiencies, promises have been made to build efficiency through re-engineering work processes/outsourcing chunks of business. Success, however, is rare, with 75% failing to deliver against original targets. Having an implementation plan for delivering the technical solution, wrapped up in a communications plan does not deliver the desired results. A better approach is to gain stakeholder engagement up-front on the reasons for the change, and involving them in the design of the solution.

Transformational and People Focused – “Getting the t-shirt”
With a passion for getting people on board with the company’s strategic direction, some leaders have gone down the evangelical route of the major conference and motivational speaker, stirring the passions of the workforce and leaving them with the corporate t-shirt. But what happens when they return to the workplace? In most cases, nothing. To learn how to really deliver a change in behaviours, read Paolo Moscuzza’s values-driven article All Aboard?.

Transactional & Task Focused – “Just deliver to the plan”
This is the rational view of the world. One client had spent up to 18 months with project teams in detailed documentation on how it intended to organise and run its business, based on the belief that if papers are produced defining where you are heading and what is required from management, then like good robots, humans will deliver accordingly. Such a misunderstanding of human motivation results in no change at all. ER Consultants’ approach is to switch the emphasis from design to implementation, providing space for managers and staff to contract between themselves on how to deliver their accountabilities.

Transactional & People Focused – “To make them happy, give them whatever they want…”
Appeasement rarely works. Belief that providing the best remuneration and working environment will make employees happier and therefore more productive is naïve. It misses the point that people need more than the basic factors to be motivated; they require some meaning of why they are doing what they are doing. Without this, demands for better terms and conditions and that on-site gym will never satisfy them. Far better to manage performance in a constructive way, as recommended in Mike Thackray’s article, Appraisal Time Again?.

© er consultants Topics Issue 3, 2007