Discovery leadership masterclass series with Frank Adu Anim: Employee engagement

…the power to transform and the drive to unlocking employee potential for optimum performance

People want purpose and meaning from their work and they want to be known for what makes them unique as well. As the saying goes, what gets recognized, gets repeated drives employee engagement. As organizations continue to adapt to the new normal, they do so by finding one thing remains the same and that exceptional talent leads to exceptional results and with this truth, challenging times magnify it even the more.

In any organization setting, it must be acknowledged that employees make decisions and take actions every day that can affect workforce and the effectiveness of the organization.

The way the organization treats employees and how employees treat one another equally can positively affect their actions or can place such an organization at risk. It is well acknowledged that engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees across industry, company size and nationality who fail in this attempts.

However, the focus on employee engagement which is on the rise globally is not an issue relegated only to the human resource team of an organization. Instead, it is a business concern that requires serious consideration by all ranks.

Again, it is evidenced by studies that employees appreciate a work culture that enables engagement for a highly engaged organization is greater in output and profitability. This means organizations that prioritize engagement are more likely to attract and retain talent.

For better understanding, employee engagement is the emotional investment employees make in their organizations. It is the passion, involvement, and motivation they bring to work, which they use to guide their work. Engaged employees identify with the goals of the organization and align their own goals with the organization’s goals.

It is crucial for organizational success but I must be quick to say that, it is not something that just happens. It takes a strategic approach to employee listening, surveying, planning and pivoting to drive optimal employee engagement. It underscores how committed employees are to the organization and their work and the relative impacts inured from retaining talents to an organization.

To emphasis employee engagement is the critical role which must be played by leadership. For without effective leadership catalyzing as key imperative for employee engagement and satisfaction, optimum performance would elude most organizations.

That said, the first step in establishing strong leadership is to build trust between employees and their managers. When employees fail to trust their leaders, their mistrust will eventually translates to poor performance over time. Without a meaningful employee leader relationship, most employees will become disengaged and will fail to reach their goals.

In this article, we will reflect on what employee engagement means, why it is critical to the bottom line of an organization, the key drivers and a glimpse of employee engagement in the future of work.

What Is Employee Engagement?

As described by Simon Sinek, employee engagement is liken to when people are financially invested, they want a return and when they are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.

Employee engagement is about positive attitudes and behaviors leading to improved business outcomes, in a way that they trigger and reinforce one another. Employee engagement is about employees feeling pride and loyalty working for an organization, being a great advocate of that organization to its clients, users and customers and going the extra mile to finish a piece of work.

When employees are engaged, they emotionally invest in their work in terms of the passion they put into their work and the motivation they feel to do their job well. They feel excited to take on new challenges, embrace change and welcome solving tough problems.

They also tend to be curious by nature, continually learning, and regularly seeking new ways to broaden their existing skill sets. They effectively are ambassadors for the organization, continually look for ways to promote the organization and further the organizational mission and objectives.

As opposed to engaged employees, disengaged employees simply put in their specified hours at work and leave. They do not involve themselves in activities beyond their regular jobs, and they value the job just enough to ensure that they get their paycheck at the end of the month.

A level above disengaged employees are actively disengaged employees. Such employees are not only unproductive, but they also undermine the work engaged employees do. Their negative attitude creates a toxic workplace and they essentially become a burden on the business. 

Why the need for employee engagement?

Research shows that employee engagement makes people more inclined to work harder and solve problems, grow and develop faster, get along with people better, and stay longer at a company. All these factors have a measurable business impact, and contribute to organizational success.

Broadly and more significantly, it is proving that, a focus on building effective platform for employee engagement inures to organizational benefits such as increased performance, higher employee retention, higher job satisfaction, increased revenue, a better customer experience and a higher customer loyalty.

What Are the Drivers of Employee Engagement?

One of the most common mistakes companies make is to approach engagement as a sporadic exercise in making their employees feel happy. To drive employee engagement are these critical key drivers of establishing the purpose, developmental agenda and scope, the need for a caring manager, ongoing conversations and focus on individual and collective strengths.

Whose Job is to drive Employee Engagement?

The success of an employee engagement program depends on employees’ receptivity to it. Employee engagement, then, is an organization-wide collaborative function.

Having said that, the orientation has always been that, the responsibility of employee engagement is relegated to the manager. Obviously, managers are in charge of ensuring that employees know what work needs to be done, supporting and advocating for them when necessary and explaining how their workplace engagement connects to organizational success.

Meanwhile, to succeed in that responsibility requires managers to be equipped to have ongoing coaching conversations with employees. Unfortunately, most managers do not know how to make frequent conversations meaningful and so more often, their actions are interpreted as micromanaging when they fail to provide the right tools and direction. So, it’s not enough for managers to own employee engagement space without adequate coaching skills needed to manage their teams.

Leaders must redefine managers’ roles and expectations, provide the training tools, resources and development that managers need to coach and meet those expectations. Here, the onus of planning engagement activities and executing them is not an exercise for human resource alone. However, human resource must be seen to play that active role in implementing employee engagement strategies with the involvement of other key leaders championing planning and execution. 

The key Drivers of Employee Commitment and Engagement

Several factors lay credence to the fact that, engagement initiatives span the entire employee lifecycle and this can prevent the attrition of high-value and high-potential employees.

Indeed, one critical work culture which contributes to keeping employees engaged is transparency. Transparently engaged employees care about the organization and they remain committed. Severally, employees tend to care when organizations:

Practices Seamless onboarding

This process explains when real employee engagement truly begins. That is when the employee is recruited and begins the onboarding process. Before a candidate gets hired, he or she gets a glimpse of the organization’s communication culture.

Once hired, the onboarding process gives such an employee an idea of whether they want to continue in the organization for the long term or not. One way to ensure employee engagement during onboarding is to give employees enough time to master their job before they hit the floor. This means that when they do, they will be ready to take on the job with confidence and build a lasting career in the organization.

 Sharing company goals and values with employees.

When organization tell employees exactly what is expected of them and how to achieve it they remain focused. Giving those regular updates about the progress of the company and where it stands in the global marketplace and communicating how the employees’ effort benefits the organization and contributes to the bigger picture are essential motivator. All these keys create a sense of belonging and naturally encourage employees to do more to drive better results.

Openness and Autonomy

An open work culture is essential to make employees feel respected and cared for. In an open work culture, employees are seen to receive important communication regularly through a unified channel from the organization, their managers, and colleagues.

They freely communicate with their managers about any task or issue that concerns them and the wellbeing of the business. Providing anonymous feedback about issues they are having with their managers and reporting workplace misconduct anonymously are great pivots for building loyalty and sense of belongingness with the organization.

More so, employees need a certain degree of independence to be productive. The questions are that, do employees have the freedom to decide how they go about their daily tasks? Do they have the freedom to plan their career path in the organization? Are they included in making critical decisions that may affect them directly? Employees rate these actions their responses as act of respectful treatment and to the larger extent an open environment ready to nurture their talents.

Offer access to productivity and time management tools

A slew of unplanned activities, meetings, and workplace distractions can reduce the overall productive time in a day for an employee. Time management is an inherent skill, but in a dynamic work environment, even the most efficient employees need time management tools. Supporting employees with time management tools can directly result in improved productivity.

Therefore, time management and collaboration tools that enable employee engagement to break down and time deadline-oriented tasks is highly advised. Even with frequent interruptions, to some extent, these tools can improve employee output.

Offer continuous learning and development opportunities

Organizations that provide structured learning and development opportunities to their employees notice higher levels of engagement. This visible interest in employee growth elicits a feeling of reciprocation from employees who become interested in the organization’s growth as well.

Ensure flexibility

The increasing demand for workplace flexibility has made it one of the most critical drivers of employee engagement. Any organization that allows employees to enjoy a certain amount of flexibility in where they work is more likely to experience higher levels of engagement. And the reason is that, when organizations show that they trust employees to do their job no matter where they are employees tend to perform better without the stress of commuting but in their own comfortable spaces.

Approaches to measure Employee Engagement

Several useful tools are normally deployed by organizations to measure employee engagement. These methodologies typically are grounded on;

Employee net promoter score

This approach measures the employees’ loyalty by asking how willing they are to promote the organization as a place to work. For employee net promoter score to be a valid measure of employee engagement, it must be administered at regular intervals say monthly or quarterly.

One-on-one meetings

For an effective employee engagement management, it is acknowledged that no technology can replace the human touch of one-on-one meetings. The reasons are not far-fetched because, employees feel heard when they are given the opportunity to have a real conversation to express their thoughts.

Besides, anonymous feedback can help voice the broader issues. For more specific personal issues, one-on-one meetings remain an excellent way for managers to identify the general mood of employees.

Stay or Exit interviews

Sometimes it is difficult to get employees to stay in a company. But conducting an exit interview can give the organization a valuable measure of information, which they can use to enhance the engagement levels of existing employees. These interviews often reveal how important it is to continuously engage with employees to prevent such instances, starting from the onboarding process and setting the tone to define a culture that new employees can feel engaged in.

Organizational performance and the Future of Employee Engagement?

We live in an exciting time. In an earlier generation, people might have been reprimanded for not being motivated to work and not giving their all relative to job performance. Now, the best practices for employee engagement have evolved and organizations ought to realize that employee engagement is critical to the organization’s fortunes.

As is known, moving forward, employee engagement will continue to become more fluid. As such, instead of one-time annual surveys, we will see organizations adopting more ongoing and holistic strategies that will allow for two-way conversations and real-time feedback. Additionally, we will see more and more organizations ready to recognize the importance of providing high-quality continuous learning and career development opportunities for their employees.

The vast majority of key drivers of performance of many organizations in the future will directly be seen around;

Building effective communication channels

Communication is important to employee engagement because it makes employees feel included, trusted and helps to connect them to the organization’s mission. Building an effective internal communication strategy with the employees will help drive not only engagement but also productivity and revenue for the business.

Leaders ought to be transparent and authentic in their communication with employees regarding engagement to increase trust, improve retention, build a better culture and establish a strong employer brand.

Establishing clearer vision and values

 Engaged employees understand the big picture and how they fit in. A clearly communicated vision and statement of core values give employees something bigger than themselves which makes them likely to go above and beyond to contribute to that greater purpose.

Instilling accountability disciplines and performance measures

With accountability being a key factor for the future of employee engagement, we realize that, when it comes to employees, everyone wants to be part of a winning team. Those who perform well feel good about themselves and are proud about where they work. By this, the need for coaches to provide clear performance guiding principles and measure for achievement coupled with honest feedback are useful. It is advised that immediate praise is ensured to reinforce desired behaviors as well as timely criticism helping to avert future problems.

Offering rewards and recognition

Rewards and recognition remain a greater way to improving employee engagement and the drive for productivity. Thinking future performance, a well-defined rewards and recognition system will allow employees to effectively differentiate between good and poor performers and tie recognition and rewards directly to the behavior that matters for the success of the organization.

Investing in quality Leadership

In the future of work, organizations that invest in leadership development will perform better than those that do not. Studies show investments in leadership development improve bottom-line financial performance, attract and retain talent, drive a performance culture and increase organizational agility. Leadership development will create the magnet to attract high-performers so to foster a high-performance organization. This is why the organizations that are ‘built to last’ must have strong histories of leadership development.

However, it is important to remember that leadership development is not just about developing leaders but about creating a culture of performance. Here, there ought to be that relationship between good management and employee commitment. Once this is evident in the organization the leaders will attract, hire and inspire employee greatness.

Professional and personal growth

The opportunity to develop new skills and capabilities will be critically important to ambitious employees. Keeping the employees engaged by finding out how they will like to stretch and giving them the appropriate opportunities for growth is going to be the new normal in the future if not now. Again, allowing employees to apply their skill sets to areas outside of their day to day role and provide a clear career path so they can work towards the next level will equally demand higher prevalence in the expected future of work.

Building a great Organization Culture

A positive culture we know results in happy employees who want to come to work every day. The better the culture, the more profitable the company. With improved culture employees feel connected to each other and the organization, showcasing desired behaviors, expectations and clarifying the employee’s role and its impact on the organization.

In summary, let me re-emphasis the point that the character of all successful organizations tend to exhibit a deeply connected root with how they have been successful in their quest to consolidate performance efforts with effective employee engagement. Employee engagement as a bedrock for higher performance, draws out a deeper commitment from employees such that, when the organization’s actions are consistent with its values and that of employee expectations, the organization achieves great successes.

 Discovery….Thinking solutions, shaping visions.

Frank  is the CEO and Strategic Partner of AQUABEV Investment and Discovery Consulting Group. He is an Executive Director and the Lead Coach in Leadership Development and best Business Management practices for Discovery Leadership Masterclass.

Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

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