Got Employee Engagement?
December 28, 2007 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
If you’re a manager and you want to build a great team that makes a HUGE impact on the bottom line of your company, you need to get your employees engaged and loyal to you.
Here are 5 quick questions to ask yourself to determine if your team is loyal:
- Have you lost more than 20% of your team for “no reason” in the past 12 months?
- Do your direct reports apply for jobs elsewhere in your company, regardless of whether they are qualified for the new position or not?
- The last time you disciplined someone, did they just agree with you and want to get out of your space as quickly as possible?
- Has it been more than a year since anyone on your team referred someone to any position in your organization?
- If you polled your team, would 3 out of, when asked if they’re engaged or not, just nod and say “uh huh” or would they ask you what you mean by this question?
You probably know as a manager that employee engagement is a HUGE problem. The good news is you can fix it. Start by watching this video about employee engagement, and then dig deep inside yourself and your fellow managers to see how you can turn this around. I know this video woke me up, and maybe it will for you too.
Thanks to Skip at Be Excellent for sharing this powerful video.
It goes over the same principles that “The Dream Manager” goes over. But it still goes over the same triad of Employee-Customer-Corporate. In reality it is nothing new. I known this since to 70s/80s – the only thing is that companies have short memories and don’t practice good management/leadership techniques.
What I have noticed is that when the economy is down the more likely companies will take advantage of the employees. What they don’t realize is that when the economy turns around the employees jump-ship, leaving the company wondering why!
Maybe this little flick will remind the companies the TRUE value of employees.
Scott – I hope you’re right. Happy, engaged employees mean happy, engaged customers! The correlation is direct. Look at the Fortune 100 list. These are the best of the best companies, and they are the best because they care the most about their employees. Some may say that you have to pay to get on the list, but a company wouldn’t invest money and energy to get on the list if they didn’t care about their employees and how their employees feel about where they work.
Simple facts. Very clear and impactful message. Loved the video. And here is the question – “How?” How do you engage your reports? I get more and more confident with the idea of focusing on passion. Discovering reports’ passion and playing to their strengths. Recently finished reading “Leadership Pill” book by Ken Blanchard. He has simple ingredients to lead and inspire the team – integrity [walk your talk], partnership [team players], affirmation [“thank you for your great job!”]. What’s your take on “how?” question? How do you engage your reports?
I think that is the golden question! How? Maybe reading “The Dream Manager” would offer some of the “how”s that you ask. This is where you leave the typical ‘box’ thinking and get more personalized with it. And just throwing money at the problem won’t work after a while.
The “FISH!” program was a flop where I work. And they tried other programs for a while – all died! All these programs are superficial and don’t get to the root problems. And now just about everyone is disengaged and upper management don’t care so long as they make their numbers.
cool – checked out the book already in our library. thanks
The text is useful, the video, eh. If you want to immediately belittle your own message, use a video like this that’s dripping with shallow sentimentality. Does this really work with anyone? As soon as I heard the piano I was already down a few points in considering watching it, but I muted, and then I got to the non-verbal narrations and muted tones blurred stock photos and that was it. *clicks stop* This is exactly the kind of thing that a manager would show to disaffected employees to say “Look, see, I understand and I care SO much about you and I appreciate how difficult life is for you from day to day.” No, you don’t. You are like everyone else in the world and you’re concerned about the same things in life we are all concerned about. We don’t expect you to pretend that you care about us like this, and many of us resent the waste of time that is a video like this that ends up making it to a mandatory forced team building meeting. I am, in fact, reminded of that awful, hideous FISH! thing that was bandied about where I work and how much eye rolling went on while we spent our time wasted watching it.
You want to engage employees? Don’t treat them like the stock photos in this video. Don’t expect that they’re going to react to portray a false enthusiasm about where they work. Most people show up to where they work because they need to get paid and they will do the work the company needs them to do to get paid. Most people are NOT going to care about where they work except insofar as they will continue to get paid, and that is simply “survival” and not “success” level.
I love reading Slacker Manager, mainly because I see so many of the absolute failings my own managers engage in posted here on a regular basis. i.e. Slacker Manager just shows that my own managers don’t read something or anything LIKE slacker manager to have ideas about why their jobs are made so difficult by disaffected employees like me. (Who don’t leave because they are working toward pension plans. Leading to even more apathy. It’s pretty vicious.) However, a video like this would probably nudge the manage in exactly the wrong direction I would want to see them go. It would draw out all of the wrong behaviors from a poor or misguided manager instead of serving as a personal impetus toward making large, sweeping necessary changes to make the employees’ jobs more interesting and thus more engaging.
Wow, some great conversation going on here. I’m going to do another article with my follow-up thoughts to respond to this. Too much to put in a comment space.
To be continued shortly…
Employee engagement is my major focus: http://www.davidzinger.com.
I thought the video was produced well.
My major concern with the topic is that employee engagement is not seen as organizational initatives to suck out more discretionary effort from people within organizations.
When employee engagement is done well it is based on workplace engagement for the benefit of all: employees, leaders, organization and customers.
All 4 are responsible and accountable.
Here’s a set of practices that have served me well:
1. influence w/out authority – people sign up over using position authority
2. don’t be a difficult boss
3. play to people’s passions; not strengths
4. choose the carrot over the stick (real-time vs. after the fact)
5. lead by example
Key links -
coping with a difficult boss -http://thebookshare.blogspot.com/2007/12/seven-planning-questions-for-coping.html
leading and influencing mindful change – http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/01/02/counterintuitive-conclusions.aspx
- reward yourself in the moment – http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/01/01/reward-yourself-in-the-moment.aspx
- outlook reminder for leadership – http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/12/04/outlook-reminder-for-leadership-practices.aspx