Jo Woodfield, Principal, and EGM Brand, Culture and Research services, WRAYS
Employee engagement is simply a by-product of clearly-led, well-performing and well-managed organisation however any slowdown or period of recovery can easily blindside leadership. A fall in demand, widespread uncertainty, lower consumer confidence all drive organisations to re-evaluate their cost-base, consolidate, reposition and often there’s that overarching need to do more with less – so no surprise there’s an obvious tension between cost-cutting and engagement.
We are seeing more leader reluctance to manage or proactively engage their talent, many prefer instead to revert into management mode, ‘fire-fighting’ cost containment, reducing staff numbers, dropping salaries, doing away with bonuses, rewards and development costs etc. Whilst this might produce a healthier looking balance sheet over the short term, action like this can have far-reaching ramifications for the business into the future, often a detrimental cyclical effect on capacity, productivity and morale.
Last time we looked weren’t efficiency increases and productivity also primary drivers of profit growth?
Understandable, cost-containment is occasionally warranted but so is identifying and introducing safeguarding talent management (and engagement!) strategies and acitng on these to stay viable. After all the way business reacts to economic cycles (like the one we’re in right now) is not only a predictor, in most cases its a determinant of whether or not it will succeed or even survive.
The smart money is on equal focus between cost containment and the ‘people’ agenda. Engagement during recovery periods is more critical because your organisation is probably asking people to do more with less, this comes with increased stress, workload and amplified risk of top talent departing very minute conditions are on the improve. Senior leaders should really be talking with their teams right now, demonstrating concern for part the company itself plays in making the employee-employer interaction as positive and productive as can be. Organisations and leaders who aren’t actively trying to get closer to their people, and promote higher degree of employee engagement here and now quite possibly face failure in their quest to get their people well enough behind them to execute good strategy and quite worryingly might produce (at best) some fairly benign business results.
ENGAGEMENT: BUSINESS IMPERATIVE NOT A HR ONE
Engagement strategy connects your people with the purpose and meaning in their work by understanding what truly motivates them and giving them voice to tap into their feelings, energies, resources, demonstrate back where the improvements and opportunities reside. Engagement is central to unlocking productivity and transforming working lives but it doesn’t hinge on something your organisation does, its about how your organisation is (and it gets right into heart of the working relationship between the team and their managers). Let’s face it, managing people and fostering the intellectual and emotional relationship (and their commitment) to their work in an inspiring, disciplined way is difficult, even for the best of us. There is a chasm of difference between a person’s compliance and commitment so your managers and leaders need to be encouraged, developed and supported to do this well. In fact, entire engagement charter should be lighting up a CEO’s dashboard like a Christmas tree and at heart of business strategy – is this happening? Doubt it. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly discern performance improvement, optimising management processes, doing what you need to ensure operations move forward sustainably because they are all important, so is engagement because it tightly interrates and can assist you with these.
Compelling case to encourage companies to rethink their engagement strategy and get into the game looks something like this – its blindingly obvious to most that engaged talent are more productive, fare better than their disengaged counterparts and are typified by higher level motivation, productivity and loyalty. Engaged people tend to be more satisfied in their roles, willing to align themselves to a company, advocate its success and ‘put it in’ to see it and themselves thrive. They’re vested, and its enlightening to identify just how deep this goes. Engaged people trust they can (and do) make a difference, not only to the company but to others inside it. Engaging with your people helps build on their underlying self-confidence, this confidence isn’t confined to their own abilities, mindsets and skills either, it extends out to others in their team – powerful drivers of behaviour and performance.
Another important engagement predictor concerns the leadership, management (incl. line managers, the accompanying skill-sets etc). Has profound impact upon how teams perform and whether in fact they are being developed sufficiently, encouraged adequately to be able to perform at a higher level by these managers. Add in having appropriate process and accountabilities in place too, this further helps your organisation to maintain the engagement it has already achieved. Aim to apply similar rigour, KPI’s and evaluation to leaders who drive this engagement as you do to the other areas of business. Internalisation of engagement with leaders means they understand its importance, and their role in it right down to manner in which they manage day-to-day…because engagement isn’t an ‘event’ or initiative – it’s a philosophy, a company way of life.
Practically speaking, despite all the significance, benefits and wider financial implications for business derived from engagement – why the observable, obvious disengagement? Why aren’t more companies getting ‘real’ with it? Across Australia sadly there are so many organisations continuing to produce vast oceans of what we might classify as ‘ambivalent’ people, neither engaged nor disengaged, just coming and going every day in and out of work, doing only what they think they need to. There is a positive here though, to us its that group of people who represent greatest source of performance improvement for business, essentially for ground swell, it’s far easier to get those people ‘on-board’ over the ones who have ‘tuned out’. This will not happen without senior leadership buy-in though and we still hear from some short-sighted leaders espousing that engagement doesn’t really matter because “their teams don’t have same options available to them so they’ll stay for job security right?” Wrong – take it from us, when things turn around, and very quickly they do it leaves management floundering, desperately trying to find (and keep) the best performers in order to quickly achieve growth and the capacity for it.
That said, lately we’re confident that things are heading in the right direction, with the more progressive companies clearly getting their appetites back and redirecting focus onto more of the intangibles; leadership development (for capable, inspiring leaders), line manager skillsets, career development, and the ‘interesting / rewarding work’ component; such foresight goes quite a way to improving engagement, communications and transparency for those companies.