Articles: Engagement Resources
Allow me to (re)introduce Employee Engagement
How 5 simple steps can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
Even if you do not have additional budget for employee niceties to boost morale, I have some good news.
Why is ‘engagement’ so easy to understand in sports, but hard to implement in business? Early in my Human Resources (HR) career, almost 20 years ago, I paid little attention to employees’ emotional commitment. My focus was primarily on numbers and tangibles to help drive company performance. Who’s to blame me with an educational background in Business Economics?
Here’s the thing: Employee Engagement is not about niceties, nor does it require additional budget. Engagement is the emotional commitment with an organization and its goals. In fact, the truth I learned from many great leaders, whom I met in person and in books, is that the key to successful high performing organizations comes down to getting just 2 things right: Money and People (in reverse order). More specifically: Engagement and Cash Flow.
The key to succes for your great product or service, comes down to getting just 2 things right: Engagement and Cash Flow.
Of course we also need the skills and know-how to differentiate your product or service from the competition. Innovative ideas and technology will certainly give you a head-start. Nevertheless, in today’s global open-source economy, engagement and cash flow determine your level of success long term.
My passion is getting Employee Engagement right, using practical steps that anyone can implement. For more than a decade, I have been studying human psychological needs and motives. Through the HR profession, I also discovered that these basic principles that drive engagement are universal and thus apply to everyone.
How Engagement offers your organization a competitive advantage
During the industrial revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s, companies did not nearly give as much attention to employee engagement as they could have done. Back then, organizations did not need to. People were just glad to be (barely) making a living. Engagement was basically a ‘transactional contract’ and came down to “Work for Pay”; nothing more and nothing less.
Nowadays, with modern civilization at its peak in most economically developed countries, company perks and incentives to motivate employees have just about been exhausted. Many of these benefits have also been widely adopted across different industries in one form or another. Thus, such benefits hardly distinguish your company from the competition. The differentiator that remains for organizations to attract, retain, and motivate employees is an ’emotional contract’.
People determine the success of any organization. Engaged employees are a competitive advantage for companies.
Employee engagement is facilitated by addressing psychological human needs that are as old as time. It is only the context in which companies choose to address these needs that has changed. With all of the technological developments and automation rapidly changing the way we work, organizations still rely on people for their creativity, problem-solving abilities, and innovation. Engaged employees are a competitive advantage.
5 principles to boost employee engagement and your bottom line
So how do you get employees ‘to fall in love’ with your organization and its goals? Much like in personal relationships, we can’t force people to like us. However, what you can do is ‘set the scene’. (A nice candlelight dinner with good conversation could turn romantic pretty quick). Here are the 5 principles that any organization can action and which will boost employee engagement as well as company performance:
- Engage through Purpose. Understand who your organization’s customers are and why you serve them. Offer employees certainty and a sense of pride through the clarity of why your company exists, and what it aspires to contribute to the world. Great goals make great people; people can’t hit what they do not aim for.
- Engage through Connection. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. Companies are like social networks, and individual employee behavior is what shapes company character. “The way we do things around here” and “walking the talk” will decide where your organization is going. Listen in order to understand and not to respond.
- Engage through Contribution. This is about how your day-to-day responsibilities matter to “the bigger picture.” Also, you need to be very clear on roles and responsibilities so as to preempt conflict situations within your organization. Finally, don’t mistake activity with achievement and remember that subjectivity measures nothing consistently.
- Engage through Recognition. Salary needs to make sense, just so that it does not DISengage employees. Recognizing contribution through praise and respectful feedback for reflection is perhaps even more important. The greatest recognition people can achieve is autonomy: The trust and freedom to act. That which gets rewarded gets done!
- Engage through Growth. Invest in the growth and health of employees. Personnel development = Organizational innovation. People leave companies because they have stopped learning. Companies disappear when they stop innovating. Nature’s binary law states that if we are not growing, we are dying.
Finally, there is the leadership to help facilitate all of the above.
How the above 5 principles are facilitated through your leadership, using clarity (transparency) and trust (rather than control); will impact the level of engagement and success of your organization. The 5 principles of the Engagement Method are also extensively covered in my book, including practical (personal) examples as well as step-by-step suggestions for action that anyone can apply.
The 5 principles of the Engagement Method are extensively covered in my book. Claim your FREE pdf of the first 20 pages of my book The Art of Employee Engagement.
How to Develop Talent
What to do with my Talent-list?
Too often Talent is identified and then sits idle on some Talent-list that is merely reviewed every year. But what good is a Talent-inventory without acting upon it? It is how we action the development of Talent, that makes a true difference for your organization and the people in it. In this article, I’d love to share my thoughts with you on how to develop talent.
Whether you feel everyone in your organization a Talent, or if you consider Talent a sub-group of high potentials/performers; doesn’t really matter. What’s important is how to make the best use of your Talent’s time, energy, and passion.
If you’re interested in how Talent Development contributes to Employee Engagement, I highly recommend reading this article.
First things first; who is a Talent anyway? Let’s start to answer that by looking at ‘Talent Management’ first. The best definition I found for Talent Management is: “The anticipation of required capabilities to make it possible for an organization to reach its goals.”
This would then imply that a definition for talent might be: A talent is someone who has the required capabilities to make it possible for an organization to reach its goals.
a Talent is someone who has the required capabilities to make it possible for an organization to reach its goals.
How we might identify Talent as such, and which criteria are best to determine this, is a subject for another article. For now, let’s assume that we have identified Talents and we would like to further develop their skills and competencies.
We’ve identified our Talents, but how do we best action their development?
We have a list of names, now what do we do? “Let’s send them on a leadership course!” This could be a good idea depending on the circumstance, it would also be the reverse of the classic 70-20-10 development model.
The 70-20-10 model suggests that the most effective way to facilitate individual development is when 70% of learning takes place on the job, 20% through interaction and collaboration, and 10% through formal learning such as classroom training (like a leadership course) and digital curricula.
Following the 70-20-10 model, let’s prioritize our focus for developing Talent first on ‘learning on the job’.
Instead of ‘sending them on a leadership course’, lets focus our efforts for developing Talent on ‘learning on the job’ first.
Learning on the job: Routine, Stretch, or Stress?
How do we learn best and develop new skills? Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed his theory on childhood development during the 1920s. His research is to this day considered fundamental within cognitive sciences. Piaget developed the concept of ‘mental equilibration’, which describes the balancing of new information with existing knowledge.
In other words; the best way to learn new information is by linking it to something else that you already know. This is why metaphors work really well to introduce new information. Metaphors draw parallels between existing concepts and something new that help makes it easy to understand. I’m sure you use metaphors all the time.
In the past, I have had some teachers that tried to link new information, to something else that I also didn’t know. When I did not understand what they were trying to explain (for obvious reasons), their solution would be to repeat what they had said before, but only this time talk louder (even though my hearing was fine).
Back to finding the right ‘equilibrium’ for learning: Not doing anything significantly new might be considered ‘routine’, which doesn’t facilitate development. Learning too many new things at once might lead to an overload and ‘stress’. Stacked learning might offer the right equilibrium of a healthy ‘stretch’ for learning. Talent Development should be focussed on ‘learning on the job’, by facilitating opportunities that offer a healthy learning stretch.
Development should be focussed on ‘learning on the job’, by facilitating opportunities that offer a healthy learning stretch.
How to offer stretch learning opportunities: Puzzle or Mosaic?
What is the best way to facilitate stretch opportunities for development? I believe assigning (side) projects is a great way to facilitate Talent Development. Projects can be outside someone’s normal day-to-day responsibilities and offer a fantastic learning experience for something new. Projects can be defined SMART and have a clear beginning and end, which makes them relatively easy to document, track and evaluate.
I guess you would want to assign projects, that also contribute to the success of your organization right? Meaning that a project should offer both a healthy learning stretch for the individual, as well as contribute to the strategy for success of your organization. Hence offering the cliche of a true ‘win-win situation’.
Imagine your organizational strategy as a picture…
Imagine for a moment that your organizational strategy for success is a picture that reflects the desired result (whatever that picture might look like for you). Perhaps you can now also imagine that you could break this picture up into many different pieces; like pieces of a puzzle or a mosaic.
Each of these pieces represents a task or a project that ultimately contributes to the overall picture. As a leader, you might assign different ‘pieces’ (projects) of the overall ‘picture’ (strategy) to different people within your organization. This way everyone ultimately contributes to the overall strategy for success of the organization.
Back to assigning projects for stretched learning opportunities, to facilitate Talent Development: Assigning projects to your Talents can be done in two ways. I’ll continue to use the metaphor of a ‘puzzle’ and that of a ‘mosaic’ to explain these two ways:
1. Puzzle
The easiest way is when you take your organization’s strategy for success and break it down into smaller size puzzle pieces. You then distribute these ‘pieces of the puzzle’ to your Talents and challenge them to work on their assigned piece, to ultimately contribute to the overall picture (strategy). This top-down distribution makes for an efficient administrative process that can be deployed for execution relatively straightforward.
The challenge with this approach could be that an individual receives a piece of the puzzle (project), for which they do not have the best capabilities. Also, how would you know if the stretch learning opportunity is actually what the Talent really wants to learn, beyond what you would wish for him/her to develop? As a leader, you might find yourself having to apply constant external motivation efforts, to get the project done right.
2. Mosaic
The thorough way would be to first inventory your Talents’ interest and passion through dialogue. To uncover what it is that people like to do, what do they enjoy, what is their passion? The goal with this is to discover people’s intrinsic energy and drive, beyond their current day-to-day responsibilities. Compared to the ‘puzzle approach’ this inventory will take some additional time from you as a leader, to really get to know your Talents.
The goal is to discover people’s intrinsic energy and drive, beyond their current day-to-day responsibilities.
Once you have uncovered an individual’s intrinsic energy and drive, the next step is to apply your own skills for creativity and a ‘helicopter view’. You will need to figure out how you can use the energy and drive of that individual to (1) facilitate a stretch learning opportunity, that (2) benefits your organization’s strategy for success. Similar to figuring out how a uniquely shaped piece can contribute to your overall mosaic picture.
The next step is to apply your own skills for creativity and a ‘helicopter view’, to figure out how to use that energy and drive.
This bottom-up ‘mosaic’ approach of assigning projects has the benefit of leveraging your Talent’s intrinsic motivation and engagement. As a result, the follow-up of the project would hardly require any managerial/motivational efforts from you as a leader. In addition, you will most likely be pleasantly surprised, by better than expected project results!
A practical example…
I have regular 1-1 catch-ups with all my team members. I learned that one of our Recruitment Partners has a personal passion for Organizational Psychology. She is keen to learn the science behind this topic, and asked if this might be a useful topic to incorporate into our HR department as well.
I noticed that she has a lot of energy for the subject, and I would love to facilitate her learning ambition. At the same time I was looking to see how we might also use her passion for the benefit of our organization at the same time. “Catch two birds with one stone” as it were.
Our HR strategy is to facilitate Employee Engagement for the company that we work in. Within the recruitment function an important aspect that contributes to our HR strategy, is to attract people with the skills and competencies we need, as well as the right energy and values.
Our existing recruitment process focuses predominantly on identifying and evaluating the skills and competencies of a candidate, but hardly on their energy and values. This gap is where I saw an opportunity to make use of our Recruitment Partners learning passion.
We agreed on a side project for her to lead, through which she would work on techniques to identify candidate’s energy and values, and evaluate these to the needs for our company and the vacancy.
The project would provide her with a practical learning experience, which would be supported by theoretical training as well. The end result of this project would satisfy her learning ambition and hugely contribute to our HR strategy at the same time.
‘How to Develop Talent’ in summary
Now that you have read most of what I had to share, I will do you the courtesy of offering my thoughts on this subject in summary, for your consideration:
- Identifying Talents is one thing, yet developing Talents is what will truly positively impact your organization and the people in it.
- Considering the classic 70-20-10 people development model; we might assign projects as a priority, instead of sending Talents on a training course.
- Piaget’s fundamental research on learning helps to identify the ‘sweet spot’ (equilibrium) between routine, stretch, and stress development opportunities.
- Imagine your strategy for success is a picture that you could break up into different pieces; like pieces of a puzzle or a mosaic. Each piece represents a stretch project.
- Assigning a stretch project to your Talent for the purpose of their development can be done by taking the approach of (1) a puzzle (top-down) or (2) a mosaic (bottom-up).
- A mosaic approach leverages your Talents’ intrinsic motivation, passion, and engagement to the benefit of your organization’s strategy for success.
Studies confirm that a ‘mosaic’ approach produces 38% higher productivity, 44% higher client satisfaction and 59% lower employee turnover.
Tapping into personal passion will save you considerable ‘management efforts’ because your Talents will be self-motivated and engaged. Studies confirm that a ‘mosaic’ approach produces 38% higher productivity, 44% higher client satisfaction, and 59% lower employee turnover than a ‘puzzle’ approach.
Back to the original question of this article: “What to do with my Talent-list?” The answer is: “You action it by assigning stretch projects for development, using a mosaic approach.”
What to do with my Talent-list? —
You action it by assigning stretch projects for development, using a mosaic approach.
If you’re interested to learn how Talent Management contributes to Employee Engagement, read my book.
The 5 principles of the Engagement Method are extensively covered in my book. Claim your FREE pdf of the first 20 pages of my book The Art of Employee Engagement.