I recently read a Blog post entitled “Why Engagement May be the Best Management Voodoo Ever.” As I worked through the article, I also worked my way rapidly through a range of emotions – from curiosity to irritation to anger to defensiveness to understanding and, finally, back to curiosity. The author, Wally Bock, posits that “employee engagement,” and those consultants that preach its importance, have simply created the next management fad. His points, if I understood them correctly, are that employee engagement is poorly defined and difficult to measure, that it is not the be-all, end-all answer to management success, and that consultants tend to be more concerned about the actual state of employee engagement rather than how engagement impacts productivity
Message received, understood, and ultimately agreed with.
That being said, I enthusiastically believe that employee engagement is absolutely critical in the workplace. Important in the sense that, with scant few exceptions, it is not possible to create a consistently top performing team (hence, a team with high productivity) with participants that are not engaged. Any kind of team for that matter – workplace, athletics, volunteers, whatever.
I believe the research data clearly indicates a direct correlation between employee engagement and key metrics like productivity, profitability, employee retention, safety and customer advocacy. I agree that definitions are not wholly consistent or crystal clear, but companies whose employees report (through independent surveys) that they like their jobs, like their bosses, feel valued on the job, and feel connected to the company’s vision and objectives consistently report better results in critical performance metrics.
Frankly, I don’t care what we call it, but the concept of employee “engagement” to me isn’t really new. An examination of successful leaders (as well as coaches and teachers, for that matter) reveals a consistent set of skills that have always been used to create highly productive teams. What are those skills? Here is my “short” list of ten critical management/leadership skills necessary to effectively engage employees and build a productive team:
- Be competent in the team’s core skill set
- Create an environment of trust
- Make sound and well-reasoned decisions
- Prepare and empower employees to do their jobs well
- Fully support employees with appropriate resources and training
- Provide a clear sense of vision and direction
- Set and communicate clear expectations, and create accountability to those expectations
- Provide effective feedback and coaching
- Recognize and reward excellence
- Sets leadership priorities as: communication, people development, and strategic planning
What Are Your Top Priorities?
From my perspective, effective leadership skills naturally create employee engagement. It’s simply a question of learning and applying those skills in the workplace. The challenge is that most managers are not trained to be good leaders and/or they are too bogged down in the daily grind of the workplace to focus on leadership priorities. In my view, those leadership priorities should be: 1) communication, 2) people development, and 3) strategic planning, but are often these instead: 1) paperwork, 2) problem solving, and 3) doing a lot of the work employees should be doing instead.
Or something like that. Managers are so busying doing things that they have little time to develop things. In a recent article from CFO Magazine, I read this this quote:
“Internal communication issues are rarely top priorities….that is, until they create potential liabilities.”
I think this is pretty profound. Many of the important things that management/leadership should be doing for an organization are rarely even a priority – until a warning bell sounds. Employees, for example, routinely complain about the communication problems that exist in the organization, but rarely is it considered a priority to remedy the problem, so next year we will be talking about the very same communication problems.
Communication is rarely a priority because things like budgeting, decision-making, and resource allocation (to name a few management activities) seem more directly connected to productivity – except at those organizations where leadership believes there is a direct correlation between engagement and productivity. At those organizations, communication is seen as a critical component of employee engagement and, therefore, an absolutely necessary skill to be developed right along with budgeting, decision-making, etc.
Some consultants may use “engagement” as the latest fad; but, regardless of misuse by others, good leaders know that engagement is a critical part of a highly productive team.
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