3) An Environment of Engagement

There’s lots of definitions of engagement. You’ll be delighted that I don’t propose a new one here. You’ll find lots of reports, articles and blogs about what engagement is all about – and you’ll find one that works for you. Here’s three that have influenced me recently: This does what it offers on the tin - practical advice. I like this cynical look at engagement stats. And this, from my former employers work, is a robustly healthy mix of both the cynical and the practical.

In my past two blogs I’ve talked about performance being the driver for all activity and that for performance you need alignment between customer and employee expectations and for that you need engagement.

And one thing that I think engagement is about which isn’t well covered in what I read is this: Hypothesis #4: Engagement is about making the right decisions.

It’s not about robotically making the right decisions for the business. If that’s your bag, head here. And I’m not talking about “If I stay until midnight to get this done, I’ll get nominated for employee of the month” (although if you have, you should (and if you don’t have an employee of the month, you should)). I’m talking about creating the greatest possible overlap between what the business wants, and what employees want to professionally achieve.

It should be a two way-street. One where employees have an inherent understanding of what’s good for the business, and know what they’ll get in return, when they do the right thing, the right way. And maybe (and here I could be straying beyond hypothesis into pure speculation) if you’ve made those kind of decisions all the way down the project, then you possibly haven’t ended up having a midnight crisis. After all, is that crisis a show of your engagement, or a last-resort that will seriously damage your engagement?

So, how do you help people make the right decisions? As I touched on last time, I think it’s about the creation of an atmosphere where three interlinked things happen:

1)    Purpose and culture are known and talked about

2)    There’s effective communication, and that lives or dies with line-managers

3)    The drivers – the what-you-get-in-returns – that people most value are understood, tailored to the workforce, and measured

 

And it won’t surprise you greatly that those are the topics of my next three blogs.