Employee Engagement is the name of the game (Part 3)

I listen to my fellow professional colleagues and feelings of overwhelm; overload and burnout seem to be a common theme. Higher demands and fewer resources are the new normal. 

Levels of engagement amongst Australasian workers have been consistently low since surveys started in 2004. If organisations and employees are to experience a win/win from an engaged workforce then consideration needs to be given not only to developing organisational drivers of engagement but also to developing the individual employee drivers of engagement. The role of leadership, as the interface between the organisation and its employees, is critical in this process. 

According to Tony Schwartz in his blog, New Research: How Employee Engagement Hits the Bottom Line, “effectively addressing the issue of capacity — energizing the workplace — depends on the willingness of individuals, leaders, and organizations to each take responsibility for their roles.

 For organizations, the challenge is to shift from their traditional focus on getting more out of people, to investing in meeting people's core needs so they're freed, fuelled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work, more sustainably.

• For leaders, the key is to begin thinking of themselves as “Chief Energy Officers”. Energy is contagious, for better and for worse, and disproportionately so for leaders — by virtue of their influence. "The manager is at the heart of what we might think of as a personal employee ecosystem," the Towers Watson study concludes, "shaping individual experience ... day in and day out." 
  
  Among sustainably engaged employees, for example, 74 percent in the study believed senior leaders had a sincere interest in their well-being. Only 44 percent of traditionally engaged employees felt the same way, while only a minuscule 18 percent of disengaged employees felt their managers genuinely cared about their well-being. No single behaviour more viscerally and reliably influences the quality of people's energy than feeling valued and appreciated by their supervisor.
   
• For individual employees, the challenge is to take a measure of responsibility for their experience, and not allow themselves to default into victim mode. It's bracing to discover how two people can experience the same workplace, and even the same set of demands, in entirely different ways.
  
  Employees willing to take more responsibility for how they manage and take care of themselves — regardless of the sort of organization and supervisor they work for — end up feeling better and performing better than those who see themselves as victims.” 

A lot of focus, research, and discussion around improving employee engagement have been around the responsibilities that lie with leadership and organisations with far less attention being given to employees own internalised drivers and mindsets that lead to engaged states. 

Neuroscience has proved that our state of mind, internal representation and belief systems create our attitudes, behaviours and ultimately performance...... all of which can be changed. Do then employees themselves hold the trump card, the power and ability to unlock the engagement dilemma?         

Recent work by Crabb (2011) examined this relatively unexplored side of the engagement equation and identified three key drivers of an engaged state:

• Focusing strengths
• Managing emotions
• Aligning purpose

Employees rarely have the individual skills to develop these three drivers. Managers and leaders within the organisation are crucial in facilitating the development of these drivers within employees: Highly developed coaching skills are invaluable if they are to perform this role effectively. 

For example:

• Exploring how the employee can improve their resilience by challenging their negative emotions and reframing negative or irrational thoughts
• Assist the employee identify where their individual values align closely with the work they do
• Facilitate employees finding personal meaning in the work they do
• Facilitating the employee identifying and measuring their strengths
• Developing the coaching dialogue to uncover how an employee’s role might be shaped to accommodate more of their strengths and fewer of their weaknesses
• Facilitating the employee identifying creative and practical ways to manage their weaker areas effectively

A coaching approach would also be useful to facilitate high levels of leadership engagement which could assist managers to reflect the organisational culture and values in an authentic way, whilst training them in coaching skills, such as those outlined above, might facilitate the adoption of self coaching by employees and thereby the development of their individual drivers of engagement. An adaptation of Crabb’s model is shown below highlighting both the critical role of management as the interface in facilitating employee engagement, and the potential role of coaching at various junctures:

Using coaching principles in conjunction with an empowering style of leadership offers a potential solution to the employee engagement conundrum that is both theoretically sound and practical to implement.

References:

• Bauruk, R. (2006). Why managers are crucial to increasing engagement. Strategic HR Review(January/February).
• Crabb, S. (2011). The use of coaching principles to foster employee engagement. The Coaching Psychologist, 7(1), 27-34.
• Smith, F. (2009). Workers as Disengaged as Ever. Australian Financial Review.
• Towers-Perrin. (2007). Largest Ever Study of Global Workforce Finds Senior Management Holds Trigger to Unleash Talent Potential
• Schwartz, T. (2012). New Research: How Employee Engagement Hits the Bottom Line