Employee Engagement – Part II: The Practical

In part I of this series we covered some of the history, research, and metrics of employee engagement. Here in Part II we’ll get more practical and shift the focus on what you, as a leader, can do to ensure your team is engaged and performing at a high level. But first, just a hint of review in differentiating engagement from satisfaction, but also describing where they overlap.

Job satisfaction is focused on me: my personal, perceived happiness with my job situation and what my employer is doing to make me feel satisfied. Engagement goes beyond the me and adds a heightened level of commitment and motivation to help advance the objectives of the organization. If I’m engaged, I’m connected to the organization, I say good things about the company; I’m inclined to stay with the company, even though I have other options; and I strive to move the company forward with extra effort (Hewitt Associates).

A recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey indicates a number of factors related to employee satisfaction. The factor most influencing satisfaction is fair treatment and respect throughout the workplace. Employees want to be part of an environment where they see themselves and others being valued and treated equitably.  However, reinforcing the concept that satisfaction is focused on self, compensation and benefits ranked second on the SHRM study with 63 percent of the participants reporting pay was very important to their satisfaction.

This is not new or revolutionary;  it’s refreshingly simple. If organizations want satisfied employees they should treat them with respect and pay them appropriately. These are requisite building blocks to having engaged employees who are committed and perform at high levels. They are the “elephants in the room,” the big, easy things to pay attention to, but unfortunately many organizations minimize these satisfaction factors that are likely antecedents for engagement and improved profitability. So rule number one is: focus on these satisfaction factors! But what else should companies and leaders be doing to increase engagement?

Team Leader as Chief Engagement Officer

When reviewing the engagement literature I noted a lack of material on the “leader effect.” The literature seems to focus on what organizations can do to drive engagement at the macro level, i.e., actions taken across the enterprise which impact all staff. While helpful, I contend that much of leadership and engagement occurs in small doses – actually micro-interactions between a leader and individual team members. My first glimpse at the importance of the supervisor/subordinate relationship occurred while conducting my dissertation research (so long ago it was appropriate to use the word subordinate). This research indicated the relationship between a leader and a team member had a strong impact on both the team member’s performance and how transformational the leader was perceived. These were not “upper-echelon” leaders, but predominantly first-line supervisors in a nuclear power plant. Transformational leaders, sometimes referred to as charismatic leaders, had stronger relationships with their team members and performed better than non-transformational leaders. Yes, leadership is real, powerful, and matters at all levels of the organization, not just the C-suite.

I recognize I’m drawing inferences here that are not fully researched, but my focus is on providing  practical advice. From a helpful point of view, this means leaders should be the agent of engagement! Successful leaders embrace the influence they have on their team members. They may not be in a position to make sweeping changes in compensation design or  how their  organization values people, but they can certainly make an individual connection which leads to increased engagement.

As VP of Human Resources at Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary XTRA Lease,  I learned an important  leader effect lesson from CEO Bill Franz. We were conducting succession planning assessments and reviewing  high-potential candidates. One mid-level manager achieved strong results in the assessment and I was making a case to place him in the development pool, but Bill did not have a positive impression of this manger’s people skills. Bill put it this way, “Shawn, when I was climbing the ladder I wanted to pull everyone else up with me. Your guy is trying to get there by climbing on top of them.” As a leader, Bill understood the value  of connecting with and engaging others, and creating this common esprit-de-corp referred to as engagement.

So again, nothing revolutionary but refreshingly simple: if you want an engaged team, first, be the leader and recognize your value in driving engagement. After acknowledging your influence, I encourage you to consider these five engagement practices.

Five Practices to Increase Engagement Within Your Team

1. Engagement as part of the selection and development process – Building a team begins with selection and then continues into development, which never ends. Isn’t it better to hire someone who is open to being engaged and then nurture that desire to connect with your organization? At HLA, we administer valid, reliable assessments which measure (among many things) the “Big 5” personality variables. Conscientiousness is one of the Big 5 which predicts engagement and has been linked to performance across many job categories. In addition to conscientiousness, optimism, which is a separate personality construct, is also predictive of engagement. Both of these personality factors can be used to select employees and optimism in particular can be developed in existing team members. My colleague, Laura Heft (laura@growoptimism.com) of Grow Optimism, LLC, has developed a number of selection and development assessments and supporting training to assist leaders and their teams in this area.
2. Set vision and direction at the individual level – Where do I fit into the puzzle is a question all employees ask. How do lower level leaders create and reinforce corporate vision? Team members do need to hear the broad vision from the CEO, and not all leaders have the opportunity to shape the vision and future of their organization. But all employees benefit from knowing the mission and  respond to understanding how they contribute to success. The CEO can’t touch every team member, but individual team leaders can fill in the missing pieces to the puzzle and add color commentary as they reinforce the importance of the vision to each employee.  All  leaders should be connecting with their team members regularly, emphasizing the mission, vision, values of the enterprise and personalizing the message to each team member to fit his/her personality and contributions, clarifying roles and expectations.
3. Be clear and open when communicating – I just can’t say enough about communication.  But leaders should also recognize the limits and like recognition, no matter what you do sometimes it’s not enough. I tell my faith-based clients that Galatians 6:9 was written for church leaders. This is the frequently-quoted passage concerning “not growing weary in well doing, for in time, you’ll see the benefit if you don’t give up.” But this word from the Apostle Paul applies to secular leaders as well. Never enough communication. Never enough touch points. Never enough recognition. Yes, much of leadership is like the movie Groundhog Day, where news anchor Bill Murray repeats every day over and over. But keep repeating and don’t give up because communication is a necessary ingredient for engagement!
4. Create distance between poor performers and star performers – This practice won’t likely appear in the typical article about engagement, but if you truly want your team to be engaged you must deal with poor performers. This practice relates back to satisfaction and treating people fairly; treating people fairly doesn’t just mean preventing discrimination and harassment. It also refers to taking care of me, the team member who has been working at a high level while others have been slacking. Separate the normal distribution of talent in your organization. Reward the high performers, those folks who truly make things happen; provide honest appreciation to the solid citizens who make up the majority of your team; and help the C players make a positive career transitions to another organization or career where they can be successful.
5. Focus on customers for a collective win – Again, the immediate leader with the day in and day out relationship with his/her team is in the perfect position to reinforce the value of the customer and how the customer fits into the mission of the organization. It’s helpful here to broaden the definition of the customer to include internal as well as external to encourage engagement from that perspective. For non-profits customers are the mission, the reason many team members are part of the organization. Providing linkage and a tie-in to your collective customers with all of your team members creates a win for everyone!

These five practices are not revolutionary, but not exactly simple to implement. We at HLA are here to help you implement these, and other, engagement practices across on your company.

Part III will focus on helping you, as a leader, stay engaged, because sometimes all of us get stuck. More to come!