Employee engagement - take a walk on the wild side
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Redundancies, shutdowns, request for volunteers to work for free. According to a recent survey, half of the UK’s employees are suffering from stress. With all this gloom, it’s a pretty tough judgement call whether it’s the best of times or worst of times to be trying to engage employees. After all, you don’t want to lose your brightest and best, but get it wrong and you could just push them over the edge.
Even in the unequivocally best of times, attitudes towards some of the so-called softer sides of how your company ‘engages’ can be healthily cynical. You go to the workshop, play some games and go back to what you were doing before and do it in pretty much the same way.
When things are as hard as they are now, employees need belief in the future of the business and a sense of control over their working life. They need to feel they can act positively to safeguard its future, rather than simply being asked to make sacrifices.
Those running the business need their people to be focused, making their time and their energy count, working together effectively, not in-fighting to the death or panicking into conspicuous activity.
So maybe now is the time to think about employee engagement less as an exercise in sermons from the managerial mount and more as a collective problem-solving ‘we’re all in this together’ to smartly navigate your way through the good times and the bad.
In any organisation, most employees know where the niggles and the fault lines lie between divisions, departments and teams. The things that get in the way of productivity or great customer service. So give them the space to talk to each other about the bugbears. Ask them to create a market stall of talents and resources to share between teams: what information, skills or resources do they have that could help other teams solve their problems? What do they need in return?
It does mean being prepared to tackle the grouses and the anxieties about the way business gets done head on, rather than closing them down. It means pushing for immediate action on good ideas, not scheduling a meeting in a month’s time. It also means providing the commitment that the leaders of the business will make things happen where there’s a clear case. And it won’t be comfortable. When everyone’s feeling insecure, their focus will be, at best, on meeting the targets they’ve been given, not thinking more widely. They’ll need some persuading that this is about doing better with the same, not just more for less.
But if you are prepared to embrace the unexpected and give employees the chance to help reconfigure the way you work to deliver the product, service or experience you want your customers to have, it might just be by far the best thing you’ve ever done.
