Having delivered training and facilitation as part of several, varied engagement initiatives we are continuously surprised at the variation in the definitions of the word engagement among people in organisations. One person's idea of engagement can be another person's trigger to disengage.
However we have noticed that the key underlying theme for most disengaged employees is feeling unheard, under valued and even in some cases anonymous and dispensable.
Some key questions are:
What are you asking people to engage with and why?
What is it you expect to change or happen as a result of full engagement?
What are the obstacles?
How does full engagement look, sound and feel behaviourally?
How does full engagement look in terms of the business?
Does the current infrastructure of your business (systems, hierarchy and processes) allow for the level of engagement you want?
Suprisingly few people can answer these questions with any real clarity or certainty.
I have heard several responses to these questions including- employees making an effort to go the extra mile (sometimes called discretionary effort), increased interpersonal communication between employees (getting out from behind a computer screen), employees regularly sharing best practice and new ideas across departments for the benefit of the whole, increasing transparency between leaders, managers and employees, more money, more training, more time, more feedback, more communication.
As we all know most start ups begin with the energy of people and their ideas, beliefs, values and experiences. The interplay between these dynamics determines how and what will become the hard and soft infrastructures of the business. So the business is built from the bottom up with the people at the base. People (employees) are then literally creating and entangled in the processes and systems of the business as they strive to establish the product or service.
Of course once the small start up becomes a growing and expanding success it becomes about investment, stakeholders, productivity and ROI which needs organisation. This is often when new management, systems and processes get introduced and are added to what already exits but not necessarily always including previous infrastructure. Everything is scaled up and sometimes the original people, places and things that were in position when the company began become less important and in many cases, obsolete.
Often the main obstacle to engagement is that the structure of larger, established organisations are built with systems, processes, supply chains, business models, rules hierarchy and bureaucracy that employees have to fit in with. Aspects of the infrastructure and some employees embedded within it tend to ossify over time. This is particularly problematic with M&As.
One solution for laying the foundations for full employee engagement is to re-organise the infrastructure (both tangible - systems and environments and intangible-processes, rules and culture.) of an organisation around the people who currently inhabit, use and live them.
This would start with an 'idea sharing' initiative (in an environment of honesty and trust) to explore if, when, how and where people are currently bypassing existing bureaucracy, protocols, systems and processes to get through the working week. Also looking at any obstacles and opportunities for improvement based on the experiences of employees across all sectors and departments thereby opening all possible channels of communication between people at all levels.
This doesn't have to be wholesale change and replacement but just a matter of creatively 're-organising' the facts. Adapting current ways of doing things but taking cues from the employees up. The by-product of this process would be employees engaged around a shared commitment to make things work better.
Engagement in this context could be defined as both listening to employees ideas and then implementing them.
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