In times of high demand for talent and increasing mobility in bright professionals, the need for their "engagement" is becoming critical.
Unplanned turnover is expensive: in professional staff the direct and indirect costs involved can exceed a year's salary. Engagement means people being focussed, going the extra mile, really working hard for your organisation.
In large organisations the issue is addressed with staff surveys, ongoing culture change programs, management training and fairly frequent tuning of incentive award programs.
However, engagement is very much a personal thing. Ninety percent of the "engagement" anyone feels at work comes from those they are closest to: their peers, their staff and their boss. Maybe there are some things you can do, now, and directly - rather than waiting on wider initiatives.
First, sit down and examine your own practices. Not what you believe in, or try to do, but what your staff experience in their interaction with you.
How would each of your staff score you on the following (out of ten):
- listening to them as a whole person
- remembering the details of the whole person they open up to you
- adding value/improving their abilities/helping them build a career which does not depend on you
- providing knowledge and understanding (about the business, its strategy, its challenges)
- providing the resources they need
Try building a matrix with these criteria running across a page in a series of rows, and then with the individuals in the team you manage represented in columns down the page. Score yourself as they would see you.
Next, ask yourself what you need to do for each individual to improve the scores you think they would give you. The actions needed won't be uniform, so don't look for a collective solution.
After this, and when you think you have done enough to materially lift your scores (as you would guess their ratings) in a few months' time, take the next step. Show them the instrument. If you so choose, get a reading on how you are scored actually by these people. But of equal importance, invite them to work the same process for their direct reports.
Engagement starts with the practices of the CEO, and then with those who report to this position. It does not rest on culture surveys or the widespread endorsement of imperatives. Nor does it rest on money or on the quality of office fit-out: more money doesn't buy engagement once your salaries are set at market rates, and some of the most engaged teams can be found working in second and third rate office environments.
Engagement is personal: it rests on individual relationships. Engagement is a form of loyalty, and it has to be "earned".
This little exercise works on key criteria of engagement which make simple common sense. But the same criteria also emerge as key drivers in empiric research on this subject.1
The message here is: ease back from the daily rush at work, and reflect a little on what might make each member of your team feel more engaged at work. Do some thinking, perhaps aided by the exercise suggested, and then go to work on your practices.
1. One of the larger studies in this field was undertaken by the Gallup organisation in the USA - and an interesting commentary on this work is provided in "First Break All the Rules" - a book by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman. (It was published by Simon and Schuster, UK, 1999)