A 2007 Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 employees worldwide found that only 21% felt fully engaged at work and nearly 40% were disenchanted or disengaged.
This negativity has a direct impact on the bottom line. They found that companies with low levels of employee engagement had a 33% annual decline in operating income and an 11% annual decline in earnings growth.
Those with high engagement on the other hand, reported a 19% increase in operating income and 28% growth in earning per share.
No wonder there have been more articles and blogs on employee engagement that I could ever count. But the question is this: What are we as leaders really doing to change ourselves and our cultures?
Leaders are the catalyst for change. Leaders can easily underestimate how their attitudes and behaviors affect the energy and engagement levels of their teams.
Be Wise… Energize!
Because energy is contagious, both the quality and quantity of a leader’s energy can drain or galvanize a team.
In working with an executive team for one of my clients, we developed a goal for them to create a highly engaged, employee and customer-friendly, high performance culture. Through an extensive needs analysis we uncovered that burnout was rampant at all levels of the organization and the employees at this organization were definitely in that 40%.
We first helped the leadership team implement some simple and very effective tools for spreading “energy” through the ranks. We then developed a program focused on helping people managing their energy along with their time to prevent this high degree of burn out. Harvard Business Review has a wonderful article I picked up a number of best practices from (see Managing Your Energy Not Your Time,” HBR October 2007).
Human beings don’t work like computers; they can’t operate at high speeds continuously, running multiple programs at once. And it is amazing how many people are expected to work like computers.
We do best and are most productive when we alternate between period of intense focus and intermittent renewal. I will share a few ideas here From the HBR article along with some others from my bag of tricks:
- How many of you sit at your desk and wolf down your lunch while reading through your emails? Get away from your desk so you come back more focused and fueled to face the rest of the day.
- Set aside an uninterrupted 60 to 90 minutes each morning to focus on your top two to three priorities and not responding to emails or putting out whatever fires had flared up the night before.
- Reduce interruptions by performing high concentration tasks away from phone and email. In fact I suggest responding to emails and voice mails ONLY at designated times during the day.
- Engage in healthy conflict. The failure to be direct and holding in anger and frustration will zap your energy and have a negative impact on colleagues and those you manage. Patrick Lenoni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team talks to this point.
- Make an effort to give people your full focus and try to listen “with both ears” without interrupting. I know this is difficult, but commit to ignore email while talking to people on the phone.
- Fuel positive emotions in yourself and others by regularly expressing appreciation in detailed specific terms through notes, email, calls or conversations.
- Identify your “sweet spot” activities; those that give you feelings of effortless absorption and fulfillment. Find ways to do more of these. One executive who hated doing sales reports delegated them to someone who loved that activity.
- Share your passion and your values. Communicate what you stand for and what your larger mission is, beyond profit. What is it that gets you up in the morning? Why should others feel passionate about doing it too?
To effectively re-energize and engage their workforces, companies need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing in them so they are motivated and able to bring more of themselves to work every day.
If companies allow and encourage employees to create and stick to such rituals, they will be rewarded with a more engaged, productive and focused workforce.
What are you doing to re-energize and engage yourself and your workforce? I would love to hear.
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Kristi Royse is CEO of KLR Consulting
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Dear Tom,
I am currently working on that topic with a logistic department of a multinational company (the topics are : commitment of people to achieve the goals, empowerment of the total population around business objectives). As consultant, I do not tell them how to be energized and commited but prefer to ask them when they are committed, empowered and energized how it is ? What are the ingredients of such a peak experience. The approach I use is called “appreciative inquiry”. I was international HR Director before being a consultant and we were very much used to the use of the “root cause analysis” as soon as we were receiving the Engagement Survey results. The outputs of our analysis (even done with the people who answered the questionnaire) were poor as using this approach leads usually to “the pointing fingers syndrom !”. The appreciative methodology use the opposite way : when it works, why does it work, what do people specifically do to make that a success, what are the motivations out of theses successess etc… I hope this gives you an answer among others about your question.
regards,
Bernard
By Bernard Tollec Owner (Consultant & Coach) at INVOLVE CONSULTING
Interesting article! Yes, employees are more likely to seem disengaged at the workplace today, and this could possibly be because of greater organizational hierarchy. When I say this, I mean that when companies have a structure that involves a multiple tier system, the work filters itself out, and when it reaches the employees, it not only makes itself mundane by nature, but also does it create a de-link between the tasks and the rewards. Here, I mean rewards in the sense of customer satisfaction and not monetary benefits. Like Vineet Nayar has explained in his book ‘Employees First, Customers Second’, the potential of all employees must be unlocked by decentralizing decision-making. He calls the principle ‘Destroying the office of the CEO’, and he explains how the ownership of change must be transferred to the employees. This would not only create an entrepreneurial mindset among them, but also would make them directly responsible for what they did. That would, by default, make them more engaged and involved in their work.
I completely agree! I personally try to be engaged mostly because I become unhappy and complacent if I don’t make an effort to but the owner’s definitely play a huge role in how their employees feel. I worked for a small company where Monday through Thursday we all showed up at 8am and had breakfast together in the deli, which was paid for by the company. Then got to work at around 8:30 – 8:45. Noonish we took an hour lunch and we went home at 4. Friday’s we did the same thing except no lunch but we went home at 1. On top of that, the pay was EXCELLENT! And All medical benefits were paid for. This was the BEST place I have ever worked for! I was always engaged. I rarely spent personal time on the computer fiddling around. I was always looking for things to do. I spent my own time thinking of ways to benefit the company. The company became very important to me and probably because of the simple things they did to make me feel important to the company.