you will get better and better at giving recognition. As you recognize others more often, you’ll become more competent and confident in doing so, increasing your skill and effectiveness. The PDRI cycle helps you get better until recognition becomes an ingrained habit. Adjust your plan accordingly and repeat as necessary.
✔ The president of a large manufacturing company walks through his plant once a month to say hi to his people. This makes him feel like he’s a great manager. If you ask his people, however, they see this behavior as little more than a joke. Says one front-line worker, “Each month, Mr. Johnson asks me how my family is. And each month, I tell him ‘I’m still not married, Sir.’”
✔ In another company, employees report that upper management tends to recognize them more as a show for the benefit of their peers rather than for the employees themselves. In their management team meetings, company managers will talk about the great job one of their employees is doing, but the comments rarely get back to the actual employee being acknowledged.
✔ In another organization, employee-of-the-month awards are handed out in management meetings, at which the employees being recognized are seldom if ever present. The manager running the meeting traditionally concludes his congratulatory remarks with a comment along the lines of, “If someone runs into Larry, please tell him that he was named employee of the month.”
Who should be responsible for employee engagement in the organization? Ideally, senior leaders and the HR department should design and lead the efforts, and then managers should implement them. But who is the “owner” of the effort moving forward? Who should drive the efforts?
According to the Aberdeen Group, for 63 percent of the Best-in-Class organizations the group surveyed, CEOs are the primary champions of successful programs and value motivating employees and supporting engagement initiatives. Yet many CEOs aren’t always in the best position to own and execute the organization’s engagement strategy, so it often falls to the managers themselves with the help and guidance of the human resources department. When managers are responsible for employee engagement, they are more likely to link these strategies to performance and results desired by the organization.
Ultimately, organizations have to select drivers that make the most sense for their companies. The key to making sure those driving the initiative are successful is to ensure that they have the necessary resources and authority and embrace the task.
A number of organizations have contacted me for help in improving their focus on just a single variable of employee recognition. They know they need help, based on survey responses to questions such as “I feel valued for the work I do.” My first task is to get them to realize it’s difficult to change anything based on feedback from just a single variable. It’s like trying to guess the shape of a golf ball by looking at a single dimple. You need to expand on that variable to develop a more robust understanding of what is needed. In this case, what does recognition mean to those answering this question? Who is providing (or not providing) recognition? How often is recognition provided? Does recognition vary over time? Does recognition vary with different circumstances? At the very least, you should create an expanded index of variables that all lead to better understanding what employee recognition means for your employees.
I’ve seen people (somewhat comically) try to interpret what a variable means without this broader understanding of the context (“I think what employees are saying by making this variable low is that … ”), but why guess on the meaning of the variables you are measuring when you can simply clarify by asking additional questions, conducting some employee focus groups or a pulse survey, or all of the above? The further you drift from the specific variables you are measuring, the more difficult impacting those variables will be.
Chapter 2
Strategies for an Engaged Workforce
In This Chapter
▶ Encouraging employees to take initiative
▶ Increasing employee autonomy
▶ Focusing on career growth and development
By being proactive, positive, focused, and forward-looking, managers can engage and inspire employees – and employees can inspire and engage themselves and their coworkers – in practical ways that yield real results and allow their companies to become stronger, more profitable, and more competitive in even the most difficult marketplace.
Taking control of their circumstances helps employees take control of their jobs – and their lives – and makes positive things happen. Companies that have had increasing engagement scores over the last decade have revealed a short list of key variables attributing to those results, and this chapter focuses on those variables. Here, I show you how to create a framework for managing employees in positive and practical ways to overcome negative times and circumstances. I offer a strategy, a process, and key factors critical to success for you, all supported with examples, techniques, and case studies of how other managers have succeeded in fostering more engaged employees.
All performance starts with clear goals and expectations. The starting point of any effort to improve or sustain employee engagement is giving employees a clear and compelling vision. If employees don’t know (or aren’t inspired by) what the organization is doing, they find summoning up the motivation to succeed more difficult. Frances Hesselbein, president of the Leader to Leader Institute, once put it this way: “No matter what business you’re in, everyone in the organization needs to know why.”
Assessing employees’ understanding of your organization’s mission and purpose
Ask employees what the mission and purpose of the organization is. If they don’t know, or if you get a different answer from each person you ask, chances are things have drifted or perhaps haven’t been clear for some time. Use this opportunity to revisit your purpose.
To gain clarity about the organization’s mission, management guru Peter Drucker suggests that you ask these five questions to get at the core of your business:
✔ What is our mission?
✔ Who is our customer?
✔ What does the customer value?
✔ What are our results?
✔ What is our plan?
Clarifying your vision (and revisiting this process periodically) is useful for deciding what’s most important for the
