Employee Engagement Is Everyone’s Job

The following is a guest piece by Kevin Kruse.

“Hey, why is it always up to the manager to increase engagement?” Shirley had thrust up her hand and didn’t wait for me to call on her before blurting out her question. She continued, “The person who always complains about ‘communication’ never raises his hand in a meeting to ask a question.”

We were in the middle of workshop teaching leadership principles that drive employee engagement—techniques that increase an employee’s emotional commitment to the company they work for. I paused, not knowing where this Director-level executive was going.

There was a wave of murmurs and head nodding among the other managers in the room. Derek suddenly piled on, “And the people who say there are no growth opportunities have never logged into our virtual university even once!”

My well planned meeting suddenly derailed into a spontaneous conversation around the role of the individual in employee engagement. What should be expected of the individual worker when it comes to satisfaction, motivation and ultimately, giving discretionary effort?

Shirley’s spontaneous outburst set me off on a one-year quest to better understand the role intrinsic motivation plays in employee engagement efforts, and how we can actually teach individual employees how to take ownership of their own engagement.

Lord knows we need to pull out all the stops when it comes to engagement. While individual survey results vary, most researchers agree that we have an employee engagement crisis around the world.

Low engagement is a crisis for companies as it is a drag to growth, profits and ultimately share price. It’s also a crisis for individuals as low engagement at work spills over into our personal lives and impacts our health and relationships.

Based on my own experience as a business leader and Best Place to Work winner, and findings from surveys of over 10 million workers in 150 countries, I’ve concluded that the top four drivers of engagement are Communication, Growth, Recognition and Trust.

Additionally, the single most important factor in employee engagement is the relationship one has with her boss.

But unfortunately, we’ve been focusing on only half of that relationship—the boss. In other words, what can the supervisor do to increase communication? What can the supervisor do to increase recognition? What can the supervisor do to increase trust?

We need to keep developing managers, but we need to start teaching individuals what they can do to increase their own engagement and how to increase the engagement of those around them.

First, employees should identify and focus on the areas that matter to them most.
While research will tell us what drivers are most important for the masses, we are all individuals. I may really crave growth opportunities at my stage of my career, while you might be more interested in recognition for what you are already doing.

To support this step I developed a free online assessment to help uncover your personal engagement profile that will show you the relative importance of each engagement trigger.

Second, we need to teach employees mindfulness—specifically, being mindful of all the things companies and managers already doing to drive engagement.
One activity I’ve found to be effective is to ask the employee to write down all the things the company does to foster a specific area, like Communication. Some employees will write “Nothing” or “Weekly staff meeting”.

But then I share a generic list of what some companies do, including: one-on-one meetings, team meetings, town hall meetings, company newsletter, intranet, annual performance reviews, yammer, and on and on.

When asked to circle all the items that their own company is indeed doing, usually the revised list is much longer than their original list. An “aha” moment occurs when they realize, “Well, I guess they are doing a lot more on communication than I realized.”

Third, we need to teach employees how to partner with their bosses.
You think communication is lacking? Great, huddle with your supervisor to suggest specific actions that can improve the situation. Don’t think the company is supporting your growth? OK, how can you hold a career path meeting with your supervisor to discuss your goals and what it’s going to take to accomplish them.

What individual workers need is the message that they actually have an obligation to contact their supervisor if they aren’t satisfied; we can give them tools like model emails and “conversation starters” to help them navigate these conversations.

We can’t be afraid to have an honest conversation around the individual’s obligations to be engaged and to drive the engagement of others. The cynical view is that this is just pushing it all on the employee or this enables out of touch C-level executives to say, “It’s their fault not ours!”

The enlightened viewpoint is to realize the important role of intrinsic motivation and that you don’t need a title to lead, you don’t need direct reports to be a leader, and that everyone should have “driving positive engagement” as part of their job description.

Kevin Kruse is a New York Times bestselling author whose used his focus on leadership and employee engagement to create and sell several, multi-million dollar technology companies that have won both Inc 500 and Best Place to Work awards. His newest book is “Employee Engagement for Everyone: 4 Keys to Happiness and Fulfillment at Work”.