Engagement
“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”
- Doug Conant
Gallup recently surveyed 150 CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officers) of large companies across the globe. They asked how they were maintaining productivity and engagement levels give the extended season of the COVID 19 pandemic. The survey noted these top five responses:
Mission and purpose are important drivers of high employee engagement. This one shouldn’t surprise us. It is always the case, but particularly so in this kind of season. When everything seems unsure and even pointless in the world, the place they are coming to work better be pretty clear on who they are and the difference they are making in the world.
Leaders need to go the extra mile to show how much they care about their people. During a recent ice storm in Texas where many lost their water and were not able to get to stores due to the icy conditions, the CEO of one of the companies we work with procured dozens of cases of water and hand-delivered them in his four-wheel-drive vehicle to the doorstep of all of their almost 100 employees.
Unprecedented levels of communication and transparency are necessary to maintain trust. Everyone is assuming far worse than the reality. They all have friends who’ve lost their jobs and heard of companies that have failed. Share as much as you can as often as you can.
You cannot measure productivity by “butts in seats”. In an information and service economy, many of the office roles that have gone home are really difficult to measure. Micro-managing and “big brother” looking over shoulders reduces trust, lowers morale, and achieves the opposite of the intended purpose.
The emergency mentality of 2020 cannot be sustained through 2021. People cannot work in crisis for very long. That can only be sustained for shorter periods. The mandate to “go the extra mile”, work longer hours, and contribute more will start to have disastrous effects if carried out too far.
There is gold in this survey. When working with teams, we often find the opposite of what senior leadership reports. There is a natural assumption that when things are going the way management likes, they must have the wrong team and need to get a new one. This lack of belief in a team is felt and perpetuates the problem.
The real antidote to all those frustrations often lies in how they are managed. Getting a higher level of productivity and engagement from a team is typically the result of managing them better. Being attentive to the things that cultivate and motivate the team to greater heights. The good news is those things that yield better results for your company also produce a better quality of life for all those you employ.
As my business partner says, “Don’t try to boil the ocean.” Start with one of the suggestions from the CHRO’s above and when there is measured progress in terms of engagement, move on to the next. Ironically, there is virtually no cost associated with the ideas mentioned above.
Consider
Has the engagement level with the team suffered in this last season of COVID, along with social and political unrest?
Are you feeling disconnected from displaced team members?
Which of these simple areas above do you feel like you could most easily embrace in order to improve productivity and engagement?