Scott
Constantine of Performance Link NZ
shares a series of plain truth articles
about creating a highly engaged
workforce.
Less than 30% of corporate employees in the western world are engaged in their
work (virtually all engagement research
now reflects this). The rest are either disengaged or at best ambivalent. This dismal statistic provides enormous opportunity for business improvement especially given the correlation between employee engagement and business performance. Managers can dramatically improve employee engagement by creating the right environment and culture.
One view of employee engagement is
that, it is a concept concerned with bringing out
or unlocking the very best of what is already naturally within each employee, for the pursuit of work goals.
It is not about transforming people into something they are not.
It does not turn every employee into the right person for their job, nor does it make every person a highly performing individual
compared to others, but what it does do is to allow what naturally exists in an organisation to come out and to be applied.
I'm not talking about the effort that employees have to put in to keep their job, get reasonable performance reviews, or to earn their bonuses.
I'm talking about unlocking the part of them that they
normally don't even bring to work, the part that we see when we see an outstanding performance, tireless pursuit of a goal,
an awesome presentation, or brilliant creativity.
Ironically, rather than trying to
directly drive engagement levels, managers need to
instead put their efforts into
systematically creating an environment where employee engagement can
flourish on its own accord. Here is
a broad framework to start with:
Environmental Factor #1 Create an environment where people feel the investment of their true self is worthwhile, valued, and valuable. This is an environment where people feel able to give to their work, able to receive from their work, and also able to give and receive from others in the course of work.
Environmental Factor #2 Create an environment that provides sufficient psychological safety. This is where there is a sense of being able to show and employ one's true self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.
Environmental Factor #3 Create an environment where people feel that they have the physical, emotional, and psychological resources necessary for investing their true self in their work performances. This is an environment where employees feel capable of driving physical, intellectual, and emotional energies into their job performance.
The po!nt: "Creating a highly engaged workforce requires systematic attention to the environment
which you provide."
www.performancelink.co.nz
