Building employee engagement

Written by
Ron Jones, Ron Jones Consulting
Workplace Management: Strategy & Advice

Almost every article on employee engagement refers to the importance of culture.

I have struggled at times with understanding how the culture of the organisation is really defined, since so much of it seems to come from the approach adopted by line managers. We constantly claim that ‘people join organisations, but leave managers’.

This suggests that the interpretation and practice of the corporate culture adopted by managers is a key determinant in the day to day experience of staff and how they describe the culture. The actions and behaviour of managers will influence each staff member’s description of the culture as they experience that behaviour.

My work with a wide range of organisations suggests that there are really 5 areas of influence which ultimately determine the level of engagement.

These are Purpose and Direction, Values and Behaviour, Consistent Treatment, Empathy and Responsiveness, Effective Communication.

For each manager, there is a fundamental need to build a level of confidence and trust with staff around their commitment to these areas of influence.

This will mean taking action to do the following:

Purpose and Direction - Be clear about the purpose and direction of the organisation
Managers should know what the business model is and how that impacts on the area they manage. Knowing how each component part of the business links to others is vital in creating a sense of involvement and excitement. All companies have a story about what they do, the name, their history: these should be told with passion.

Values and Behaviour - Be clear about the values and behaviours
Managers need to model and demonstrate behaviours that clearly associate them as having a strong values base which is aligned to the organisation’s core values and beliefs. The extent to which staff feel welcome and included is also a key outcome of the behaviour of managers.

Consistent Treatment - Be consistent in your treatment of staff
All treatment of staff should reflect the values and be capable of a test of consistency: this particularly applies to issues such as to the types of behaviour that are rewarded and those that are not.

Empathy and Responsiveness - Be engaged in the work issues that staff deal with or are concerned about
Managers need to enquire about what is happening and acknowledge and respond to the concerns of staff. Simple displays of recognition and communicating to staff about successes - and even failures – are important in demonstrating understanding and creating a strong sense of pride.

Effective Communication - Be open and authentic in your communication
Managers often need to be trained in how to be effective in their written and verbal communication. The ability to convey a message authentically is a vital feature of establishing and building trust.

There may be other equally important features of building and sustaining employee engagement, however these five areas have been the most significant in my experience.

The challenge within our organisations is to recognise their importance and establish the basis on which we appoint people demonstrating these characteristics into leadership roles.

Why Job Descriptions Matter

One of the challenges for HR is preparing job descriptions that are effective in addressing the strategic needs of the organization and linking this to the outcomes expected of any particular position.

Somehow we seem to have separated the job from the organization in such a way that we describe the focus of the organization in strategic terms but describe jobs by reference to the tasks they perform. Managers have clearly decided that the best way to control the workforce is to describe jobs in this way and this has been aided and assisted by HR departments.

Interestingly, of course, the position descriptor then becomes fairly useless as a reference point for performance development and management. Most people are capable of demonstrating that they can easily undertake the tasks in the position descriptor since these are usually set in such a way that they describe what the job used to do, not what it needs to do. Sadly, someone who can’t do the tasks assigned to them is probably not going to benefit from any performance development process.

Position descriptors need to be outcome focused and linked directly to the areas of accountability in a strategic or business plan.

I recently reviewed and rewrote a set of position descriptors for a large service sector organization that had used a very traditional task description system that categorized activities according to whether they were performed daily, weekly, monthly or occasionally, and the percentage of time to be spent on each task group.

Not surprisingly, this agency experienced a high degree of turnover from staff whose commitment and loyalty to the organization was affected by a high level of control and what they also perceived to be a lack of trust.

By changing the description of the roles to reflect the strategic nature of the position, and through developing a strong link between the successful achievement of position outcomes and organizational success, we were able to reduce turnover and improve morale.

This change was only possible because the CEO recognized the benefit of doing something different and being prepared to adopt a practical and relatively easy to use system. A similar approach has been adopted by another service sector organization and is being implemented within an expanding resource sector operation.

Every organization sets out to establish a performance culture and attempts to reinforce this through a management and development system.

We need to understand that when we recruit people or promote them, we are usually looking to match their capability and potential with the future needs of the organization. To limit this possibility by inappropriate job descriptions is to deny the organization – and the individual – of realizing the full impact of their talents and contribution.

HR owes both parties a better deal.

What do you think?

This article was written for Human Resources IQ.