UPMC administers surveys to all 80,000 employees across 20 different hospital systems, doctors’ offices, clinics, and long-term care facilities to understand the employee voice.
With more organizations becoming aware of the importance of engagement, the media coverage of the topic has become widespread and more scholarly. This, however, can be a double-edged sword. In a September 3, 2011, opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Do Happy People Work Harder?” Harvard professor Teresa Amabile and researcher Steven Kramer shared some of the results from a project in which they collected more than twelve thousand diary entries from 238 employees at seven companies.
Download: Sample Employee Engagement Survey
They found that about a third of the time, the workers were unhappy, unmotivated, or both—but that on the days that they were happy, they were more apt to have new ideas. Amabile and Kramer write:
“Managers can help ensure that people are happily engaged at work. Doing so isn’t expensive. Workers’ well-being depends, in large part, on managers’ ability and willingness to facilitate workers’ accomplishments—by removing obstacles, providing help, and acknowledging strong effort. A clear pattern emerged when we analyzed the 64,000 specific workday events reported in the diaries: Of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important—by far—is simply making progress in meaningful work.”1
Articles like this create a compelling and data-driven case for the importance of engagement and the role that engagement plays in performance. However, they can also confuse readers who don’t understand the concept of engagement. For many, words and phrases like happiness and work harder create confusion and fuel misconceptions about what engagement is and isn’t. Is engagement about feeling happy? Is it about simply getting work done? Not quite. So let’s take a look at some of the myths surrounding engagement and the facts behind them:
Do you like Infographics? Here are a couple more for your enjoyment:
Lack of opportunity for personal growth or career development is the number one reason that employees leave a company. So what’s it like in your organization? Have you implemented growth into your employee retention strategies? Do your employees grow or go? According to a survey by Glassdoor and Harris Interactive, more applicants—52 percent—wanted to hear about growth opportunities when interviewing for a job than about any other perk. The same survey also found that one-third of employees left a job because of—wait for it—lack of career growth—than for any other reason. Only 8 percent left because of their managers.105
When professional growth opportunities are absent in a retention strategy, you get stagnation, boredom, and finally attrition. People work on autopilot. They aren’t present; their minds are not on their work. Errors happen. Quality drops. Indifference sets in. Work becomes routine. It may still get done—how many times have you driven a familiar route mindlessly, only to end up safely at your destination with no memory of getting there?—but nothing new happens. Innovation grinds to a halt.
We analyzed survey results from over twenty thousand employees who had left a large biomedical company and its subsidiaries during a period of five years. We compared attrition numbers with engagement scores, and the results were intriguing. Typically, employees enjoyed a high level of growth during the first six months of employment. However, at the nine-month mark, these companies experienced much higher than average levels of attrition, and engagement levels plummeted. What was happening?
Upon further investigation, we learned that during the first six months, these employees were constantly learning. This made sense; the job was new to them. However, at about the nine-month point, employees had learned the basics of the job and were no longer as challenged as they were during the first six months. At that point, their levels of engagement dropped sharply.
What was even more interesting was that once employees hit the fourteen-to eighteen-month mark, engagement and retention increased again until the two-year mark. What was happening at each of these points in time that impacted both engagement and retention? Simple—it was about growth.
Employees were learning and growing the first six months, but at about the nine-month mark they stopped. They also had little concept of where to go from there. They couldn’t see any growth opportunities awaiting them. They felt stagnant. Those who stuck around for fourteen to eighteen months suddenly began to be presented with further growth opportunities, such as new assignments, promotions, and different team roles. They were, once again, growing. Engagement increased.
This pattern remained constant until the two-year mark, at which time employees began looking outside the organization for new opportunities and challenges. Some of those who remained fell into the same patterns of stagnation and disengagement.
For these companies, the solution was clear: Step up efforts to create growth opportunities at the nine-and twenty-four-month marks. Employees, in turn, had to choose to take advantage of these opportunities. Those who did showed clear levels of engagement. Those who did not generally left the organization. That, reasoned these companies, was “good turnover.”
Among some organizational leaders—executives and managers alike—there’s a great deal of fear that by helping employees develop professionally, they’ll only be preparing them to leave for greener pastures. It’s the “help them grow and watch them go” syndrome, and it’s simply not valid. As Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni write in Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go,106 career development has become the “killer app” of employee engagement, which in turn leads to higher revenues, greater profitability, increased innovation, and a host of other happy outcomes.
Giving employees an environment where they can elect to develop professionally is very much the lesser of two evils. Is there a risk that by doing so you’ll merely train your best people to leave for better jobs? Of course. But consider the alternative. Would you rather have unmotivated, unskilled people, numbed by routine, at the heart of your company, interacting with your customers?
Doesn’t it make more sense to help your people develop skills that make them worth keeping—and then hold on to them by creating a culture in which they have the autonomy, respect, and freedom to see how far they can stretch without fear of failing? Based on our research, it’s not even a choice: While some growth-minded employees leave, most engage and stick around, and the organization benefits.
A growth-positive workplace is especially important to Millennials, who will form the next-generation workforce. A 2012 survey of nearly eight thousand college students conducted by Achievers and Experience, Inc., showed that the most important factor to them in choosing a place to work was career advancement opportunities, beating salary 54 percent to 51 percent. Also, “interesting and challenging work” tied with salary, 51–51, as the most important factor.107
Clearly, while pay and other hygiene factors need to be there, employees want growth and development not only to advance their future career prospects but also because it makes work more enjoyable and rewarding. Human beings are curious individuals who want to learn, adapt, and evolve; the circumstances don’t matter as much.
Even hourly employees want to be challenged and grow through their jobs. In a 2012 study of 2,743 employees in an international manufacturing company, our team found significant differences between the attitudes, beliefs, and values of hourly versus exempt employees. For example, only 51 percent of hourly employees felt that they had a voice in the organization and could speak up without fear of retribution or negative consequences, compared to nearly 70 percent of exempt employees. Only 39 percent of hourly employees reported receiving counseling in their careers, compared to 54 percent of exempt employees. Yet consider how important the role of the typical hourly employee is to a company’s well-being:
Hourly employees often represent the majority of customer-facing roles.
They are directly involved in production.
They directly impact quality.
They are advocates of safety.
They know where the problems are, and how to resolve them.
When was the last time a manager in your organization worried about training an hourly employee so well that he became too employable to stay?
Yet by denying growth opportunities to all workers because of this irrational fear, some managers are preventing some of their most valuable people from getting better at their jobs. It doesn’t make sense.
These days, we’ve noticed a trend we call the “tour of duty.” A person comes to an organization, finds tremendous opportunities for professional and personal development, becomes more valuable, and leaves. However, because management encouraged his growth and gave him what he needed to get better, the relationship remains strong. A few years later, he comes back for a second tour, occupying a higher rung on the corporate ladder and often bringing with him an even better skill set.
That’s why the “grow and go” mentality is self-defeating. In the end, growth leads to engagement, and employees who find deep, satisfying engagement in an organization are more likely to form mutually beneficial long-term relationships with that organization . . . even if they’re working somewhere else.
105 Glassdoor, Harris Interactive, “The Age of Social Recruiting.”
106 Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go:Career Conversations Employees Want (New York: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012).
107 Jacquelyn Smith, “What Employers Need to Know About the Class of 2012,” Forbes, April 3, 2012.
Employee engagement begins with the individual employee. If the organization, corporation, not-for-profit, university, sports team, what-have-you—is the entire organism, then each employee is like a single cell. Change may appear on the scale of an entire organism, but change begins at the level of the single cell. Let’s look at the process of growing a more deeply engaged organization by looking at the role that you, the employee—play in your own engagement.
At this point, your position and title are irrelevant. Even if you occupy a glass-walled office in the C-suite, you are first and foremost an individual, working for the benefit of a wide range of stakeholders: your colleagues, shareholders, customers, and family members, to name a few. Even if you are at the managerial or executive level and have the power to shape and set organizational policy, your greatest impact on the level of employee engagement within your organization will be how engaged you are personally—how strongly you find ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®, meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection in where you work and whom you work with.
To that end, it’s worth reiterating a critical point about employee engagement: Being engaged is a choice.
Even if you are the policymaker, engagement doesn’t just happen. Remember, the organization’s job is to create the conditions optimal for its members to engage with their work, their mission, and each other. Once that fertile soil has been laid down, it is each individual’s responsibility to say, “Yes. I will trust, I will commit emotionally, and I will embrace opportunities to flourish in my organization.” It’s important to remember that engagement involves hearts, spirits, minds, and hands. This means that you must choose to both feel and act.
While some of the keys to engagement are based on innate qualities that are not always under your conscious control—you probably don’t have complete control of what you will find meaningful—how you choose to act on those stimuli is very much a conscious choice. That’s why, in any organization, all employees fall somewhere along what we call the, Engagement Resistance Curve.
Engagement Resistance Curve
Some individuals engage more easily and eagerly than others due to both innate personality characteristics (autotelic personality, high self-esteem) and learned behaviors (high levels of trust, past positive workplace experiences). Others engage grudgingly, if at all, due to the same factors, from poor self-esteem and cynicism to issues like undiagnosed anxiety disorders.
Simply put, some people are wired for engagement, while others aren’t. Most of us, however, fit somewhere between these two extremes. We choose to be engaged (or disengaged) based on the environment we are in and where we find the ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®—meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection—in that environment. It’s a 50-50 proposition. The organization builds the ball field, and we choose to bring our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands to the game.
Most of us approach employee engagement with varying degrees of resistance. The engagement resistance curve doesn’t rank people’s current levels of engagement, but their propensity for becoming engaged. It looks like this:
Auto-engaged (5%): This employee is innately inclined to find meaning, purpose, connection, and fulfillment in almost any work. She quickly and easily embraces organizational efforts to increase levels of engagement. She tends to be optimistic, confident, self-aware, and enthusiastic. In short, she will be engaged in nearly any environment.
Engagement optimal (20%): This employee does not engage as instantaneously as the auto-engaged employee, but he does not require a great deal of encouragement to do so. He will respond positively to organizational opportunities to engage, provided they are authentic and promises are backed by action. He also tends to be optimistic, confident, self-aware, and enthusiastic, if not on quite the same “walking on sunshine” level as the auto-engaged person.
Motivationally engaged (50%): Most of us will fall into this category. These employees are willing to engage if their motivational and satisfaction needs are met—if they are paid fairly, given appropriate perks, feel emotionally safe in their roles, shown potential paths of advancement, and so forth. They are not cheerleaders, nor are they saboteurs. They are potentially effective employees who can fully engage and deliver excellence under the right conditions.
Engagement hesitant (20%): This employee would rather not engage, but is not opposed to it, either. She is likely to regard her job as something that pays her expenses and nothing more, and she is likely to regard efforts at engagement with a jaundiced eye. Relationships with organizations are transactional—quid pro quo. She will respond to engagement efforts only if they are persistent and personal, and she tends to step in and out of engagement. She tends to be naturally somewhat jaded and pessimistic about work.
Auto-disengaged (5%): These are the lost causes, the people who are unlikely to engage regardless of what the organization does. This employee cannot view work as anything more than a paycheck, and he is likely to hold an adversarial view of his employer, whether that attitude is justified or not. He is likely to be cynical, suspicious toward his employer’s motives, and a negative, indifferent clock puncher.
Sometimes, if the conditions aren’t right for an individual to engage, that also means speaking up and saying, “This is what I need if I’m going to engage.”
So where do you fit on the Engagement Resistance Curve? Remember, you are responsible for your ability or inability to engage, regardless of your position within your organization or your organization’s efforts to “get employees engaged.” Engagement may be a 50-50 proposition between employer and employee, but the individual has as much power to drive employer engagement initiatives as the top decision makers do. Don’t wait for your employer to come to you, because doing so presupposes that your employer (1) understands engagement; (2) realizes that you and others are not engaged; and (3) knows the unique factors that will engage you, the individual.
Do you simply knock on your superior’s door, complain that you’re not feeling engaged, and demand (whether implicitly or directly) that he do something about it? Of course not. The process begins with YOU, not your employer. So where is your current engagement level? To find out try taking this online ENGAGEMENT MAGIC® Self-Assessment. It’s completely free and you will surely gain insight into how engaged you are, you’ll also have a much clearer idea of how engaged you wish to become and what to do about it.
What’s the difference between employee engagement and employee satisfaction? In this fun infographic we compare employee engagement vs. employee satisfaction.
Could it really be the end of employee engagement? I was evaluating some technology the other day that is designed to help individuals achieve their goals. The “app” I was looking at provides a user with a variety of ways to ensure that a habit will become imprinted on the test subject – I mean the user. Rather than coming away excited, I felt troubled. I began to wonder whether we spend too much time trying to “program” the human brain. Is the brain just a biological computer, where inputs and outputs are readily configurable? My experience tells me no. And, I think many of you are like me: you feel uneasy when anyone claims to know the precise levers to pull in order to make significant behavioral changes. Most of us believe the human brain, and its attendant quirks, is much more than a grey-matter motherboard that runs on cellular respiration. While we cannot describe its scope, we certainly feel its complexity.
Let’s keep that thought in the background while we turn to the concept of employee engagement. Rodd Wagner is a well-known journalist and consultant that focuses on employee engagement. He recently proclaimed that “[t]he age of ‘employee engagement’ may be nearing its end.”[1] Wagner’s primary point is that because companies and practitioners have failed to perfectly implement the ideas that underlie employee engagement, it’s time to try something else.
Could Wagner be right? Maybe. But, it depends on whether you are looking for something new to talk about or whether you are truly interested in furthering the science of organization development. When commentators like Wagner predict a change on the horizon they do so to sell a new way of looking at things. They attempt to make themselves relevant. I suppose we sometimes do the same thing at DecisionWise. The problem is that when practitioners unveil a new model or theory, we implicitly send the message that organization development is an ever-changing field, constantly discarding the old in search of the new. It’s as if we are searching for our own social “string” theory to consistently explain and predict the universe of human behavior.[2]
As noted above, however, the human brain cannot be programmed with punch cards. It cannot be cajoled into submission. It has produced the greatest works of art while also committing unspeakable atrocities. Humans are incredibly complex and powerful; more complex than the multitude of dimensions contemplated by modern theoretical physicists. As such, there will never be one unifying behavioral theory. Similarly, imperfect humans will never perfectly implement models that, in the end, are designed to make them better.
At DecisionWise, we do not claim to have the sine qua non of organizational effectiveness. We understand that organization development is a soft science, and while we use scientific methods where possible, this is truly as much art as science. Critics like to find flaws in contributions. Certainly, they exist. But our discipline has yielded scientifically-validated insights and recommendations, and good consultants are able to help organizations and individuals make meaningful changes that are both substantive and measurable.
As human beings, our innate urge is to make things better: our homes, our crops, our tools, our lives, our relationships, etc. As long as this yearning exists, there will be a need to study and promote the concepts that underlie “engagement,” even if we are not perfect in implementing our discoveries. As individuals and organizations try to find order and meaning in their lives, they will seek out others with experience for suggestions on how to achieve these ideals. Consequently, organization development will continue to be an important field of study and research.
We know that labels and paradigms will come and go, as there will never be a single, successful theory for a subject predicated on the human brain. We also know that even though human and organizational behavior is exceedingly complex, that’s no reason to give up on ideas that are proven, and have merit. To do so would be to ignore the decades of research and practice that have contributed greatly to the success of both organizations and individuals. With the innovation-at-all-costs mindset, sometimes organizations and individuals discard the practical for the creative. DecisionWise remains committed to providing our clients with the best professional advice possible in order to help them make their human interactions better, both at home and in the workplace—and it works. That doesn’t always mean searching for the newest theories or practices, just to sell a new way of looking at things. Good change helps us progress. Bad change sets us back.
There will always be those that look to abandon the “tried and true” in search of the “untried, but new.” But let’s not drop what works, just for the sake of finding something “different.” Even if that means we continue to promote effective models that a few consider to be outdated. [1] Wagner, Rod. “The End of ‘Employee Engagement?’”. Forbes.com. Forbes, 11 May 2015. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. [2] For years, theoretical physicists have been searching for a single theory to reconcile Newtonian physics with quantum mechanics. The most widely-known theory that has been postulated to solve this problem is “string” theory.
Autonomy can be one of the most powerful pro-engagement factors for an organization. Creating an autonomy culture is crucial for employee engagement to flourish. If you’re starting from scratch in the kind of company where employees feel compelled to look over their shoulders at all times, begin by figuring out the level and type of autonomy that your people want. Are they most interested in spatial or temporal autonomy, which you can provide by allowing telecommuting or exploring scheduling possibilities? Or are they after something more esoteric, as in the respondents to a Fortinet survey in which more than 50 percent said they viewed using their own mobile devices at work as a right, rather than a privilege?1 Know what kind of autonomy matters to your workforce before you offer it.
The design and architectural firm Gensler, which has designed work spaces for such clients as the World Bank and Virgin Mobile, has found through internal research that giving employees more control over their physical environment leads to optimal performance. Their 2013 employee survey showed that employees given more control over where, when, and how to work had higher levels of innovation, satisfaction, and job performance. They also found that technology workers in “open” offices (where furniture can be reconfigured and there are few privacy barriers) actually focus better than those in traditional office configurations.2
Autonomy and the Feeling of Ownership
Having the autonomy to design a physical space—cubicle, office, work van, an area of the plant floor, even a jail cell—engenders in the employee a sense of ownership. He or she immediately does the equivalent of marking his or her territory. It’s a way of telling others, “This is my space.” Researchers at the University of Exeter School of Psychology studied more than two-thousand office workers and found that those who had control over the layout of their work space were 32 percent more productive than counterparts who lacked that control.3 That’s a meaningful difference that impacts the bottom line.
With ownership, one also claims responsibility (and the inherent accountability) for space, task, role, or assignment. Ownership is a powerful factor in creating engagement. Grant employees ownership.
Making Autonomy Meaningful
Make the autonomy you offer meaningful and authentic. The more potential risk a type of autonomy carries for the organization, the more meaningful it is to the employee. In other words, giving employees the freedom to decorate their cubicles while directing their team activities with an iron4ENGAGEMENT MAGIC® fist means nothing. It’s an insult. Meaningful autonomy, at times, may mean that the boss trusts you with something that has the potential to embarrass the organization, or cost it money . . . making you much more likely to handle with care.
4 Ways to Create an Environment for Autonomy Culture
Create an environment that offers both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators can be as straightforward as performance incentives, an extra afternoon off, or profit-sharing. Intrinsic motivators demand more subtlety but can be evoked by measures that attach meaning and purpose to the work, training that fosters the desire for excellence, and other tactics that align work with positive feelings. Effective autonomy empowers employees to tap into the meaning that underlies their work. For instance, allowing an employee with small children to work from home three days a week can connect her to one of the reasons she’s working so hard—the welfare of her family—and help her be a more committed, inspired employee.
Next, structure broad goals, desired outcomes, and general boundaries but allow your people to determine everything else about how they reach those goals. Let them do things their way as long as they behave and operate appropriately within the context of key relationships—and as long as they deliver. Also, create clear accountability systems that remind employees they can come and go like the wind, and dye their hair green, only as long as at the end of the quarter they have hit or surpassed their benchmarks.
Provide your people with the tools and resources they need to reach your goals and theirs. Training, technology, new faces, whatever it takes. Again, this is about trust, saying, “I’m willing to invest in you and your ideas because I believe you’ll make it worthwhile.
Finally, once you’ve done all this, get out of the way, and let people do their thing. If you hire people who want to give 110 percent and put them in an 85 percent environment, you’ll do your organization greater harm than by hiring 85-percenters in the first place.
Don’t grant autonomy if you as a manager aren’t prepared to follow through. Keep in mind that once employees have a taste of true autonomy, they won’t want to give it up. We’ll watch Yahoo! and see how this real-time experiment in taking away autonomy plays out.
1 Ellen Messmer, “Young Employees Say BYOD a ‘Right’ Not ‘Privilege,’” CIO, June 19, 2012. 2 Gensler, 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey 3 Craig Knight and S. Alexander Haslam, “Your Place or Mine? Organizational Identification and Comfort as Mediators of Relationships Between the Managerial Control of Workspace and Employees’ Satisfaction and Well-Being,” British Journal of Management 21, no. 3 (2010). 4 H. A. Simon and W. G. Chase, “Skill in Chess,” American Scientist 61, (1973): 394–403; D. K. Simonton, “Philosophical Eminence, Beliefs, and Zeitgeist: An Individual-Generational.”
This infographic provides a comparison of employees and their behaviors in engaged and disengaged organizations. Which type of organization do you work for?
So what DOES an engaged organization look like? Heck, what does a disengaged organization look like? Satisfaction, motivation, and happiness are like seeds, soil, and water. Without them, you can’t grow engagement. But on their own, they don’t create engagement. To grow crops, you need one more thing: the sun’s energy. To grow engagement, you need energy of employer and employees communicating, collaborating, building trust, and promoting shared values. That’s when magic happens. Download: Sample Employee Engagement Survey
Finding meaning and connection when it’s 100 degrees outside, one o’clock in the afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, and 38 pallets of sod are waiting to fill in an acre of land, isn’t necessarily ideal. If you haven’t laid sod before, just imagine lifting a couple thousand 20-pound slabs of pre-cut dirt and grass one by one and carefully placing them on the ground in a brick-stack pattern to create an instant yard. Not only is the sod heavy like thick rolls of carpet, but there is A LOT of it! And the heat! This may seem like a crazy idea to most but this is what the DecisionWise team did recently for one of our own…did I mention the heat?
At this time last year, I was eating lunch with my good friend and co-worker. It was just me and him at a small Mexican joint when he received a call from his wife. By the look on his face I could tell it must be something serious. He politely excused himself from the table and took the phone conversation outside. As I ate my food I watched him pacing back and forth outside the window. He had a deep crease in his brow indicating serious concern for whatever his wife was telling him. He returned to the table, picked up his food, and without explanation he was gone. I finished my meal wondering what the news could be. It would turn out to be worse than I thought.
I returned to my office and completed my work for the day not paying much attention to what had transpired earlier with my buddy at the Mexican restaurant. As I drove home I dialed his number to see if everything was all right, not knowing what to expect. He picked up and proceeded to tell me that his 7-month-old daughter had just been diagnosed with leukemia, cancer of the blood cells. My heart sank. My baby boy was the same age and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t even know children that young could be affected by cancer. What could I say or do that could ease the stress, pain, and worry? No one knew the journey that lay ahead, the long conversations with doctors trying to understand the sickness, the sleepless nights next to their sick child laying in a small hospital crib, the side effects from chemotherapy that can bring even the strongest of adults to their knees, and the constant, pounding stress. Since that day, many people have reached out to offer help and any type of assistance possible to my friend and his young family, and frankly that’s about all we can do.
Eleven months later, his daughter is still undergoing treatments that cause loss of hair and other painful and uncomfortable side effects. She has a difficult time keeping solid food in her body so she receives nutrition via a tube that she wears constantly. After all her small body has been through, she still maintains an infectious smile and the energy to want to play with her big sister outside on the grass under the big blue sky. One problem though, there is no grass. Well, not yet.
Using every spare moment where he was not in the hospital, my friend has worked tirelessly to get his yard prepped. Single-handedly installing a sprinkler system he now has a permanent trucker hat tan on his scalp. But I haven’t heard a single complaint as he prepared for the new grass his two daughters could enjoy together.
A week before the sod was to arrive, the DecisionWise team approached my friend with an offer: allow the team to come together and install the sod in his yard so his daughters could have an enjoyable place to play. And that’s exactly what we did. Twenty DecisionWise team members got work done early and changed into their grubby work
clothes for an afternoon to serve one of our own. We gathered work gloves, wheelbarrows, hats, sunscreen, water, and of course pizza, and separated into assembly lines of sod layers. With sweat dripping, slab after slab of instant grass was laid in an organized manner until the entire front and back yards were green—ready to be played on by two young sisters. It was hard work, but it was our pleasure to be able to put our own teachings into practice, especially for one of our own team members and friends.
At DecisionWise, our team of consultants guide corporate leaders on how to lead staff and build successful teams. We even wrote the book on employee engagement, ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®: Five Keys for Engaging People, Leaders, and Organizations, in which we teach about meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection. Helping a sick child obviously taps into MEANING.But that wasn’t the only key in play that day. In just a few short hours, we went from a dust bowl to a lush yard; the IMPACT of our presence was unmistakable. Not to mention seeing the eyes of those sweet little girls. In fact, the CONNECTIONwith those girls, my friend and his wife, and all my colleagues sweating it out that day has gone through the roof. And you know what? Working for a company that gave us the AUTONOMY to take work off and help out both empowered me and increased my CONNECTION to it as well. Touching on all these ENGAGEMENT MAGIC® keys might explain why, despite the physically uncomfortable nature of the task, nothing but smiles shone through the dirt and sweat stained faces that day.
It was MEANING and CONNECTION, two of the five keys of employee engagement, which brought the DecisionWise team together that day. My friend and his wife were effusive in their gratitude to everyone for showing up and giving of their time and effort to help out that day. The DecisionWise team in turn thanked them for giving us the opportunity to serve, connect, and find a deeper meaning in our jobs. They received more than a yard and we received more than some time off of work.
It’s easy to show up for work every day and complete tasks, but that will never keep us authentically engaged. Finding meaning, making an impact, and building connections in both our job and with the PEOPLE we work with produce authentic lasting engagement.
During Jack Welch’s tenure at General Electric, he championed the concept of “reverse mentoring.” Reverse Mentoring is where more mature employees seek the advice of younger colleagues in effort to learn technology skills or to otherwise remain culturally relevant. I have been experiencing a bit of reverse mentoring here at DecisionWise, and it’s been eye-opening.
One of my responsibilities as COO at DecisionWise is to oversee our technology and underlying strategies. Like most growing organizations, we are constantly challenged to stay abreast on the latest technology in order to be disruptive, innovative, and provide value to our clients. The difficulty with technology is that it changes faster than Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe. So, I found myself constantly visiting with our development team in their “software lab” to discuss the latest tools and technology changes. Over time, I found myself focusing my attention on one of our younger developers, Micah. Micah is a self-proclaimed nerd, and a disciple of popular geek culture (i.e., think of The Big Bang Theory on television). He is also incredibly creative and talented.
Unbeknownst to Micah, he was quietly becoming my reverse mentor. I would pepper him with questions and “what if” scenarios on how our technology could maintain its quality and continue to serve our client’s needs, and he would calmly respond like a Hindu yogi. But, that’s not how it’s supposed to work, right? Being older, wiser, and possibly better looking (my opinion), it was up to me to dispense the wisdom of all things business.
In commenting on the power of reverse mentoring, Alan Webber, the co-founder of Fast Company, has noted, “It’s a situation where the old fogies in an organization realize that by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, you’re not in touch with the future the same way as the young twenty-something’s. They come with fresh eyes, open minds, and instant links to the technology of our future”.[2] Webber’s right. And Micah was, and is, helping us figure things out at DecisionWise.
As our talks increased, I learned that our relationship had an unanticipated consequence. Being my mentor was helping Micah’s engagement at DecisionWise. And this is where I want Micah to share his part of the story:
When Matt arrived at DecisionWise, I was closing in on my first year with the company. Just before Matt’s arrival, I was on vacation with my family on a beach in California. With work off my mind, I had some time to think about what I had accomplished in the past year and what the future looked like. When I looked back I saw many great accomplishments mixed with a few struggles. The people I work with are great, the services we offer are top-notch providing significant value to our clients and have the power to change people’s outlook in their jobs. Great stuff right?
However, I was struggling to get excited about work and tackling the next project. My engagement was fading. That’s an interesting position to be in while purportedly helping build a product that measures employee engagement.
I returned from vacation trying to get excited about where we were headed and embrace the strategy and roadmap that had been outlined. It was becoming difficult for me. I was looking for something that could help increase my engagement level. A couple days after returning from vacation we had a company meeting and the owner announced Matt as a new hire and COO of DecisionWise. I left the meeting feeling excited, hoping that his addition to the team was just the disruption I needed to help increase my personal engagement at work. Little did I know how far that would go.
The relationship that quickly formed between Matt and I really helped drive my engagement. As Matt started asking more questions about how to take our technology to the next level, I naturally went beyond simply answering them and started thinking bigger picture. My brain regularly fills with ideas and I saw how these could be aligned with our company’s strategy. I dug deeper into the questions he was asking and wanted to come back with solutions, not just answers to questions. Matt listened to my suggestions with genuine interest and began implementing them into the company.
I was able to offer advice and insight, and ultimately see the positive impact my ideas were having on the company. My engagement level naturally increased and I immediately recognized the importance of one of the essential keys to employee engagement, IMPACT. I now see a clearer and more exciting picture than I could sitting on a beach a couple months ago.
Now, Micah regularly stops by my office and our CEO’s office with new ideas to share. And, each visit is well worth our time. First of all, they are fun. Second, we engage in collaboration that is helping DecisionWise become even more innovative and competitive. Micah’s engagement is infectious, and we can see it helping others as well. At the end of the day, this post isn’t about me finding the right mentor, it’s about Micah’s engagement and his tremendous contributions to our team. Jack Welch was right. You are never too old to have a good mentor, and your mentor’s age, title, or position shouldn’t matter.
[1]Reverse Mentoring Cracks the Workplace, Leslie Kwoh, The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2011. [2]Reverse Mentoring: What it is and Why it is Beneficial, Lisa Quast, forbes.com, January 3, 2011.
“Engaged managers till the soil for their direct reports, creating the same conditions that lead to the manager’s full engagement in work and workplace culture. They then encourage employees to find engagement in ways that are unique to them, based on what the manager knows about their passions, interests and needs. Disengaged managers, on the other hand, either don’t know what motivates their people, or simply don’t care. It’s about management by authority, threat and coercion,”
As a regular contributor to Entrepreneur.com, DecisionWise CEO, Dr. Tracy Maylett provides valuable insight into how managers can keep employees engaged. A key take-away is to invest in your managers. They will ultimately have influence over the teams that effect the organization’s bottom line. So, managers, if your team is disengaged (or engaged!), take a look in the mirror. The correlation isn’t likely due to chance.
