Embedding Employee Engagement

Imagine, for a moment, trying to run your business without any people. You can't, can you? That is because people are an essential component of any organisation or business. It is impossible to deliver any product or service without involving people. So you have to agree that the attitude of your people to their work must affect the way they work and hence the way your business performs.

A historical imbalance

Yet for the past two decades or more, technology and process improvement have been your primary business focus. You may not have done it consciously, but your people have generally come a poor second in your management priorities. Inevitably, this has not been good for people's attitudes and so has not been good for business.

Even worse, you justified most of your investment in technology and process improvement by a reduction in employee numbers. This, of course, has compounded the problem. So if the returns on your investment were less than they should have been, you can now see why. To rectify the situation and achieve the returns you originally expected, you have to redress the past imbalance.

The present imperative

Are you suffering from declining growth and/or diminishing returns on your technology and process improvement investment? You can hardly be surprised after more than two decades of investment. You will inevitably be feeling the effects of the law of diminishing returns. Plus, that past investment needs time to bed in for you to consolidate your returns.

So what can you do now to keep growing and improve your returns?

Well, in your shoes, we would be thinking that now was the time to invest in people management. This is the only viable option, as well as being necessary to redress that past imbalance.

And if that isn't enough, then the high profile discussion raging on the subject of employee engagement should be more than enough to convince you. Not just because your people are important, but because you now also understand better why employees are so disengaged.

Of course it is easy to get caught up in the hot issues of the moment. Perhaps you are uncomfortable with the rather ambiguous, not-easily-quantified nature of employee engagement and you are uncertain of what it really means in practical terms.

Or maybe you are concerned because you have already invested a great deal of time and effort and money in trying to win the hearts and minds of your people, and you feel you don't have any tangible results to show for your efforts.

But you are not alone.

The surveys that show such high levels of employee disengagement clearly reveal that efforts to engage employees are not proving wildly successful. If anything, the situation seems to be deteriorating. Yet you cannot afford to do nothing.

The challenge

If current methods are not working, and stopping altogether is not an option – and it obviously isn't in this case – you clearly need to rethink what you are doing. The prevailing situation suggests that either:

your approach to the subject is wrong, or you are unaware of factors that are working against you. Your good intentions make the latter more likely.

In any case, this seems almost self-evident in light of the worsening employee engagement trend despite all the efforts to improve it. Clearly something is working against you. And once again there are two possibilities. The factors working against you are:

inherent in your organisation and its culture and the way it operates, and/or inherent in your methods to improve performance. Either way, if you are unaware of what is sabotaging your efforts, you are never going to make the progress you want, are you? So bear with us while we give you a fresh insight.

The threat

Let's start with a quick look at the changing nature of business and what drives commercial success.

The 19th century economist Adam Smith identified land, labour and capital as the three primary "factors of production". However, in today's global economy, land appears almost incidental and is barely relevant. Similarly, you will surely agree that access to capital is no longer the barrier to entry that it once was. If you have a reasonable business plan, you can access all the funding you need for your business – and sometimes even if you don't!

That leaves you with labour – the people. (So there you have it: further justification for the cliché that your people are your most important asset.)

In the 21st century, therefore, it is reasonable to argue that the three primary "factors of production" are people, technology and process. But it is people who link it all together. Thus your people are the nervous system of your organisation.

For this reason, anything that erodes employee engagement is a threat to your business.

Toxins of employee engagement

There are a number of "toxins" that attack employee engagement. Their paralysing poison slows performance and reduces results and puts your whole operation at risk. They are particularly dangerous because they are invisible parasites, carried by the very tools you use to enhance performance.

1. Regimentation

   One key consequence of the technological progress has been the development of automated workflows. In fact, these have themselves been a major factor in driving process improvement. Their integrated rules engines have led to increased standardisation and the removal of most – if not all – of the decision making from the systems' users.

   This has contributed to a massive erosion of job satisfaction and/or the status of a role. The net result has been to turn service and support functions into a modern equivalent of the manufacturing assembly line. So you should not be surprised if it has the same negative long-term effects on your business.

   The banks provide a perfect example of this. Whereas the local branch manager was once a powerful and revered figure in the community, they now have virtually no power at all.

   For instance, when a customer approaches their bank manager for an increase in their mortgage, the entire process will likely be controlled by head office and the manager's authority may be severely limited.

   Such erosion of authority may make perfect sense for the bank's management, with their focus on reducing costs and maximising profits. However, for the rest of us, it reveals:

   a lack of understanding of the total business an insensitivity to customer needs a complete unawareness of the human aspect of business. The implicit lack of trust in their people illustrates the point perfectly.

2. Performance measurement

   The technological advances and the automated workflows have led to a massive growth in measurement capabilities. This in turn has fed a new industry in benchmarking and analytics. Undoubtedly, this has merits, but it does sometimes seem that it may almost have led to an "if-it-moves-measure-it" mentality.

   The adage that "You cannot manage it if you cannot measure it" does not necessarily mean...