When I was in business school my leadership class professor had us complete an activity that’s really stuck with me. The exercise goes like this: take out a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper, place it horizontally on the table, create a timeline starting with the year of your first job and ending in the present. Write in your positions along the timeline then draw a line graph creating peaks at your career highpoints and valleys where you were less satisfied. Step back, look at the peaks and identify what it was about those jobs that made them high points.

Eleven years later as I help organizations create work environments where people take ownership of their work and are committed to doing a great job, I’m reminded of that activity. Those peaks are what employee engagement is about. Research has shown that managers play the most significant role in their employees’ workplace experience. Everything a manager does and does not do creates a climate that influences how employees feel about coming to work and how much energy they put into their work once they get there – in other words their levels of engagement. Look over the peaks on your own line – times when you experienced being fully immersed, focused and successful at something you enjoyed working on. The chances are that a great manager played a role in one or more of your stories.

Research on employee engagement has led to many articles and books on how managers can build energy and commitment in their teams and throughout their organizations. In this article I share the results of some of that research and identify three key things managers and leaders can do to increase engagement:

1. Ask questions that increase engagement
2. Target the top factors of engagement
3. Focus on business results rather than on increasing engagement
   

I went to a seminar recently where a well-known organization shared their research on employee engagement. Over 30 pages of data – multiple industries, geographies, charts, graphs, sliced and diced all to identify the drivers of engagement. They surveyed thousands of employees across multiple industries and compared engagement to organizational performance. Some of the results were surprising. For example, an employee’s organizational level doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in how engaged he/she is (except for senior leaders who are about 20% more engaged). Other results were less surprising - the emotional side of engagement (“Do I like what I do?”) is about four times as important as the rational side (“Do I believe it’s in my best interest to commit?”). From my experience the greatest take away from this and other similar research is that we can identify the factors that drive engagement. This is where we should put our energy.

Research on engagement builds on the history of research into employee satisfaction. For years organizations have conducted employee satisfaction surveys to measure the perceptions of their workforces. Although satisfaction provides valuable data, we all know that some people can be “satisfied” with a fat paycheck, bank hours and few deadlines. The Gallup organization has played a big role in addressing the satisfaction concern by showing engagement’s linkage to productivity, profitability, retention and other business outcomes. The primary measurement tool that Gallup uses is a 12-question survey called the Gallup Q 12. Paradoxically surveys like this can be very useful in identifying actionable ways to create a climate where your employees choose to contribute at high levels, but sometimes the way you use the survey data can decrease engagement.

One of our clients told me about his well-intended but unpleasant experience of using his team’s survey data to improve engagement. He called a meeting to share his business unit’s results with his managers and their direct reports. The group broke into their work teams to talk about the data. Inevitably the conversations turned towards the low areas, those responsible for them, and why the areas were mostly out of their control. He then asked the group to create a list of things to do to address the problems. They created action items that no one was very excited about doing or really believed would make a difference. He tells me the meeting and subsequent conversations got people to think more about and focus on what was wrong with the organization. Engagement didn’t improve and some would say it got worse. Ouch.

So, if focusing on fixing what’s broken doesn’t work so well, what can managers do to increase engagement? Research and experience suggest that these three actions will have a positive impact:

1. Ask questions that increase engagement.

Conversations impact how we feel and think about each other and our work and these feelings impact our actions. What you focus on grows. When you ask someone “What do you think about the way the organization deals with a poor performing team member?” you will probably get a mouthful of negative comments. You may not have meant to, but you have just increased the perception of the organization as a lousy place to work. And if you ask, “What’s the best way you have ever seen this organization address someone’s poor performance?”, you’ll get an answer that’s more constructive and positive. An easy solution - ask questions that focus on the future you would like to see, versus things in the past that are not favorable. You can do this one on one or in a meeting to review employee survey data.

2. Target the top factor of engagement.

Sure there are multiple drivers of employee engagement, but one factor stands out in all the research: “give employees a real voice in how work gets done”. It can be as simple as asking employees about the highpoints in their careers and discussing with them how to make more highpoints happen in a way that supports the business.

3. Focus on improving the business.

Identify a “mission critical” issue you want improved and invite people to make it happen. For example: An R & D company invited all the scientists who were moving into a new building to a 3½-day meeting to design the way science could be done in this “lab of the future”. Over 80% of them volunteered to work on teams to implement the design. They were engaged! In another setting, -a hospital- had agonized over the lack of physician engagement and had tried unsuccessfully to bring the doctors together to discuss this problem. But when they invited the medical staff to discuss “Reclaiming the Joy of Practice: Creating the Hospital We Want To Work In”, the response was overwhelming and the level of engagement jumped by quantum leaps.

If you invite people in an authentic and collaborative way to create or improve something that’s unquestionably linked to business results, they will engage.

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Mike Feinson is a Partner at Innovation Partners International.
Click here to reach him by e-mail.