Engage! How to Create the Best Employee Engagement Program for Your Organization

By Mary King

What is Employee Engagement? And why should I care?
I was one of the leaders asking these questions. Perhaps you are too.

Get ready for a trip behind the Corporate Curtain to explore the new gold standard in management. This accessible guide shows you how to create an Employee Engagement program that fits your organization — resulting in new growth, increased profits and empowered employees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary King
• Release date: Nov 10, 2010

Mary King

Mary had compiled the Scriptures for the HOLY GHOST BIBLE into a manuscript to tell the story of the Holy Spirit only from Scripture. An editor took one look and said it would be good to make it a devotion where there could be interesting questions to go with the sets of Scriptures. Mary liked her idea and 4 years later and loads of fun in the Spirit, HOUSE OF THE HOLY GHOST devotional was ready for publishing.

Book preview

Preface

Risky Business

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. —Paulo Coelho

Our CEO – impeccable in her conservatively cut suit – stood center stage beneath the spotlight’s glow as she announced the company’s new initiatives. It was my organization’s annual meeting for leadership. I sat halfway back, on the left side of the auditorium. A manager from the mid-level trenches. A lawyer. A high-potential leader on my way up.

When the PowerPoint slide entitled Employee Engagement appeared, I thought, nothing like senior leadership with a new buzzword. I felt a flash of amused pity for whoever got stuck with that turkey, but quickly dismissed it and returned to mentally reshuffling my workload.

I paid absolutely no attention.

Maybe you haven’t either. But you’re a small business owner with dreams of profitability dancing in your head – dreams of a highly motivated workforce, embracing ownership, delivering quality – and who gets that from employees? Or a visionary in a startup trying to launch your great idea before they chuck you into debtors’ prison: so close now that you can hear the cell door clanging shut if you can’t make the magic happen. Or a CEO driving your company forward, preaching innovation, while your employees continue to steer using their rearview mirrors. Perhaps you’re an investor wondering which company will grow in times where holding serve is considered a win.

Or maybe you’re a mid-level manager, one of thousands in service to a global conglomerate, halfway back, on the left side. As you may have guessed, when that turkey landed, it was smack in the middle of my desk.

It was time to pay attention.

This book is what happened when I pushed all my actual work aside and addressed my new top priority. I was to chair a task force. Dear God, not a task force. As I read the background profile, I wondered if updating my resume should be my new top priority.

My company’s consultants reported only twenty-eight percent of our large workforce met the minimum standard of engagement. Translation: The employees didn’t like their jobs and therefore might not be doing the best job they could. Senior Leadership was concerned. Very concerned.

I was concerned as well, though for a different reason. My primary occupation for the two years prior to being charged with Employee Engagement was serving separation notifications as wave after wave of layoffs rolled through our company. Those who saw my name on their calendars pretty much knew I’d show up with their pink slips in hand. Usually their offices were already packed.

The Powers That Be had assigned the Grim Reaper to lead Employee Engagement.

How was someone with the reputation for serving divorce papers supposed to motivate others to feel engaged? What did I do to deserve this turkey? Was my performance slipping? Was it Thanksgiving?

I gave second thoughts to polishing my resume.

I do not like to fail. My career had, up to this point, sailed along pretty smoothly. I graduated from West Point, served as an Army officer and married my college sweetheart with whom I had two boys. I went to work in Operations for my local utility and after surviving the whitewater of a merger, moved into Human Resources. I returned to school at night and received my J.D. from Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis and was admitted to the bar. I moved into a leadership role at work and gained altitude. Until this.

But I hadn’t gotten this far by turning down tough assignments. And the job market wasn’t looking so hot. I resolved to take this turkey and make it soar.

Learning to Fly

What I learned from my reading in the days that followed is that Employee Engagement is more than a buzzword. It is not the latest reconstituted can of management-speak promising growth (especially for the slew of buzzword-spouting consultants that promote all of the latest management/leadership strategies), though it could easily become so.

Employee Engagement is the Golden Fleece of leadership, no matter the size of the business. It represents discretionary effort, innovation, ethical behavior, attention to detail, follow up, follow through, and follow you to the gates of hell mentality (aka loyalty). It’s the key to any company’s ability to survive these chaotic economic times and into the years to come. It is when all employees in the organization are playing their A Game, all the time.

No small order.

Don’t get me wrong, my skepticism over the whole concept didn’t vanish overnight. I went through a learning curve. I talked to a lot of people, attended training, read research and joined forums devoted to the topic.

You could say I engaged.

The first thing that struck me is that Employee Engagement is both a top-down/bottom-up venture. It encapsulates good leadership (management) and good follow through (workers). The old us vs. them dynamic was noticeable by its absence. Employee Engagement must stretch from the boardroom to the break room to navigate today’s ever-changing, global, half-melted down economy in which someone threw out the rulebook and the only rule left is to change. And change fast.

Employee Engagement is our best chance to survive. All employees must understand that if the company fails, downsizes or reorganizes, it puts their own jobs at risk. The stark reality that I found time and time again is that people from both sides of the spectrum need to be involved because the job they saved would be their own.

And speaking as the Grim Reaper, I would much rather prevent the pain, suffering and loss caused by separation notification duties. These are good people with families, kids, mortgages… and I suffered along with them. Could it be that Employee Engagement could become my own salvation as well?

Mary King

San Francisco, California

Chapter One

Mission: Impossible

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

—Henry A. Kissinger

I never saw it coming. The day after that fateful company meeting, I arrived to find my inbox stuffed with a bulky file and an attached memo. New assignment: Employee Engagement Task Force, Chairperson. First meeting: Wednesday, 2 p.m.

I stared in disbelief.

I expected any minute to hear the Mission: Impossible theme. Mary King: Your mission – and you have no choice but to accept it – is to guide your company through the process of making all employees believe they love their job, their boss and their company… resulting in exponential increases to profits and stock price. Your career will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

I fired people. I coordinated layoffs. Of course, that’s not all I did nor did it take up the largest percentage of my job description, but that’s how most people thought of me. I wasn’t the logical person to engage employees. My coworkers usually ducked behind the nearest potted plant when they saw me coming. Dangerous collisions could occur when two or more people spotted me simultaneously and dived for the same foliage. Maybe I should hand out helmets.

I sat at my desk and worked my way through the file, skimming the summary and empirical data. I was reminded of an old adage: If it looks like a turkey, walks like a turkey and squawks like a turkey...

It’s a turkey.

Employee Engagement at First Glance

From my initial review, I learned that the term Employee Engagement originated twenty years ago in an article published in the Academy of Management News, Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work. It drew on research pursued since the 1970s by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and later published in his book, Flow), which showed that people found work more engaging when it required complete concentration and challenged their skill set – but with an important caveat: that they believed they had a good chance at succeeding.

All well and good, I thought, but in an organization with employees numbering in the tens of thousands, that was just slightly less than completely unrealistic.

Flow wasn’t the bait that was drawing the attention of senior leadership, anyway. I could easily imagine they were interested in their personal Flow situations and highly doubted they cared about mine. So what was it?

I spotted the answer further down, buried in dense texts surrounded by the requisite unreadable charts and obligatory graphs. There was a correlation between employee satisfaction (aka engagement) and business unit outcomes. In other words: Engaged employees translated to bigger company profits. But it only took a quick thumb through before I realized this data demonstrated correlations not causation. Suggestive, but inconclusive. Any lawyer could tell you that correlations and causality meant two very different things.

A traditional law school example of the fallacy of correlated variables was the rate of ice cream sales to the rate of homicides. They were positively correlated: meaning that when one rose, the other did too. Was it then logical to conclude that eating ice cream caused murder? Or that after committing murder, most people bought ice cream?

Not unless you’re in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

A third variable was causal to both: the temperature. When the days heated up, more people committed murder. And in the same heat, more people bought ice cream. Not necessarily the same people, however. So, correlated variables left a lot to be desired as the basis for any sort of conclusion. However, that was exactly the possibility that intrigued The Powers That Be.

Conspiracy Theory

It struck me that I was teetering on the edge of a Dilbert moment. A cold dread seized my heart when I remembered a story that Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) told in Dilbert 2.0: Twenty Years of Dilbert.

The story came from the period when Adams worked as a full-time telecom engineer for Pacific Bell during the day and drew Dilbert at night (since anyone in his family holding only one full-time job was considered a slacker). The executives wanted to get rid of Adams, but lacked anything remotely resembling a plausible reason. And he was too high profile to fire peremptorily. So, they assigned him to the most gruesome task forces they could think of, in hopes that he would quit.

That’s me, I thought, they’re trying to make me quit.

I took the stairs two at a time and caught my boss – the wily and cantankerous Wilson Parker, one of our Vice Presidents of Legal Affairs – waiting at our notoriously sluggish elevators. Why? I demanded. Do they hate me? What did I do?

With a deep sigh, he waved me down the hall and into his office, which was suffused with the glow of warm sunlight that my desk in the rat warren on a lower floor conspicuously lacked. I worked in Labor Relations. We didn’t rank floor to ceiling windows. I let loose the barrage that had been building since I opened the file. They specifically say Employee Engagement is personal and immeasurable. What am I supposed to do? Wave my magic wand? I patted my pockets, feigning a missing magic wand.

Simmer down. It’s an honor, Wilson soothed, in what passed as his best soothing voice. In person, he’s about as soothing as a barracuda. He’s lost his mind.

I don’t believe in this kind of touchy-feely crap, I blurted out. I came from operations and the military, a background we shared – and a background that made me naturally leery of initiatives that smacked of corporate wishful thinking. Wilson was cut from the same cloth. It was why Senior Leadership recruited him and why he hired me. We got real results. Then inspiration struck me like a bolt out of the blue. Let’s throw Lewis under the bus.

Lewis Lattimer was a rival Vice President coming up the Human Resource side of the organization. Wilson shook his head, though an arched eyebrow conveyed that he liked the way I thought.

You’re preaching to the choir. They want you. A wave at the ceiling indicated they meant top-tier leadership. They say you’re respected by employees and have developed a reputation for neutrality and quiet confidence. He gave me a half blast of his sharky smile. You know I’d rather have you actually working. However, I also need you to… another wave indicated, … make it happen. He shrugged. It’s out of my hands, and ushered me out of his office.

Take the rest of the day off, clear your mind. I know it’s the weekend, but you’ll have to get up to speed for your big meeting next week. I’ll hook you up with some of my contacts. See what you find out. If it can’t be done… His voice trailed off with a faraway look in his eye, the way I’d seen him do hundreds of times when he was weighing the pros and cons of a question. He snapped back into the present. Then we’ll throw Lewis under the bus.

Deal, I agreed, as he stepped into the elevator, pecking furiously on his BlackBerry. My own phone buzzed as my calendar updated. Wilson wasn’t wasting any time hooking me up with his contacts.

As he disappeared behind the closing doors, I fought the feeling that my career was sinking as fast as that elevator.

Retreat

When I got home, I told my husband, Todd, who was surprised to see me so early, about the new assignment. I guess my negative attitude made my dissatisfaction clear as I recounted the day’s events. He patiently listened and resisted pointing out that other people had it a lot worse. Eventually, the thought caught up with me.

Whew! I guess I don’t exactly sound engaged myself, I said. He laughed with me.

Because we both knew, even as I vented my frustration, that I would not be marching into Wilson’s office to tender my resignation. Between the economy and our financial responsibilities – mortgage, kids’ college funds, retirement – I couldn’t afford to leave. Besides, there was nowhere to go. And I, as the Grim Reaper, knew that only too well. I didn’t want to risk my fortune in a boat made up of my résumé and what contacts I had that were still employed. Only last year, a huge law partnership with 400 attorneys had disbanded themselves, flooding the market in our city with highly skilled people. No, thank you.

Even Employee Engagement sounded better because, whether I liked it or not, it was now my job.

As Within, So Without

To stem the flood of self-pity, I thought about the bigger picture. In America, despite decades of the best efforts of psychologists and self-help books, tapes and seminars, our strongest identification remained with our occupations. The second thing people asked each other at parties, after learning someone’s name, was So, what do you do?

The problem of not being able to find a job, often for the first time in their lives, had crippled individuals, families and our demanddriven economy as a whole. A new term, chronic unemployment, entered the lexicon — defined as workers unable to find a job for at least six months. (Hallmark™ even developed a card for it!) Most people knew a neighbor, family member or friend in this boat, or in its sibling ship, the USS Underemployed.

Everywhere I looked, the news got worse. Another new term, jobless recovery, meant that economists weren’t anticipating the jobs eliminated through the last constriction of the economy would return. Gone, in this case, meant gone for good. As Katherine Rampell reported on May 12, 2010, in The New York Times, Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back. Period.

But how about those who held onto their positions? Surely they were the chosen ones, delighted to have survived, right? Not so