Let’s face it, focusing on employee engagement can seem like a risky strategy. What if employees want you to change the way you do business? What if engagement means giving your direct reports control?
If creating more engaged workers leaves you excited and nervous then congratulations. It means you know what’s at stake.
Why Employee Engagement Matters
Let’s take a second to remind ourselves why engaged employees make good business sense. First off high levels of job satisfaction = better productivity. Add to that sickness and staff turnover reductions and that leads us to savings in training and hiring. Turn that into a trend and now there’s a result on your bottom line.
And the soft gain? A recent Gallup analysis showed high employee engagement has a positive correlation to business success.
Why Engagement Means Handing Over Control
Dan Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us shows autonomy, mastery and purpose get people motivated.
If we can take anything from Pink’s work I’d suggest it’s that allowing staff at least some autonomy is a more effective motivator than the traditional reward based systems.
Making Autonomy Less Work for You
Creating autonomy in your business can mean changing your existing systems and processes. It’s a cultural change but that doesn’t mean you have to do it all. In fact if you see building engagement through autonomy as a task for yourself you’re missing the point of this blog post.
Turning concepts of leadership on its head, Research published in the European Management Journal calls for leadership at all levels rather than more people in leadership roles. It’s about redlining hierarchy so staff can play an active role in decisions that affect them. And why wouldn’t you want that? They’re on the front lines and know the issues.
Management That Guides
The result is change initiatives that see staff designing and implementing their own changes in the best interests of the business under the guidance of senior management.
And it works because when people design their own solutions they’re invested in making those solutions succeed. It also means embedding change becomes easier.
And that increases the chances of long term success for your employee engagement initiative.
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