How Organizations Get Employee Engagement Wrong
Employees now expect more. Employee engagement is key to success for most organizations. If we understand the typical and recurring mistakes made in this field, we can predict and prevent them happening to us. Today’s guest post is by Frank Devine, author of RAPID MASS ENGAGEMENT: Driving Continuous Improvement Through Employee Culture Creation (CLICK HERE to get your copy). The Roll-out Assumption During a visit to one of the sites where my Rapid Mass Engagement (RME) process had been implemented, a group of senior visitors toured the site guided by a shop-floor employee who outlined the new high-performance culture. The visitors could see and feel the culture and were impressed by the ‘Behavioral Standards’ – behaviorally specific standards designed to make accountability both easy and transparent developed from employee data and created by employees. One of the visitors informed the guide that they were going to take these away and ‘roll them out’ in the visitors’ own organization. The employee guide looked deflated and when asked why, explained: “If you think you can roll these out, I have not explained properly how they were created … and who owns them.” This roll-out assumption is common. In one site the employees added the following to the organization’s Behavioral Standards: “Warning: attempts to apply these standards without the process that created them will only disappoint.” Ownership matters and creates discretionary effort and engagement, and anything rolled-out, by definition, is not owned by those on the receiving end. Engagement without Enablement Imagine you do what it takes to create a highly engaged workforce, but employees then crash into overcautious and inflexible legacy systems. Our HR and Quality policies, how we recruit and promote, how early we involve end-users in the design of equipment and software can all be designed to maximize enablement, but […]