Full Transcript Below
[ANNOUNCER]:
Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.
[COBY]:
Did we lose a patient?
[JAMES]:
No, that’s just my lunch.
[COBY]:
Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby. he’s James, and let’s get started with a question. Should companies be doing employee engagement?
[JAMES]:
We talk about engagement a lot. It’s probably one of our favorite areas to focus in on. And honestly, no. Companies should not be doing employee engagement because engagement is not an activity, it’s not a task. And in general, it’s not something that you should be doing. Employee engagement is something that you create. Think of it like the outcome rather than the activity. And I think that issue right there of companies thinking that employee engagement is the activity that they have to perform is the cause of a lot of well intentioned, but ultimately meaningless engagement initiatives by companies.
[COBY]:
Absolutely. Again, it’s a bit of a trick question because the idea is that should there be employee engagement in companies? Absolutely. But it’s the wording of doing employee engagement that we’re really trying to say is kind of the crux of most of the problem. It’s the root cause of why a lot of stuff goes wrong, because there are a lot of efforts made out there about employee engagement, and there’s a lot of time invested, a lot of people that really talk about it. But I think the fundamental mistake is that we think of it as something to do rather than something that needs to be the natural consequence of doing of other things that will actually provide us what we need around employee engagement.
[JAMES]:
Well, and that’s the biggest thing that we’ve seen in our work, is that when we are talking about strategies with organizations, when we’re working with people, when we’re engaged in these conversations, what comes up over and over and over again and what has led to kind of the problems that companies are experiencing is that they are viewing engagement as something that needs to be ticked. Right. Some activity that needs to be checked off so that they can move on to something else. Which is why we get into these common engagement strategies or systems of, well, let’s survey people, or we have an engagement software that can do manage our recognition programs, and it will survey our employees because these are physical tick boxes. We can see that these things have been accomplished. And it gets us into this mindset of engagement is something that we do, but engagement is not the activity because then it’s just engaging with people. What we actually need in our organization are people who are actively engaged in their work, not companies that are actively engaging with their employees. It’s still important for companies to engage with people, but that is not the strategy. That is not the outcome that you should be striving for.
[COBY]:
Yeah, well, it’s funny because whenever we get into conversations with people, whether in person or online, around employee engagement, some people, it’s a real hot button for because they’ve seen investments, they’ve seen priorities. That doesn’t pan off. Some people have said. There are some people who are very against the idea of employee engagement because they’ve seen it wasted or they’ve been tried or companies have been tried to be sold on why it’s important. They’re like, what’s the ROI on it? There’s a lot of people that really tend to have kind of a negative impression of the idea of employee engagement, mostly because it’s been done wrong or it’s been viewed wrong for so long that people have been burned by it, where companies have invested in it and investment hasn’t paid off or consultants have tried to sell it, and they get a lot of pushback because they want to know kind of how is it? What’s the effective ROI on it? And everything like that too. But largely the way that we try to reframe the conversation is to say that engagement is defined as having, as employees having a motivation and enthusiasm in their work. And we find that definition very helpful in reframing this conversation because it’s about what is it that has to be done to create motivation and enthusiasm as employees. They are the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. They are kind of what engagement looks like, feels like, acts like we say, engagement is really just kind of. Employee engagement really is just kind of the term that means this. How do we create motivation and enthusiasm in employees to allow us to have higher productivity and higher profitability? And that is really what we need to keep in mind whenever someone engages or someone has a conversation with us around. The idea of employee engagement is to think of it as creating motivation and enthusiasm in our workers, because that will kind of help kind of keep this thought straight as we try and reframe this conversation well.
[JAMES]:
And keeping that definition in mind, it also becomes very easy to understand why existing strategies or activities don’t have a lasting impact. Because if you are trying to create motivation and enthusiasm, but your workplace is full of conflict, or people don’t feel safe, or there are any number of reasons why there is rampant job dissatisfaction in the workplace, engagement, quote unquote, engagement should not be your first activity, right? If you want to create motivation and enthusiasm in your workforce, then you need to start looking at what are those foundational pieces. So we talk a lot about cultural transformation. It’s kind of our thing. And we have this process, this structural piece that you can implement to understand what are the stages that you need to go through to get to the engagement stage, the creating motivation and enthusiasm in people. But there are steps that need to be in place or foundational pieces that need to be in place before you dive directly into that.
[COBY]:
Yeah. And so I think it would be helpful to really clarify what we call the three pitfalls when it comes to doing employee engagement. And I think that might help kind of people, again, reshape how they think about this concept and hopefully identify where they potentially have been going wrong in the past and maybe even come at employee engagement with a bit of a revigorate station because they now might know what to not do.
[JAMES]:
Right.
[COBY]:
So the first pitfall, pitfall, number one, is mistaking engagement with engaging with people. And we talked about this, I think we did a podcast episode early on in our first season about employee engagement and about the difference between the noun of engagement and the verb of engagement. So the verb is engaging with people. As James said, the idea of you’re doing engagement, communication activities, or you’re creating conditions where you’re interacting with employees. And that is, again, the verb of engagement. But that’s the pitfall is that that is not employee engagement. Is that important in the workplace? Absolutely. Should you be trying to improve your communications and your interactions with employees? Absolutely. But that’s not employee engagement. Employee engagement, we have to think of it more, again, as that noun of having motivation and enthusiasm in employees.
[JAMES]:
I think that’s the crux is that, again, if we want to achieve the outcome, which is creating motivation and enthusiasm in people, the engaging with as your strategy, surveying whatever it may be, that is not enough to create the outcome. So if you’re looking at engagement as your activity, you’re looking at it wrong. If you’re looking at it as there is a set of activities that need to be performed in order to achieve this outcome, that’s a much more complete picture. And that’s how we start to move forward towards achieving the outcome of creating engagement.
[COBY]:
And I think it’s not just businesses that make this mistake. I think that there’s a lot of great software tools, resources out there to support employee engagement.
[JAMES]:
Absolutely.
[COBY]:
But a lot of them, again, they have their place. There is value in the software, in these programs, but they overvalue engagement as engaging with so software that does automated communications, that do surveys, that do all these other kinds of stuff like that. Again, there’s a place for them, but they are not an entire employee engagement strategy because they do engagement, which is engaging with a lot of businesses have been taught wrong by a lot of some of the software, that if you implement this software, these programs, these strategies, you are doing employee engagement. And to them that seems reasonable. But this is one of the things we really want you to take away from this episode is that is wrong. You should not be doing employee engagement. And you need to have a much more realistic understanding of these tools and software because again, what they’re selling you is something that is, again, a viable part of working with people, but it is not what will create motivation and enthusiasm if the software only focuses on engaging with.
[JAMES]:
Well, you’re absolutely right. And what I think is interesting is that there’s a tremendous amount of value that you can get from these software programs, especially in the early stages, to craft your engagement strategy. Right. You need to understand what the current vibe, the current environment, how your employees are interacting, reacting to different inputs. And these programs can provide you tremendous amounts of data. But the data has to be used to do something, right? So understanding what’s happening is really good, but collecting data for data sake is a waste of time and energy. What you now need to do is once you have some data at hand. Okay, well, how can I actually use this information to achieve the outcome of creating motivation and enthusiasm? Not just, well, people are saying that we want a monthly party instead of an annual Christmas party. Sure, socialization pieces are really good team building exercises, but again, those types of things won’t create the noun of engagement.
[COBY]:
And that’s an excellent lead into the second pitfall, which is performative solutions.
[JAMES]:
Right?
[COBY]:
And a lot of times the doing engagement means having easy to view parties or putting in fun break room add ons like foosball tables and treadmills and stuff like that. Right? It’s often this big showy effort or this big showy event or whatever it might be. That is something that, look how great we are is something that tends to be kind of a common approach people take, especially when they use their employee engagement. They’re doing employee engagement as part of their employer branding. Look how fun our workspace is. Look at all these great standing desks. It’s very much about showing we put on a great performance of the way that we do employee engagement. And that is, again, something that is pretty common. And usually, like we say, we often kind of somewhat belittle it down to being about putting a foosball table in the break room. It’s usually kind of how we tend to get to it, but it is something which. It’s more about the sizzle than it is about the steak.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. And these can be well intentioned, like, these can be well meaning. It’s not necessarily that we believe that people who are engaged in these strategies are doing it purely to just showcase stuff. There can be some authentic trying. We’ve heard this is the way to go, so we’re going to do this type of strategy. The result of it, unfortunately, is that it’s still just a performative effort. And so you can have a really fun annual Christmas party that people really enjoy and look forward to, where you are engaging your staff. People are having fun, they’re having a great time, but a singular event is not going to sustain any type of engagement in motivation and enthusiasm over the course of an entire year.
[COBY]:
That actually brings to mind a client. We had a number of years ago that we did some advisory work around trying to improve their performance and productivity. And when we talked about engagement with them, they were so proud of their annual Christmas party. Do you remember this client? And they went all out. They had multiple locations or multiple sites and they would bring everybody in and they’d have this big feast. They’d have members of their board of directors come in and they would do the end of the year wrap up and funny slideshow.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. And they had their awards ceremony, which wasn’t quite the Michael Scott Dundee awards, but wasn’t that there were a few that could have been Dundee’s.
[COBY]:
Yeah, you’re right.
[JAMES]:
Legitimately, people enjoyed that party.
[COBY]:
Very well done, Christmas party. But going back to kind of the work that we did with them, the problem was whenever we talked about anything around engagement, they pointed to that party that was like the thing and that was the only thing. And as great as it was, and I mean, too bad we didn’t get to go to them. It sounded like a blast, but that would make a big show of it. And man, they got a lot of traction on social media about that. Holy cow. They posted a lot about that. Everything. But that was the big performance that they put on and it was the big show that was supposed to last the whole year.
[JAMES]:
Yeah, and we would never advise them not to put on this big Christmas holiday party because people authentically enjoyed it. The company was authentic in wanting to provide a fun, friendly, competitive party to celebrate their staff. It’s just a single signature event. It will have an immediate and a short term impact in terms of making people happy, making them feel good, connecting them with the organization, which are all really good things that we want. But how are you supposed to sustain that motivation and enthusiasm throughout the entire year?
[COBY]:
I don’t think there’s a party fun enough to last you a year’s worth of motivation and enthusiasm. I don’t think that there’s a budget big enough or an event great enough that would give people that people, even in February, when they’re being feeling overworked, or they feeling micromanaged, or they feel taken advantage of, or they feel they can’t talk to their team about something important to get them through that lull.
[JAMES]:
At least I’ve got the Christmas party coming up in ten months.
[COBY]:
Exactly. Like I say, you’re right. I’ve been kind of sounding very accusatory when I talk about these things, but you’re right. These are done with best of intentions.
[JAMES]:
And they are well done. It is a well crafted, well done event.
[COBY]:
Yes. And this was the case with the client. They really thought they were doing the right thing, and a lot of it was they were doing what they had always done, which is conventional wisdom aside, but that’s what the experts on Forbes and all them said to do at the time. So they just took that as gospel and realized that they were kind of led astray, thinking that it would work. So it’s something that, again, often done with good intentions, often done for the right reasons, often well done. But it’s the fundamental mistake of thinking you have to do employee engagement is really that piece that they just.
[JAMES]:
Or that there’s a single activity that will accomplish the outcome. Yeah.
[COBY]:
So talk about the third pitfall, which is ineffective efforts. Now, these are when businesses or individuals or leaders, whatever, take it upon themselves to put something into place that they think will have a much. That will yield a much greater result than it actually will. Like a good example was, I remember talking to another client about
[COBY]:
the fact that one of their senior managers would always bring in coffee randomly to his team. Just kind of everybody on the team. He’d buy. He learned everyone’s individual coffee orders and would bring in for no particular reason, would bring them in kind of thing. And that’s a pretty cool thing to do.
[JAMES]:
It’s a nice, kind, authentic gesture.
[COBY]:
Absolutely. The problem with the result of it was that this manager thought that effort would make up for all of the overworking people, or all of the being a little bit harsh when employees have a problem or other things like that. They thought that that kind of was an equal remedy to some less than stellar management strategies.
[JAMES]:
Well, we talk a lot about job dissatisfaction and what causes people to become dissatisfied with their work. And fundamental to that is the idea that you can’t solve job dissatisfaction without actually resolving the specific factors that are making people dissatisfied. Right. Buying coffee for people, not buying coffee for people is probably not going to cause them to become dissatisfied with their work. So buying coffee for them is not going to solve the problem of job dissatisfaction. And we’ve got tons of material on that. I will try not to go off on another tangent about that, but all of that to say you can have these really great gestures that are done authentically, that are well meaning, that come from a place of, I, as a manager, authentically want to do something nice for my team. But if you think that is going to solve the structural, organizational, cultural, environmental problems in the workplace, it’s just not. It’s going to be completely ineffective in creating the outcome that we are talking about.
[COBY]:
Yeah, you’re right. Often when they engage in the pitfall of ineffective efforts, they often overvalue the impact that their effort is going to have, thinking that it wipes the slate clean or it’s an equal counterbalance to something that is causing them to lose motivation and lose enthusiasm and everything like that. And again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with making that effort. That’s actually a really nice gesture to learn everyone’s coffee order. Buy everyone coffee, bring it in. But again, it’s kind of like an insincere apology in a sense, because, for example, remember there was a time that the manager almost lost it and went on a bit of a tirade, yelling at a couple of employees and really kind of, he knew that he had hurt the team, so we thought. So buying coffee was kind of almost like a bit of an I’m sorry.
[JAMES]:
Without actually saying I’m sorry.
[COBY]:
Yeah, it’s almost like I bought your coffee. So we’re good, right? Was kind of how it was handled. And again, you kind of got some of it. But to me that’s that we’ve been conditioned to think that if we do engaging activities, if we do employee engagement, that makes up for everything else, makes up for all the cultural problems. And I think that, again, that’s the one thing that people really need to get past, is that it doesn’t work that way. And it’s something, I think that the best way I use this before we’ve talked about, if you want to think about how should you really be doing engagement? We should think of engagement more like the way we think about wellness. Right. Because, I mean, when we talk to them, we’ve had this conversation with clients about that. When we try and get them to really kind of turn their thinking around and reframe their thinking around engagement, we say, well, here’s the thing. You say you want to do engagement, but do you do wellness? They’re like, well, no, you can’t really do wellness. You have to provide the things that will help improve.
[JAMES]:
We do yoga, which contributes to your wellness.
[COBY]:
Yeah, exactly. We do provide mental health days and counseling supports and this and that and everything. Yes. Think of engagement that same way. You still need to provide the conditions that support for wellness and you need to provide the conditions and supports for engagement. And that’s that. If you really want to think about it like a frame of reference, the way that you approach wellness is probably a lot more effective of a strategy than the way that you probably do engagement.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. And that’s where things like your signature event can be one of those activities that help to create the conditions for engagement. The random acts of kindness, the learning people’s coffee orders and bringing in coffee. These are wonderful gestures and things that you can, and if you have the ability to do great, do them. But they are part of the strategy, not the entirety of the strategy.
[COBY]:
Right. And if you use that wellness lens, it’s like saying, okay, so if your big signature event is how you do engagement, would you do wellness by having a once a year marathon? Well, no. So if buying your coffee for people is the thing that you do, would you do wellness by buying everyone a salad? Well, no, again. So when you look at it from that perspective, it sounds silly.
[JAMES]:
Yeah, because a salad will contribute to a person’s health and wellness.
[COBY]:
Yeah, exactly.
[JAMES]:
But it’s not going to solve or create the outcome in and of itself.
[COBY]:
Right. We have found that comparing engagement to wellness, as far as the frame of reference that would be helpful to shift your thinking has been helpful because again, not every business totally gets wellness through and through, but they definitely most seem to have a much better understanding about what makes successful wellness strategies than what makes successful engagement strategies. I do think that, again, it’s not going to be work for all businesses. Some businesses, trust me, don’t get wellness up there. But there definitely is more. There’s certainly a larger population that understands you can’t really do wellness. You have to provide the condition to support wellness. So using that as kind of your model in how you reframe your thinking around engagement tends to be a pretty effective strategy.
[JAMES]:
Yeah, no, it’s a good analogy or a good connection there. I think it’s worth us talking. We’ve talked quite a bit about how it goes wrong. The answer to the question is no, you should not be doing employee engagement. And we’ve gone down that road. I think we’ve made a really good case for that. I want to jump ahead a little bit and talk about what should we actually be doing.
[COBY]:
Yes.
[JAMES]:
Right. Yeah. I mean, let’s talk about if we should not be doing these things, then how do we actually create the conditions that will develop this sense of engagement in people?
[COBY]:
So I think the first thing we need to be clear on is to kind of summarize what you’ve been alluding to around job dissatisfaction and stuff like that. Is that one thing you cannot fast forward through is likely the needed cultural transformation.
[JAMES]:
Yes.
[COBY]:
It’s resolving the issues that are causing dissatisfaction in people, things like the poor working conditions or lack of safety or inconsistency or those types of things.
[JAMES]:
It’s also company policies. It could be management, micromanagement styles, personality conflicts, burnout. There are a host of reasons why people become dissatisfied and disengaged.
[COBY]:
Yeah, exactly. And if you don’t plug those holes, then you’re going to be constantly pouring more of effort into a leaky bucket.
[JAMES]:
Right.
[COBY]:
So you really need to make sure that if you want to actually kind of create the environment that you’re not fighting a losing battle every day. The cultural transformation to resolve a lot of these things. And again, we did a previous episode around counterfeit psychological safety. So making sure that you actually have authentic psychological safety and everything else like that too. Right. So that’s really important, but that’s really about just making sure that you built the foundation. You need to actually have your strategy be successful and take off, because as we talked about in previous episodes about workplace culture, that you can’t just insert things without ensuring that foundation is there. Right. So you have to make sure. So step one, which is unfortunately probably your longest, biggest step, is to start to resolve a lot of the issues. Make sure that you remove job dissatisfaction, that you have authentic psychological safety, and that people feel that they can bring their authentic self, they can bring themselves to work and they’ll be accepted at work. That’s easy to say, not necessarily a simple thing to solve, but again, there are methods and strategies out there. We have something. We could talk to you if that’s what you’re looking for, but that’s a piece, but that’s not necessarily how you actually create motivation and enthusiasm.
[JAMES]:
That’s how you get to a place where you can start to create motivation and enthusiasm. Right. If this is the first time that you’re tuning in or you’re not as familiar with some of our work, what we’ve been talking about, these first foundational pieces that you need to get in place, is what we call our workplace culture hierarchy. We’ve got lots of material available on it in videos, in podcasts, in articles. Go check it out. It’s going to make the rest of this conversation make a lot more sense, because you need to understand some of those pieces, or those pieces need to be in place for everything else to become very effective.
[COBY]:
I’ll make sure I put the episode number for our episode on how to build a workplace culture. So that’s a great episode to jump into, is that, if you haven’t heard that one and you want to know more about the hierarchy, that’s the perfect intro to the hierarchy, because the hierarchy.
[JAMES]:
Is our framework, it’s our systematic approach for how companies can understand and ultimately develop their workplace culture.
[COBY]:
So that being said, once you’ve done that small job of entire culture transformation, how do you actually.
[JAMES]:
Big deal.
[COBY]:
Yeah. Overnight, how you actually create motivation and enthusiasm as employees. And the way that we talk about building employee engagement in people is what is the process that we refer to as RAMP. So RAMP. And ramp stands for the elements you have to provide that will build motivation and enthusiasm. And RAMP stands for Recognition, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. And we’ve got some webinars and stuff like that that go into that, into great detail and stuff like that, too. But I think that it’s important to understand that recognition, autonomy, mastery, and purpose are, individually, are very powerful tools for an organization to deploy on their own. They have great value that can really help improve performance and help improve retention and help improve, again, morale. But collectively, when you implement them all in an effective way, the natural consequence of doing that is higher motivation and enthusiasm.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. So let’s dig into what that actually contains within those four elements, because it’ll make a lot more sense of how the natural outcome occurs when we talk about recognition. Recognition. So if we go back to our previous example of the Christmas party, which was a phenomenal success as a signature event, they did their recognition program at that time. They would recognize people’s accomplishments and achievements and work at the Christmas party, which is not bad, but that was the primary, and for many managers, the only time that they showed recognition or appreciation to their staff. So when we are talking about recognition as part of ramp, we are talking about the timely, authentic and appreciable recognition to your staff once a year is not timely. Right. If somebody does something of note, they should be recognized for that in a timely fashion. Saying, waiting eight months and then going, oh, yeah, by the way, when you did this for me, I really appreciated. It loses a substantial amount of its impact. Right. That’s timely. Authentic is. I mean, we should all know what authentic means, but it needs to actually not feel forced. It’s not condescending, it’s not just a passing thank you. Whatever. It needs to come from a place of authenticity, of actually.
[COBY]:
And one of the things that kind of kills the authenticity is when everybody has to have a turn.
[JAMES]:
Yeah.
[COBY]:
Right. I don’t know if it was this Christmas party of this one client we keep going back to or if it was another client that did their annual wrap up. They had like, everybody won an award for something specific.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. Participation trophies are just not. Yeah.
[COBY]:
I mean, they wanted to include everyone. Let no one feel left out. And that’s fine. But if that’s your method of showing appreciation, it’s watered down when the person that’s killed it all year long is given equal or equal recognition as somebody that just started. Yeah, right. There’s something that it definitely gets watered down and lost. So the idea of everybody gets equal opportunity, equality kind of kills the authenticity at times when you’re talking about recognition. And the thing too, is.
[JAMES]:
The thing.
[COBY]:
That’S important when you’re looking at showing authenticity is that it has to have weight. It has to come from somebody legitimately wanting the person to know. You’re seen, you’re valued, and you’re valued for you, you’re not valued because I have the value of everybody.
[JAMES]:
Yeah.
[COBY]:
Right. So that piece has to be there too.
[JAMES]:
So that’s timely, authentic, appreciable is a really important factor that gets missed a lot. And it’s about, are we showing recognition or appreciation in a way that people understand and can appreciate? So we go into this in greater detail. And I don’t want to derail us too much, but basically, we tend to communicate in the way that we prefer to be communicated with. So recognition is a communication activity. We are expressing something. And so if I personally really like it when somebody tells me, thank you, you’ve done a good job, I will naturally gravitate towards showing recognition by saying, hey, thank you, you’ve done a great job. But not everybody appreciates recognition and appreciates that in the same way that language, those words may not resonate and connect with somebody. And I may be authentically showing recognition, but my team member may not be authentically receiving it.
[COBY]:
Right? Yes, exactly. Again, we don’t want to spend too much time on recognition. We did an episode, our last episode on employee engagement. What makes employee engagement work? We actually give a lot more detail about recognition. So if this is interesting to you, make sure you check out that episode. But it’s important going back to your definition. It has to be authentic, has to be timely, and it has to be appreciable because you want to make sure that you’re capturing all three elements for really effective recognition.
[JAMES]:
Yeah. Let’s jump into autonomy. So when we’re talking about autonomy, we’re talking about how do we provide people with freedoms, with limited freedoms, within the scope of their job, within operational requirements. So autonomy is going to look very different and unique for every single business because there’s a lot of factors that are going to limit or allow for the implementation of different types of freedom. Basically, when we’re talking about autonomy, we’re talking about one way that we talk about it is in terms of rules that empower people versus rules that restrict people. So we tend to craft a lot of policies that restrict and restrictive policies say that this is the only way things can be done, or this is the one right way to do it, or these are the things that you can’t do. Safety policies should be restrictive. Right. We want our safety policies to ensure that, yes, there is one singular, correct way to do it, to make sure that everybody’s safe. What’s funny to me is that we generally talk about rules that empower.
[JAMES]:
When we’re crafting organizational governance or rules to empower a CEO or a leadership team, we tend to naturally go around and use more rules that empower, rules that create a fence around the work. Executive limitations are an excellent example. Right. The chief executive can do whatever they want as long as they do not infringe on these executive limitations. That is an example of a rule that empowers someone to use their professional judgment and to really find creative solutions. And so autonomy is really about providing people with some limited freedoms in the workplace to figure out how can they work best? How can they accomplish the, do they have to follow a certain methodology, or can they focus on the outcome of their work?
[COBY]:
One of the things that tends to be a huge mistake that people make when they think about providing more independence and autonomy is they think it’s actually slacking. Or lessening the rules and policies on people. We say that’s 100% not true. We say it’s actually about creating stronger, clearer, stricter rules, but strict rules that empower. So it’s about drawing very defined timelines, very defined expectations, very defined. Again, limitations where your professional autonomy stops so that you’re creating this clear box or this clear fence around all the stuff that you can’t do, but leaving this massive space for you to have complete authority over, that you can color right to the corners in making sure that you’re giving people a very clear understanding of how they’re going to be measured, what they’re going to be expected of them, and everything else that will really make them empowered to deliver their work.
[JAMES]:
People can operate in unstructured environments. Most of us crave some level of structure.
[COBY]:
Yes. One of the things that people need to understand, if you want to be looking at creating more autonomy, you need to ensure that you are so clear on your expectations, so clear on how you’re going to be measuring the success, so clear on where the line that they can’t cross is, but then saying, as long as you don’t cross any of these four lines that have boxed you in, you do you, and that is how you deliver a really effective autonomy. And again, where those lines are and what those lines look like will differ. Job to job, business to business, operational requirement to operational requirement. But that fundamental approach to autonomy is universal. Let’s move on to master.
[JAMES]:
Yeah, let’s talk mastery. I know you love this topic, so I’ll do try to keep my mouth shut a little bit.
[COBY]:
So mastery is about skill development, it’s about talent management. And it’s something that there are different approaches to building mastery. And one of the ones that we use, which is not the only way to use it, involves kind of like the way that you kind of manage your team and how you help people understand and develop their skills. Because we often say that it’s better to let somebody get even better at what they’re already good at than trying to have everybody constantly make up for the things that they’re bad at because there is a strategy, and this, again, works in different kind of degrees in almost every environment, that if you build a team where you’ve got a team of specialists, where I have super high strengths and some real weaknesses, but if I’m supported by people on my team, that my weakness is their strength, that model can yield so much higher productivity, performance, profitability than if everybody’s okay at everything. So again, that’s not the only way to do mastery, but that is a significant strategy that can help create mastery. The other piece is about effective training and development, and that’s about providing training where people are supported to do the job that they need to do, that the training is not generic and a mile wide and an inch deep, and that the training will actually allow them to really provide this new approach or this new strategy in their workplace. Because a lot of times when training is a box of check and sometimes with employee engagement training, people know training is associated with engagement. So they sign people up for mandatory training and go box checked. Or they provide these corporate training, which really is the same for everybody, even though you’ve got high skilled people maybe in one department, and you got frontline lower skilled people in another department, given the same training, that doesn’t create motivation, enthusiasm, that just kind of mandates training and development and makes people less desiring, less inclined to seek talent or skill development that will help them get better what they’re already good at. So it’s about understanding how you utilize training and it’s understanding that there are good, effective methods to get the optimal work out of people. And it may seem a bit counterproductive or sort of counterintuitive, I should say. But there are some very effective ways of building strengths in people and allowing people to, again, do more of what they’re already good at.
[JAMES]:
Yeah, obviously we are proponents of a strength based team. That’s a lot of what we look for on the training piece. How many times have I can think of so many times in my career where I have been given generic training and it has bored the life out of me. And I have a few very vivid memories of being excited about a training program and getting my company to pay for it because I think it’s going to be a really interesting, really useful skill set and then never being given the opportunity to use the new skills that I’ve developed. We are talking about motivation and enthusiasm, and for me that was massively demotivating.
[COBY]:
Yes, absolutely.
[JAMES]:
So mastery training and development strength, an approach to building a strength based high performing team or an approach to building a high performing team. I know this conversation is running a bit long, but I really want to talk about the last component to ramp as well, which is purpose. Purpose is something that gets talked about a lot in business circles. Generally speaking, there’s two ways in which people tend to talk about purpose. Most of the time it’s aspiration. We as a company need to make sure that we have a clear purpose of how are we going to change the world? Then we will be able to align our mission and purpose with the internal values of our employees or our customers, and that will be transformative. However, just like the signature event Christmas party, it’s not enough to sustain a sense of motivation throughout the year when things get tough, that mission, that grand design, is not going to sustain people’s motivation day in and day out if there are a whole host of other problems involved.
[COBY]:
Yeah, and we have an episode where we actually get right into the different sparks of purpose. And I’ll put that in the show notes, too, because that is a great episode.
[JAMES]:
That’s going to be a lot of show notes.
[COBY]:
I’m just thinking about that. So I think I’ll do a bit of a wrap up.
[JAMES]:
…just before you do that. I just want to tie it back to the outcome, because we talked about ramp being the natural. If you follow ramp, recognition, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, the natural outcome will be motivation and enthusiasm in the work. When people feel recognized and appreciated, when they have the freedom to, when they have some level of freedom and autonomy in their work, when their skills are identified, valued, when they’re used, and when you can align their spark of motivation, their purpose, to the work that they’re doing. That is why we say it will have that natural outcome.
[COBY]:
And the thing is, too, is that when we say, you really shouldn’t be doing employee engagement, employee engagement needs to be the natural consequence of what you should do. What you should do is recognition, is providing autonomy, is encouraging your skills with mastery and connecting people to a sense of purpose. Those are the things that you should be doing that will create motivation, enthusiasm, or better known as employee engagement.
[JAMES]:
Yes.
[COBY]:
All right, so let’s do a quick summary. So the question was, should companies be doing employee engagement? Short answer is no, because that is the fundamental mistake we make, is we try and do engagement, but what we actually have to do, we have to create the conditions that allow for motivation and enthusiasm. The three pitfalls that people end up falling into is they try to do engaging with people as a way to create motivation and enthusiasm, and that doesn’t work. They try to create performative solutions that will create motivation and enthusiasm, and sometimes they will in the very short term, but they’re not sustainable, or they’ll create ineffective efforts that they think will make up for the lack of motivation and enthusiasm that people feel on a daily basis. We need to think about how we approach engagement, like the way that we approach wellness. We don’t do wellness. We provide the conditions that support wellness. So we have to provide the conditions that support engagement and that if we want to actually fix this, we need to look at cultural transformations that will provide us a work environment that will sustain motivation and enthusiasm. And the things we actually have to provide and do to create motivation, enthusiasm are recognition, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of our podcast and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca / podcast. Thanks for joining us.
[ANNOUNCER]:
For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to visit us at www.roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share employs breaking out in spontaneous dance dry mouth, a version of the sound of James’ voice desire to find a better podcast.
