Engaging Managers’ Zone – Part 4: Your Employee Engagement Landscape

Insight into why an individual may be or become engaged or disengaged is an invaluable resource.

Let’s reflect on what we already know.  In Part 2 we looked at the distribution of engagement responsibilities across different organisational roles.  First and foremost, employee engagement is as much the responsibility of the employee as it is their manager or the organisation that employs them.  To be able to own their own engagement effectively, however, they will require encouragement, support and reciprocation from you.

In Part 3 we looked at taking ownership of your own engagement as a manager.  If you’ve spent time reflecting on this, you’ll understand what kind of support will benefit the individuals in your team.

Why individual engagement is important

It’s easy to think of employee engagement as something that manifests at team level and above.  After all, that’s usually how survey results are reported and engagement strategies developed.

However, just as optimum physical performance requires all the right parts in all the right places, behaving and functioning in the right way, so optimum team engagement depends on the adequate engagement of all team members in their own right.

As brought to our attention by the ‘Shades of Grey’ report from our research partners, Hult-Ashridge, what you may perceive as ‘team engagement’ can disguise a complex and sensitive ecosystem of engagement among and between individuals.

Employee engagement can be most easily won – and lost – at the individual level.  Engaging your team as a team is important, but don’t lose sight of individual team members.  Higher engagement across the team cannot compensate indefinitely for pockets of lower engagement, especially where key tasks are delivered by individuals and not shared by the team.

Factors affecting individual engagement from within

We are, each of us, psychologically complex.  Everything we experience and do is influenced by how we think, feel and behave – consciously and unconsciously.

How we experience ‘work’ – how we feel about it and how we respond – is no different.

Don’t worry, we’re not suggesting that engaging managers train as occupational psychologists, but it is our recommendation that you develop a more robust awareness of what makes your people tick.  Improving your insight into what may prompt someone to respond with engagement or disengagement can help you better understand how to support them and do so more easily.

Bear in mind that whilst your team will be made up of different ‘fixed’ personality types, behaviour can be adjusted over time.  As managers, we can place our team members into boxes, but even the most cynical employee can become more positive if managed appropriately.

Rather than wading through all levels of detail concerning the human psyche, employment and the workplace, in the diagram below we’ve listed the aspects we consider the most relevant.

We thrive in the right conditions, and struggle otherwise.  Aligning workplace conditions to optimise the employee experience helps engagement to thrive.

As we saw in Part 2, leaders, managers and the HR department all have responsibilities for the state of employee engagement within an organisation.  However, the influence of the organisation extends far beyond the individual actions and attitudes of those in positions of authority.  Look at the enablers of engagement, for example: the need for strong strategic narrative, organisational integrity and the empowerment of employee voice.  These are embedded in the fabric of the engaging organisation.

Human beings are remarkably sensitive on numerous levels.  It’s in our DNA.  You may have heard of the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ instinct – the automatic response to circumstances that overwhelm our ability to cope.  Fight-flight-freeze is an extreme example of how psychologically volatile we can be, while on a day-to-day basis we respond limitlessly to the world around us, knowingly and unknowingly.  Seemingly dysfunctional behaviours are often coping mechanisms brought on by stress.  As managers, it is helpful for us to be aware of these behaviours and their impact, in ourselves as well as those around us.

Every aspect of our working environment affects our bodies, thoughts and feelings, and thereby the levels and direction of our engagement.

For example:

• The refurbishment of executive offices without improvement of employee areas, which can introduce a sense of unfairness.
• The malfunctioning printer that can create delay and frustration.
• The blame culture that can inhibit innovation and feed risk aversion.
• The promotion of managers based on technical ability alone, which can undermine people management.

Aligning workplace conditions to optimise the employee experience

The foundations for solid and sustainable employee engagement require more than just compelling communication.  Employees need to be physically and emotionally aware and satisfied that an employer’s engagement promises are genuine and will be delivered.  Every aspect of the organisation should be aligned to engagement as closely as possible.

At the very least, care should be taken to keep disengaging factors to a minimum.

While your authority and opportunities to influence organisational factors may be limited, you should strive to:

• understand what aspects of your organisation especially encourage or inhibit the engagement of your team, including why and how (for example: issues concerning how accessible something is and whether it’s fit for purpose and considerate of employees);
• identify those aspects within your immediate control, those over which you have a degree of influence and those entirely outside of your influence; and
• increase or mitigate their impact as best you can, either by working to change them or by providing your team with appropriate support.

In the diagram below, we feature what we consider to be the principal categories of workplace conditions.  Think about what falls into these categories within your local work environment.