What is Wrong with Employee Engagement?

Friday, July 09, 2010

In this on-again off-again roller coaster economic recovery, why should organizations be concerned with employee engagement? Employees who have been out of a job and on the street for 3 to 9 months or even a year should be plenty engaged, shouldn’t they? After all, many of their cohorts are still looking for a job, for some; they are on their second round of layoffs since the economy went south. For some job seekers things have gotten so bad they have given up looking and are not even being counted in the jobless numbers.

Employers need to remember, these are the production workers assembling products, they are the sales and marketing representatives pounding the pavement selling those products, and they are the administrative staffs in Finance, HR, and IT holding the corporate or regional offices together with a third of their former staff. These are employees who had their pay frozen, their 401(k) contribution match suspended, their hours cut back, the cost of their health care increased by double digits, and assigned double duty to absorb the work of laid off cohorts. They have come in everyday not knowing whether they will get a handshake or a pink slip.

All too often businesses do not consider that a few small acts of appreciation will go a long ways towards engaging employees in the daily operations. The other day I was in a national sub shop waiting in line for my sub to be prepared. All of a sudden, the manager threw my half made veggie sub in the trash can, where upon he explained that “something” had fallen on to the sandwich. He then directed the sub maker to “do it again”. Had that sub maker been “engaged” she would not have allowed my sub to be contaminated with whatever it was that fell on it. True, a 6 inch is not much of a loss, but then multiply it by 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year and organizations that operate on razor thin profit margins cannot not afford one trashed sub.

Every morning I stop at the small coffee shop in my building and order one large coffee. As soon as the manager sees me, he has my large coffee ready to go. No, it is not some national coffee chain headquartered in Seattle. It is a small mom and pop where the owner and his wife work to make a modest lining. How engaged is the owner-manager, very engaged, he knows that his livelihood is directly related to the 500 or so employees who work in that building. If his product quality is poor, there is another coffee shop just down the street. If his service is too slow, there are numerous sandwich shops nearby.

The trick with employee engagement is to get every employee from the loading dock to the C-Suite to act and behave as if it were their personal business. One trucking firm had the names of the designated driver and mechanic painted on the side of the trucks. A paper products company held an annual truck rodeo where families were invited to watch drivers and mechanics “wrangle” their trucks through obstacle courses. Utility companies have held similar “rodeos” where power lineman and others demonstrated their ability to climb poles, hang wire, and make corrections. One utility company holds a rodeo where the main event is locating underground pipes and cables using remote sensing devices.

Sometimes simple is better!