“Now wash your hands”: Three ways to look at employee engagement

We can really over-engineer things in HR. The jargon, the models of engagement, the diagnostics. Are we creating a veneer of complexity to make ourselves believe we are actually changing things? Three simple ways to look at employee engagement.

All the research we come across that tells us that, even with billions being spent on employee engagement in its various forms, levels remain depressingly low and stagnant.

CEOs, HRDs and communication directors who are crying out for some fresh approaches to engagement, become increasingly convinced that the answers might just be a bit simpler than we’ve made them.

We adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach. We take the worst possible behaviour and to ensure we protect the organisation, we create a policy that means no-one, anywhere, will repeat that behaviour ever again.

Through leading and experiencing numerous change and engagement initiatives, we need to do three things:

• we need to treat our people like adults;
• we need to think of them as customers; and
• we need to engage with them as human beings.

 Treat me as an adult

Most employer-employee relationships start with the assumption that employees are like children and need to be either protected or controlled.

We adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach. We take the worst possible behaviour and to ensure we protect the organisation, we create a policy that means no-one, anywhere, will repeat that behaviour ever again.

This means we alienate the 99.9% of people who had no intention of behaving badly to protect against the tiny minority.

There are not enough rules in the world to protect you from someone who wants to take advantage, and by creating countless rules you render an adult to adult relationship almost impossible.

So how would you adopt a more adult approach? Which policies would you take away that annoy people most? Try and share good news as well as bad.

Stop broadcasting and find ways of helping your people talk to each other – without veto. How much more creativity, innovative thinking, extra energy, conscientiousness and enjoyment could we engender by treating people like adults?

Think of me as your customer

If we were to think about our employees as customers, then we would do things differently. We would insist on better analysis, better predictive data, better granularity of understanding.

We would recognise that surveys can only provide the most superficial of snapshots, and we would harness line managers as the means to get to a much richer appreciation of our people.

We would recognise that shoehorning employees into one-size-fits-all processes can’t possibly work and we would throw out tired old approaches such as the annual appraisal and the bonus scheme.

People are sophisticated, messy and complex entities that need to be engaged in a variety of ways, with multiple channels and with a coherent internal brand.

Engage me as a human being

The so-called “VUCA” world – where we are experiencing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – means we need our people to follow us to work in new ways, with different people, with different technology in new locations.

A scary enough request when you trust the person who’s asking you to do it, and yet trust in our leaders is at its lowest at the very point we need it most.

People are sophisticated, messy and complex entities that need to be engaged in a variety of ways”

It can be harder to rediscover your human language than you think. Try not to say words like “dialogue” or “interaction” for a week and you’ll realise that we adopt a language that defines us as corporate and detached – not “real”.

We know that stories move us and they help us transcend sceptical analysis as we co-create with the story teller. That’s how we talk to our friends and our families and yet as leaders we feel we need to have data.

Adult to adult. Employees as customers. Human beings talking and listening to each other.