Time to blow up employee engagement

There are two things that most organizations don’t think about when it comes to employee engagement. Do you know what they are?

If your organization has been overlooking the role of the manager in its recognition and recruiting programs, it’s time to blow up engagement to create more meaningful and relevant “in-the-moment” experiences. (Photo: Shutterstock)

When you think about employee engagement, what comes to mind? For many companies, it’s the results from their latest employee engagement survey. For others, it may be the utilization rate of their employee recognition platform. Unfortunately, there are two things that most organizations don’t think about when it comes to employee engagement. The first is what employees actually want from their experience with an employer over the course of their career.

Related: Company and career growth both important to employees

The second—and quite possibly most important—overlooked factor is the role of the manager in influencing the career experiences of employees. Ironically, organizations spend millions of dollars on programs to recruit, recognize and incentivize employees often with little regard for the manager. However, the manager is the individual with the greatest influence on employee engagement, performance and retention. If your organization has been overlooking the role of the manager in its recognition and recruiting programs, it’s time to blow up engagement to create more meaningful and relevant “in-the-moment” experiences for candidates and employees.

Why does understanding what employees want matter?

The importance of customer experience in the design and development of new products and services is a given. Most organizations would not even consider new product development without considering the perspective of future customers, who will pay for and use the product or service. After all, the new product or service is designed to address customer wants, needs and expectations.

So, what about the context where employees are the customers? In the competition to attract and retain top employees, such is the case. Do organizations even really know what employees most value from their employer? If they don’t, how can they possibly craft a work environment that delivers a rewarding employee experience (EX)?

Decades of research, including research conducted on a global basis, identifies the design elements of an appealing EX. In the words of employees themselves, thus, the true sense of the phrase “employee voice,” workers around the globe told us which EX attributes are most important to them. These attributes are as follows:

So, what does an organization get if it fulfills these seven attributes? They get a highly engaged workforce of employees who take pride in the organization’s mission, advocate for the organization, are committed to staying and operate at a high level of performance.

Consider this: Statistical analysis indicates that delivering these seven organizational attributes accounts for more than 80% of the variance in employee engagement scores. In other words, once an organization has fulfilled these seven attributes, there is little else that can be done to further enhance engagement. The organization that delivers on these seven attributes to employees is the organization with a highly engaged workforce.

Do managers understand what employees truly want from them?

Sort of, but not completely. In fact, I recently asked a representative sample of 1,000 people managers working in the United States what they believe employees most want from them. This survey was conducted in the midst of the current pandemic. Managers correctly identified the following three employee wants: treating employees with dignity and respect, communicating clear performance expectations and rewarding performance contributions. In other words, what managers believe employees most want from them matched what employees themselves said they wanted.

However, there were some big-time mismatches as well. Managers really only had a faint idea of other employee wants, especially in relation to providing recognition and being fair and just in their treatment of employees. In both cases, the percentage of employees who declared one of these factors as the most important thing they wanted from their manager far exceeded the percentage of what managers themselves indicated. This speaks to an important lack of awareness of the importance of these attributes on the part of people managers.

8 keys to managerial effectiveness

In more general terms, our research has identified eight attributes that employees most want from their immediate managers. Once again, we relied on global research conducted over a several-year timeframe. Going directly to the voice of employees located in 26 countries around the world, we learned what subordinate employees most want their immediate bosses to do, as listed below:

These five attributes naturally group together because they all speak to managerial behaviors. In addition to these, employees identified a managerial skill that was important to them. A skill represents expertise. In effect, employees were stating that they want their managers to do the following:

The final two attributes are neither behaviors nor skills, per se, but rather values. Values represent standards of behavior. We understand that personal values tell us what is important to a person. Employees identified these two values as particularly important:

Why is this important to know? Once we discovered this taxonomy, we developed ways of measuring the extent to which managers displayed these attributes. We found that managers who delivered what employees most want—that is, fulfilled employee expectations of managers—in fact managed teams who were much more positive about their EX, much more highly engaged, enjoyed much better team chemistry and performed at significantly higher levels.

Thus, once again, the employee voice is extremely relevant to broader-scale organizational success. It tells us that the employee-centric manager is the one who excels, achieving much higher performance ratings and greater personal opportunities for growth and development.

How employee-centric management will shape pandemic recovery success

Employee-centric managers are generally more capable at almost all challenges facing managers. They know how to connect with employees, keep them on track, ensure they feel recognized and rewarded and help them achieve or exceed performance expectations.

In respect to the pandemic, our recent survey revealed what managers believe are the workplace changes most likely to become permanent. They are primarily two-fold: 1) an emphasis on remote work, which entails an emphasis on telecommunication, working from home, fewer in-person interactions and less physical time in the office; and 2) an emphasis on safety precautions, meaning fewer in-person interactions, more social distancing, an emphasis on personal hygiene, greater attentiveness to cleaning and disinfecting and stricter guidelines pertaining to employee safety and well-being.

The employee-centric manager will be the manager most attuned to the needs of employees as they help shape recovery to the pandemic. Whether or not these workplace changes indeed become permanent fixtures post-pandemic, only time will tell. But between now and then, our research clearly indicates that the most successful people managers are the ones who both understand and react positively to what employees truly want. This has been shown to be a successful formula for talent attraction and retention and performance optimization — both now and, undoubtedly, into the future.

Dr. Jack Wiley, an award-winning organizational psychologist, researcher, author, and leadership consultant, is the chief scientific officer at Engage2Excel. In his upcoming book, In The Employee-Centric Manager, Jack will present the results and actionable takeaways from a decade-long investigation. A groundbreaking analysis with enormous practical implications, The Employee-Centric Manager will offer easy-to-follow guidance that managers can put into action immediately to improve employee engagement, retention and productivity.

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