employee disengagement

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The Peter Drucker Recipe for Creating Engaged Employees

October 5, 2009 in Book | No comments

Recipe for engagement An adaptation from a yet-to-be published book indicates that the great business guru identified 4 actions that are necessary to create engaged employees.
1. Careful placement and promotion
2. Demanding high standards of performance
3. Providing workers with information
4. Encouraging workers to acquire managerial vision

These are difficult to challenge, and appear straightforward enough. As with most things, however, the devil is in the detail, and there is definitely scope to expand on them. Let me add what I think are key embellishments to each of these, without which they are likely to be meaningless.

Careful placement and promotion begins with proper recruitment. Thus you need to ensure when recruiting that you look at the total person. This entails moving beyond the conventional checklist of competencies and looking at the broader talents that could add value that you had not anticipated – now or in the longer term. The ability to do the job now is not much good if the person doesn’t have the ability to adapt if the organisation or the job changes or to grow with your business in the future. Valuing people as assets as I propose will ensure you regard recruitment as an investment, just like any other asset purchase, and not just a pricing exercise.

The concept of high standards of performance is fine. However, the word ‘demand’ perpetuates the innate autocracy of traditional, “command and control” management, and may be one of the root causes of employee disengagement. From the time we first start becoming mobile, humankind is always looking to better itself, and an engaged employee is likely to be the harshest critic of their own performance. Remember too that performance – like success – is seldom, if ever, something that is under our unique control. Thus if you want an engaged employee empower them to figure out and affect the things that will enhance their own performance.

It goes without saying that you cannot expect to have fully engaged employees if they feel they are not trusted enough to know everything that is going on. In any case, how can you expect your employees to make the best decisions if they do not have all the facts?

So if you seriously want your people to acquire managerial vision, you have to keep them fully informed. As you would expect there is more to it than just this. Managerial vision requires:

  • A sound understanding of the business;
  • Knowledge of the consequences of actions and the steps to take if and when things go wrong; and
  • The ability to think and act as if they owned the business.

The solutions outlined in this book, thus provide the perfect means to follow through on Drucker’s remedy and build the employee engagement you are looking for and that is essential for your long term sustained success.

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You haven’t missed the point of employee motivation – have you?

July 30, 2009 in Book | 4 comments

Top of the World 4What a delight to find someone else who recognises that companies have missed the point of employee motivation, by focussing on external rather than internal issues. It is the last vestige of ‘command & control’ management thinking, and arrogant in the extreme, to think that you – as an employer – can motivate your people! Will Marre – the co-founder of and former president of the Covey Leadership Centre and CEO of the REALeadership Alliance – recently made the point tellingly, stating that “by trying to create great companies that are ‘great places to work’ instead of igniting motivation from within” have missed the point.

You can read a fuller account of his address to senior HR executives and CEOs at the recent Employee of Choice Forum in San Diego here, but it is worth emphasising his comment, “The key is training all employees to think and act in ways that add value to both our future and our bottom lines. … Meaningful work occurs when workers harness their strengths, interests and creativity to create real value.”  The problem is that you cannot do this while not looking at the whole person.

The focus on roles and competencies means you are not looking at the total person. Yet people are incapable of physically dividing themselves, which means you have to recognise that you pay them for what is effectively 30% of their life each day. For them not focus 100% of their capabilities on the task at hand at any point during their day is to waste a portion of that life, and to short-change both them and yourself as the employer, and is the real, root cause of employee disengagement.

It may not be perfect, but valuing people as assets, putting them on the balance sheet and making them co-owners of the business is the best way of redressing this injustice and making individual and organisation alike more effective. It is the start of “igniting motivation from the inside out” – the only way you can really do it!

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Is “Command & Control” Really Dead?

July 2, 2009 in Book | 2 comments

demandFor some years now you have been hearing that “Command and Control Management” is passé and that it no longer has a place it in a business that seeks to be competitive. Yet reports of its demise appear to be greatly exaggerated and premature

Certainly “Command and Control” is logically questionable in a democratic society. After all, how can you expect people who have been raised to believe that individual rights are paramount, and that all men should be treated as equal, to accept that someone else has the right to tell them what to do and how to do it? This question alone, paradoxically, goes a long way towards answering why there are unacceptably high levels of employee disengagement and there is a deteriorating employee engagement picture. It doesn’t matter what employment contracts say or what the terms of engagement actually are, your people will always be happier doing what is required without interference. So the books and management schools that have been telling us that there is no place for Command and Control management techniques are certainly on track.

Yet, despite these efforts, and their apparent acceptance by the business community at large, the style of management remains largely unchanged. You may well have introduced initiatives to create “work-life balance” and “empower” your people, but ultimately these are largely all within the framework of existing management structures. They still bear all the hall marks of top-down management and, while they theoretically loosen the reins, they actually do very little to alter the mindset and thus behaviours tend to always revert to a Command and Control style – particularly when there is a problem or crisis.

This state of affairs can only be changed and Command and Control Management truly killed off when a new framework is introduced that will shape new behaviours and break down the old, ingrained thought patterns with their consequential behaviours. This book offers the basis for developing just such a framework and thus is essential reading for any business leader looking to meet the challenges of the 21st century and build an organisation of “FAT People” where success can be sustained.

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