It was exam results time in the Brown household this summer, with one daughter receiving her A-level grades and the other her GCSE results. I told both girls – as inter-sibling tensions started to mount – that I didn’t mind what results they got as long as they were healthy, happy and ended up doing something they really enjoyed. I meant it too. And unlike some of their friends, there were consequently no results-based cash bonuses on offer.
David McLeod and Nita Clarke’s government review of employee engagement and its importance found dozens of definitions of this topic, as well as even more research studies demonstrating its critical impact on organisational performance in our increasingly service and knowledge based, human capital driven economy.
I tend to think that engagement is easier to see and recognise than to define. As Louis Armstrong said when asked to define jazz, “if you gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna know”.
But we definitely saw it during the Olympics, not only from the athletes with their stunning efforts and commitment, but particularly from the 70,000 unpaid volunteers. In an excellent blog for the Harvard Business Review, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones profile these people who “made this extraordinary (and amazingly successful) event possible”:
“Their approach is a joy, they love what they are doing, they say ‘have a nice day’ and they mean it… their enthusiasm is contagious… they are expressing over-whelming pride and enthusiasm in taking part in something positive and important”.
And not surprisingly, Goffee and Jones’ research finds that organisations with employees who display similar authenticity, pride and enthusiasm outperform their competitors who fail to nurture and develop the enthusiasm of their staff.
So why do most of the HR processes that we see operating in large organisations today do the opposite? Why do these supposedly efficient, standardised, faceless systems ignore our enthusiasms and joy? Why do our appraisal systems concentrate on delivering rigid, narrowly-defined, controlling, supposedly SMART short-term, inflexible targets and objectives?
Why do we often, as the governor of the Bank of England put it recently, fail to recognise that “motivation does not come from financial incentives alone… the financial sector has done us a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals”.
Why do even the very surveys we use to measure engagement so often produce mountains of meaningless data and little or no action to improve it, with a focus on irrelevant statistics such as completion rates?
Working on improving the performance management process in a large public-sector organisation, a lady in one of our focus groups told me she that didn’t enjoy her experience as “my manager looked at the computer screen and not at me”. Our initiative focused on removing and simplifying a lot of the overly-complex process, and building and improving the one-on-one manager and employee relationship and experience.
Goffee and Jones’ conclusion is that “if companies organised more to draw on and fuel enthusiasms, and less to maximize efficiency, the problem of disengagement would be gone forever”. As this dire economic and employee engagement recession continues, it is excellent advice.
So what is the focus of your HR strategy at the moment: employee enthusiasm and growth, or efficiency and austerity?