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Working in a startup business is totally different than in an established company.

Employees in a startup love their job. Work is fun. The company provides its people a purpose and an opportunity to develop their talent.

Employee engagement is high. As a result people have an open minded attitude and are always looking for ways to improve not only their work, but also the total business.

Consolidated companies, on the other hand, have more worries. Their HR managers need to conduct surveys to find out how satisfied their personnel is. Usually they find out that the large majority is relatively satisfied with their job.

But satisfaction does not mean commitment or engagement. According Gallup’s 2016 poll, only 32% of U.S. workers are engaged in their jobs.

Employee engagement is not just a business buzzword. Its strategical importance is valid also for established companies, especially for the ones that are challenged by some form of disruption. No wonder that it has become the top issue on the minds of business leaders.

Here are 3 specific actions from which a company can start if it wants to increase employee engagement:

Promote Emotional Intelligence

“In order to carry a positive action, we must develop a positive vision.” -Dalai Lama

Eliminate negative emotions

At work, very often, emotions are not considered as something that needs to be managed and educated. Emotional intelligence is not promoted. Consequently some bosses have exaggerated and disrespectful behavior towards their people whenever external pressure rises.

Scientific research has discovered that exposure to strong negative emotions reduces the cognitive skills by 30–40% for a period of around 40–60 minutes. In the long term it causes even health problems.

Positive emotional energy

But eliminating outbursts of negative emotions is not enough. Employee engagement actually needs positive emotional states.

Companies should use emotional energy as a strategy to make people feel happier, be active and work better.

Understand the true nature of Human Motivation

“People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.”- W.Edwards Deming

New scientific discoveries

In her book “Why motivating people doesn’t work and what does”, Susan Fowler explains that people have the following 3 basic psychological needs:

Autonomy: to feel we have a choice and we are the source of our actions

Relatedness: to have meaningful relations and a sense of purpose

Competence: to grow and learn every day, and to feel we can cope with everything that happens to us.

What it means for employee engagement

This is good news for anyone who wants to stimulate employee engagement.

It means that people actually want to be autonomous. They appreciate positive relations at work. And they really want to learn and become capable of handling also difficult situations.

Given these points, there is a very clear alignment between people’s needs and the objectives of employee engagement.

People become intrinsically motivated when their job is satisfying their needs. This motivation from within gives them energy, intention and value recognition that they use to become more engaged in their job.

Motivation is a skill

But what can we do when people do not feel that their job is satisfying these 3 basic needs?

Motivation is actually a skill and a quality that people can learn. They can become more aware of the fact that their daily job is satisfying their need for autonomy, relatedness and competence.

Forget about carrots

Other forms of motivation, for example these based on necessity, status or rewards are not compatible with employee engagement. These schemes do not motivate people form within. Therefore they only bring a temporary compliance to what the company wants.

Carrots, monetary awards and bonus systems, actually scale down employee engagement. It obscures the awareness of what really satisfies people in their jobs.

Concrete actions on process and organizational level

“ You don’t build a business — you build people — and then people build the business.” Zig Ziglar

Providing training and coaching to the people are necessary actions if we want to improve employee engagement. But it is not enough. We must also work on the level of the process and the entire organization.

This is how our processes can stimulate employee engagement:

Active participation in improvement projects increases the autonomy of the people

Promote teamwork; it stimulates positive and constructive relations

Communicating team goals and the achieved results makes people want to work together and improve the process even further.

On the job training to increase competence and skills.

Employee engagement is also a very important organizational issue:

It requires a new model of management based on open communication

An articulated vision and mission is needed to give purpose to the work of every employee

Continuous improvement and learning should be actively promoted, and its success celebrated.

We need to introduce specific company wide training on emotional intelligence and other soft skills

The working environment needs to be clean, secure and pleasant.

Attention should be dedicated to the work-life balance, and we can look for ways to facilitate people also outside of the company.

Conclusion

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” -Maya Angelou

Employee engagement grows when people feel that their personal aspirations and needs are important to the company they work for.

Helping people find their autonomy, relatedness and competence is a clear win-win situation between employees and the company.

A key success element is to have consistency between how we treat our people, how we set up our processes, and what we do at organizational level.

Do you want to find out more?

You may want to read this previous article to discover more on performance improvement and how people, processes and the organization influence each other.

Thinking about new ways to create competitive advantage and improve your organization? This PDF describes the 4 pillars that increase enterprise performance and helps you to apply them in your company.

Click here to get the document right now