Lean Engagement from Lean Sensei's newsletter Q1 2014 issue
If you are a typical organization, you likely struggle
immensely with the whole concept of employee engagement. Discouraging, yes, but true. Please allow me to explain, and keep in mind
that I care about you and want to help you and your business to succeed. First, I must admit that my research is based
only on a “small” sample size: a few thousand managers, a few hundred clients, dozens
of business leaders, and multiple industry sectors. Yet despite these logistical limitations,
patterns have emerged in overwhelming regularity. Yes my lean friends, I have come to the
conclusion that most organizations don't really measure engagement well or even
understand what it is. I have seen companies and government agencies
equating and measuring engagement through employee surveys, job satisfaction
scores, retention rates, and other symptoms that represent a complex set of
employee relations issues muddled together in a satisfaction score. Frankly, these measures fail to get to the
root of why people stay or go. I see many initiatives intended to build
team morale that have nothing to do with real work in the gemba. Sometimes I see hard-nosed managers press
their staff and criticize them relentlessly, oblivious to the resulting
disengagement. I also see executives and managers pandering to employee whims
and apologizing for organizational shortcomings to improve engagement scores,
while ignoring needed action to improve business effectiveness. Sorry, my
job is to point these things out, even though few leaders like to hear it. Thus, the topic for this blog is building
real employee engagement.
It seems many businesses would be happy to ignore the truth
about employee engagement. The stark
truth is that engagement is not about having employees feel good about what
your company does for them. It is not
about knowing the names of your employees spouse, children, dog, cat, and
goldfish. Yes, you have to care for
them, but in the context of what a man or woman can do and how you can help
them do it. It is about employees
intrinsically feeling good about making a contribution to your company. “Wow wow wow!” That is what we need—a big paradigm shift
about what engagement really is. Let me
state this emphatically - from a lean perspective - engagement is about feeling
that you are making a difference in the company you work for. It is not about feeling that someone else is
making a difference for you, or gives your trinkets because you are an employee! It helps if the difference you make is
explicitly understood and recognized at the time you make it. It hurts if someone tosses a few general
platitudes out to everyone after the fact without ever acknowledging your
specific work, and then HR organizes another company picnic so you can burn
another Saturday in an attempt to feel good for the team. Hmmm.
Time to check the rear view mirror.
I suggest a fundamental re-definition of
"Engagement" is needed if we want genuine positive feelings and
retention of good dedicated employees to persist. Here is the key premise: Engagement = the
degree to which employees demonstrate a shared destiny with the organization by
proactively solving the problems of the business. Lean engagement
is not simply about employee happiness. It is about commitment to mutual
destiny and actively fighting for the business. It is about working
together with your manager, peers, staff, and cross-functional teams to make
‘how you do work’ better. So from this
perspective, voluntary
participation in problem solving teams and kaizen activities is the purest form
of engagement. Yet very few companies measure and
celebrate problem solving engagement. Taking
ownership of processes and seeing improvements through will not only get
results, but will build mutual trust which improves all those employee
relations issues, and reduces the relevance of many predictable employee
relations symptoms.
So what are the implications for leaders to promote an engaged
workforce? Here’s a secret ten-step
engagement program that any manager can do:
(1)
Stop relying on employee surveys and start
having real 1-on-1 “real” conversations with your team
(2)
Find out what makes them upset and frustrated
more than anything else at work
(3)
Make sure you and they understand the root cause
of the dissatisfaction
(4)
Figure out how to solve it, or who has already
solved it (but don’t tell anyone that you know)
(5)
Equip your team to solve it; ask the right
questions that will cause them to discover solutions on their own; be delighted
in the creative ideas they come up with and assess them objectively
(6)
Coach them through solving the problem, clearing
roadblocks but letting them take the lead
(7)
Congratulate them for solving it, and show how
it helped the business and the customer
(8)
Ask them how they can pass on what they learned;
get them to tell their story
(9)
Have them take ownership of the new standards, and
re-training / maintenance of those standards as inevitable changes are realized
(10) Follow-up to ensure their kaizens do not
fizzle out, and their efforts are not diminished. Show pride in their accomplishments, not your
own.
If you do this (or are doing this already), you are actively
building engagement. If you are not
doing this, what are you doing? Whatever
it is, please don’t call it engagement. Have
a look at the ten points. There are
always a couple of them that leaders recognize that they can do better. Commit to doing it. Engage.
