That feel-good sparkle of best-ever service

Employee engagement is a leadership toolset to achieve business goals, argues KEVIN PAGE, Operations Director with Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks. But not everyone knows how to make it work.

Leaders strive for engagement but often find it difficult to achieve on a large scale. That’s because engagement is often at odds with organisational and leadership theories in common use. While our personal motivations for engagement are deep within us, engagement is a team activity: it’s unlocked when you feel good about the team you’re in and your place within it. Remember that feel-good sparkle you experienced from best-ever customer service? That’s engagement.

The key is to build engagement into an organisation’s processes – it doesn’t depend exclusively on individual leaders creating what I call ‘high engagement organisations’. These organisations routinely integrate employee participation, communication and leadership behaviour.

It sounds obvious, but if we want people to engage, we must find a way for them to participate. And this isn’t just about opening dialogue and asking for suggestions. That is only part of it.

Participation that unlocks engagement is about how we manage ongoing relationships with our people – seeing them as members of teams that are seeking recognition, trust and a positive sense of their individual worth. 

Give them a voice
The motivating effect of giving a voice to people may be considered old hat, but is still valid. Suggestion schemes, continuous improvement programmes and quality circles are the obvious techniques. But the process can be much wider – seeking views, requesting feedback, holding a ballot, running a simple intranet poll are all ways of offering a voice and involvement.

All the same, we have to be careful which decisions are “democratised”, otherwise everything grinds to a halt and starts to lose authenticity. Seeking views on the future of the pension fund, for example, is quite different from moving the water-cooler five feet to the left. 

It goes without saying that people will participate only once when a system doesn’t live up to their expectations. Setting those expectations early and clearly, giving due notice of important decisions and the guidelines for involvement, builds inherent fairness into processes.

And then doing something visible and tangible with the results of the involvement shows everyone that their input has been worth it: promises have been kept. Delivering this consistently, across groups and over time is demanding and needs co-ordination and commitment.

People in one team instinctively compare their lot with other teams: a well-intentioned leader looking to get something extra for their team can create a spiral of comparisons that leaves people in the other teams feeling worse-off than they were.

A great deal of western communication assumes a ‘one-way-street’: I say and you listen – and I assume you hear what I intended. This can cause a lot of confusion. If you agree that ‘organisations are conversations’, it pays to get it right. There are some techniques that can move communications up a gear and make it a valuable part of engagement.

The first thing is to avoid thinking in terms of communication, and think instead about comprehension. The simplest way is to ask people what they understand from what they’ve just heard.

Responding means someone has to become involved. But it does something else, too. It forces someone to make sense of things and to personalise your message for themselves – like the old expression: ‘how do I know what I think until I’ve said it’. Make room for this sense-making. Build time for conversation. It helps unlock engagement. Get people together in smaller groups, or use online feedback for larger groups.

Different communication channels convey different types of information. People seek accuracy from written communication, and emotion from personal communication. Choosing the right channel mix for engagement requires both.

It’s natural that we tend to over-estimate our strengths and underplay our weaknesses. Most leaders believe they’re good at the behaviours that influence engagement, and maybe they are. A well run, 360-degree feedback process helps leaders calibrate how they come across. Courtesy, sincerity, open-mindedness and good listening, all communicate engagement. They are the emotional support components of leadership that are taught in every leadership class.

But there’s another side of leadership that gets less attention – the practical support certain leaders provide for their people. Mentoring someone through a new situation, ensuring they actually understand what’s needed and supporting them by remaining involved is not fashionable.

The delegation training most new supervisors receive teaches how to allow others to fend for themselves. This is to allow time for the supervisor to take care of the business of supervision from afar. Where I have seen extraordinary engagement in my research, there has almost always been a leader involved with their people who actively invests in relationships.

Engagement is a leadership toolset to achieve business goals. As leaders, your challenge is to remain involved as active investors in social capital. The greatest onus falls to leaders directly. The sparkle of best-ever customer service awaits those who make engagement part of how they and their organisation work. 

Top 5 engagement drivers in UK
1. Senior management are sincerely interested in the employee wellbeing
2. Opportunity to improve skills and capabilities
3. The employee’s organisation quickly resolves customer concerns
4. An appropriate amount of decision making authority to do job well
5. Organisation’s reputation for social responsibility 

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