Staff Engagement: Play a new mind game

Companies keep measuring their staff engagement the wrong way, says DUNCAN BURY. They need to dig deeper to get at the emotional truth about employees’ real attitude to their jobs.

On applying for a mortgage recently my bank manager chastised me, telling me to ‘focus’ as we went through a 40-minute phone call with the mortgage centre. I wasn't engaged.

I have worked in many jobs, from stacking shelves in a supermarket to being part of a European Work Group dealing with engineering surfaces. I have been an alarm fitter, a bus driver, an order picker, a scientist, an IT specialist, an itinerant Executive Director and a CEO.

When was I most engaged during these jobs? When I was excited by what I was doing, using my skills optimally. When I was challenged by what I was doing. When I was emotionally involved in the task and when people told me I was ‘bloody brilliant’. I was engaged when I was an order picker. I excelled at developing the best paths to get round the warehouse to satisfy customer needs in record time.

But the question is, can you really measure engagement in a meaningful way? The results of engagement surveys to monitor engagement are often presented as something very much like this:
• 56%of our staff enjoy coming to work. This is 2.7%higher than last year. (Whoopee!)
• 65%of our staff recognise our brand.
This is the same as last year and better than the industry mean. (Although compared to Harley Davidson it is very, very poor.) (The parentheses are mine.)

These results are precise but are they accurate? Does this output really tell you whether staff are engaged? What about your management team, are they engaged? And are you? If I was to meet you and talk with you about your engagement I would know within five minutes whether you were engaged or not. How? Well, I would be listening for the emotive content of your speech, watching your behaviour, listening to the ‘cognitives’, the things that were the subject of your sentences, the ‘what you are talking about’ bits. I would be trying to construct what you were thinking about and why you demonstrated what you did to me because of your thinking.

Now, a ‘thought leader’ can be defined as someone who demonstrates a deeper level of thinking about their responsibilities and leads on the back of that. ‘Thought leaders’ apparently think harder than the average leader about their business.

So let’s think harder about staff engagement. If you want to know the issues that concern your staff, don't ask them to fill in a questionnaire, ask them what questions they want to be asked. Then don't ask those questions of them, analyse the questions they have requested. That will give you a great first insight into their level of engagement and the issues on their minds. Then think deeper still. Ask them to respond in free text to one question: how engaged are you with the company? And then analyse that. The combination of the questions they would ask, the cognitives, and the response to the free text, the emotives, will tell you much more than a survey ever would about their engagement.

So how do you get staff engaged? In a short article such as this it is difficult to explain in detail but let’s consider this briefly. Being engaged is about finding the challenge in the task you have been given and responding to it positively. Let’s explore this. We are in a new role. The task has been defined by others. We consider how we are going to tackle the challenge and we complete the task. Job done! But let’s explore this a little. Those individuals, who are engaged in an organisation or activity, reframe the challenge they’ve got to make it more complex, challenge their skills and develop new strategies. By that I don't mean increase the complexity of the task, but they think harder and find a real challenge.

Back to shelf filling. As a student I found this task mind-numbingly boring. I reframed the task of ‘filling shelves’ to be a task of presenting the goods with perfect precision, with no date-expired goods. I became totally engaged with the task and the organisation benefited. It also set the standards for others. I was bloody brilliant at shelf filling.

Now, here’s a more complex example. Let’s take a bank employee, working in the front line dealing with over the counter enquiries. They have been asked to ‘sell’ more, offering insurance and other financial products by asking the customer questions. They do their job. But an engaged employee might reframe the role as one of ‘Private Banker’ to high-turnover clients, endeavouring to provide a private banking service to every member of the public who enters the branch.

Now that is a challenge and pretty engaging. So look for the cognitives, the emotives and the challenge, and the engagement will follow.

DUNCAN BURY is MD at Miascape

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