Dance Monkey

The Engagement Circus

HR@bigorganisation.com: Yoga session

HR@bigorganisation.com: Zumba Session

HR@bigorganisation.com: Random quizathon

Do you just ignore them? Do these mails intrigue you? Do they engage at all? What is this engagement that companies are so keen to drive?

“Why am I here? What am I doing?” – we've all had these thoughts pass us by and I had Dan Pink help me out with this. He says we are not here for the money, but for meaning. Incentives make people slower – the focus should rather be on autonomy, mastery and purpose.

While poetry is soothes the soul, prose is needed for action. It is ultimately about bringing autonomy, mastery and purpose into these core job dimensions.

For a start, these 5 dimensions can act as a guide to help yourself, or your team every time you think of improving engagement. Some of these aspects do get diluted, as we go into niche roles or super-speciality jobs but a little drive into the skill variety or feedback dimensions can go a long way into making a difference.

Now we know for a fact that engagement is not just about the activities organised. Park the activities part for now, we will come back to those. We need to figure out the individual to figure out the collective.

We start with level 0: The manager. Look at how your manager behaves – that is more or less a reflection of how you would be behaving with your team.

Now that work and home boundaries have blurred, response fatigue has set in. No one feels in control as they grapple to make sense of their entire world by looking at a 15 inch screen, sound emitting box.

Humans are designed to look for non-verbal cues, for little pieces of information hidden in the expressions, in the stride, in the security brought in by familiarity. That is where we look at how our managers behave – do they listen, do they speak, do they make efforts to tell us we are all in this together. To make special time for the informal conversations they would otherwise have had. This habit, would flow down from the top – it always does and somewhere we would all like our managers to be mindful of this. That is engagement level 0.

If you have ever wondered what you can do to feel more engaged with work, I now present the oldest trick in the book: Gallup has identified 12 foundational elements of employee engagement that predict high team performance. If you have ever filled out an employee engagement survey, chances are that it was probably just a jacked up version of these questions. These questions are excellent even for introspection. Spending time going through these questions, and answering them at a basic level can take us a long way in understanding why we are so disconnected from work sometimes.

So it is not just about the initiatives that the HR team tries to come up with but it is also about how individuals are able to predispose their environments in the right direction for meaningful engagement. Coming back to the organisation. If the organisation needs to be engaged as a whole, we figure out and document the kind of employee personas the organisation has. Do we know whether employees want more vouchers, or books, or yoga sessions?

Giving people what they exactly want – something meaningful, something they want to make time for. To teach them how to eat right, how to invest right, how to conduct better meetings, could turn out to be much better alternatives. At the end of the day, it all boils down to – autonomy, mastery and purpose.