employee engagement – Page 4 – The Consulting Artist

Discretionary Effort is Theft

The holy grail of employee engagement. Get better at it and what do you get? More discretionary effort from your staff. Get better and better at employee engagement and you get more and more discretionary effort.

Work Life Balance

Except…the last time I looked we only have 24 hours in any one day, and we can only function productively and meaningfully for so long. So for employees to give more of that discretionary effort to their employer, well that means they have less to give to themselves, their family and their friends. and that doesn’t sound much like a balance to me.

Unpaid Overtime

How much is enough? Workers in the UK already work among the longest hours in Europe. And according to the TUC, around five million UK workers contribute over seven hours extra a week without pay. They estimate that to be worth upwards of £4,500 ($7,200) a year in extra pay.

If employers are really serious about engaging, then more consideration should be applied to binning bonuses and distributing some of that pot and the savings that come from no longer having to frig the figures, sorry I mean administer the bonus scheme, as an increase in pay. And perhaps overlay an across the company flat rate profit share scheme to distribute part of the extra benefit gained from better work?

Acceptable Discretionary Effort

So if there are only 24 hours in a day, and we’re already working long hours and making unpaid contributions already, is there a case for acceptable discretionary effort? Perhaps there is. Let’s say your team has a major project to deliver within a certain time, and things are tight. If you work for an employer who already treats you right then perhaps being asked for a burst of extra effort to get something specific done is fine, so long as a) we can be clear on how much extra we think is needed and b) for how long. If discretionary effort becomes any more of an expectation that that, then it’s not discretionary effort, it’s theft.

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Career Development a Key to Employee Engagement

I read lots of stuff about how vital career development is in the employee engagement mix. I also read a lot of articles stating that people are in the main, not very happy with the career development on offer to them, our own research in partnership with Careergro earlier this year seems to back this up:

What is career development?

BlessingWhite say, ‘Most employees do not define career goals by traditional notions of advancement. That’s good news for employers facing workforce reductions and shifting priorities. When individual employees define what career success means to them, they’re better positioned to increase satisfaction and performance in their current jobs or make the lateral moves required by organizational redeployment of talent.’ Their research indicates nearly half of all employees are looking for interesting or meaningful work in their next career move.

Today’s post is an ask for help. If you have the time, I’d really appreciate your feedback on the following questions please.

How would you define career development?

What is the most valuable piece of career development advice you’ve received so far?

What is the worst piece of career development advice you’ve received so far?

Thanks in advance – I look forward to hearing from you, and in the meantime, here’s The Clash with their take on the matter:

What is Employee Engagement? Ask Archie!

In my Engage for Success launch blog post on Monday about defining employee engagement and measuring employee engagement, I also mentioned we heard from Archie Norman, currently chairman at ITV. Archie (I will refer to him by his first name, I hope he doesn’t mind) was invited to talk to us about what employee engagement means to him, and after David MacLeod introduced Archie as the Godfather of employee engagement, I was keen to hear what he had to say. Here are a few things that caught my attention:

Work is becoming voluntary

Archie said that young people are more and more deciding whether they want to work, where they want to work and for whom. The last two I get, but I felt his first assertion was somewhat removed from reality. Most people want and indeed probably need to work, and I couldn’t help wondering what kind of response his statement would get from the roughly one million young people currently unemployed in the UK?

Knowledge workers

Archie said that businesses are becoming more focused on knowledge, skills and the service people deliver, less about costs. I certainly think there is a strong connection between the employee service and customer service experience, and if you can get the employee piece right, the customer service flows more easily and meaningfully. And I think most people would agree that improving knowledge and skills is vital, yet the ‘training’ budget is often one of the first to be hit in tough times. As more and more big companies are run by bean counters, I’m not sure I see the cost challenge going away any time soon.

Customer service

Archie said that ‘we go to places to shop that have humanity’, and he also said that ‘self esteem defines service’. These are powerful observations and I was pleased to hear talk of things more emotional, and less functional.

Engagement is not a survey

“Engagement is not an HR activity, although HR should be responsible for measuring it,” Archie said. “And it’s not a survey. Engagement is about leadership living the values.” Unsurprisingly I disagree with anyone being responsible for measuring engagement and I do think that if engagement is about meaning, purpose and shared values, it should flow everywhere in and out of the business, through leadership and way beyond.

Hierarchy is dead

‘I haven’t had an office since I worked at McKinsey’, Archie told us. “Hierarchy is dead,” he said. “Offices and all that have to go. Job titles are meaningless.” He encouraged total transparency and said leaders should reward staff for speaking up and telling them what should be changed about the company.

I’m curious to know how Archie felt when after finishing his talk we were shown a video of some 40 CEOs all giving their blessing to employee engagement. Most, if not all, were older, white men, doubtless very well paid indeed. The fact that this collection of the great and good lacked any obvious diversity was disheartening enough, and the assertion that somehow the Engage for Success movement might succeed thanks to the exhortations of the 40 leaves me feeling Hierarchy is still very much alive.

You can read another angle on Archie’s talk courtesy of HR Magazine here and Graham Frost has covered the event more broadly here too. And as always, I’d love to hear your views, particularly on the death or otherwise, of hierarchy.

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