+44 (0)208 123 1958Are engaged employees born or made?
Archive
Tags
- business efficiency - 16 posts
- business innovation - 14 posts
- co-creation - 13 posts
- collaboration - 17 posts
- collective intelligence - 14 posts
- employee engagement - 18 posts
- high street - 1 posts
- idea generation - 9 posts
- ideas - 6 posts
- ideas lab - 3 posts
- participation - 6 posts
- portas - 1 posts
- town - 1 posts
- town centre - 1 posts
- wiki-solutions - 25 posts
Published at: 11/08/11 10:00:00
We all want more engaged employees.
But are engaged employees born or can we make them?
The value to an organisation of having engaged employees is not in dispute. What is surprising is that every organisation doesn’t have more of them. Which begs the question “Are engaged employees born rather than made?”
When recruiting for key roles you ensure that you look for evidence of candidates being engaged in their current jobs. Do they invest a lot of physical, mental and emotional energy in their work? Can they demonstrate new ways that they have contributed to their organisation’s success? Is there evidence that they go beyond what is typically expected or required? Can they show that they have overcome challenges that confront them along the way? You know the questions.
But not everyone you hire has all the characteristics of an engaged employee. What happens then? Do you take what you’ve got and be grateful for it, believing these to be traits that you are either born with or not. Or do you back your organisation to be able to instil what’s missing, believing engaged employees can be made?
Probably, like me you believe that engaged employees aren’t born that way. Why then are the numbers of truly engaged people in an organisation so low?
Here’s a thought for you to mull over. Employee Engagement is a personal thing. What one employee finds engaging about his work another will find unbearable. It’s not about the job – it’s about the individual. The reason levels of engaged employees across an organisation are low is because we focus too much on the job itself and not enough on the individual who is tasked with delivering it.
That’s not surprising because focusing on individuals is time consuming – there are just too many of them! To understand what engages them requires dialogue, you have to ask, to listen and workout together the best way to match the needs of the individual with the needs of the organisation.
The way that dialogue traditionally takes place is in a one on one interview. That in itself has its problems – the environment isn’t conducive to honest dialogue, you have to be in the same place at the same time, both parties usually hate doing it and the person conducting the interview is expected to know how to do it and know all the answers. The further down the hierarchy of an organisation you go the worse it gets. Let’s not even talk about how time consuming it is!
Then there is the ‘staff satisfaction’ survey. That too is limited because you only get individual answers to the questions you ask. You don’t get to find out what other people think about the answers you are getting. And it seems to take ages to set up, get responses and report back on.
But there is good news. That’s how it used to be – now there’s a better, faster, smarter way that removes all of the negatives.
For the last two years at Wiki-Solutions we have been developing and improving a process and methodology to effectively drive employee engagement across the whole organisation – We call it Wiki-LabsTM. We have identified the problems of employee engagement and created bespoke on-line environments tailored to clients’ specific requirements to addresses them. It gives employees a voice, as they share their views, ideas and feedback on topics that really matter to them and influence their job satisfaction.
The other good news is that it can be done inside three months from initial meeting to final report.
If you believe that engaged employees can be made and you need to improve all your key matrices then let us show you how. You are only three months away from making a difference.
Comments
There are no comments as yet, add one below!
