Sustaining Workforce Engagement

How to Ensure Your Employees Are Healthy, Happy, and Productive

Lonnie Wilson

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429808791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This book explains the importance of employee engagement – It defines what it is, what it will do for your business, and how you can achieve it as well as sustain it. It covers the history of employee engagement along with why employees were formerly much more engaged with their work and company than they are currently.

The author explains, in depth, why employees want to be engaged but are not. He discusses the emotional, psychological and social forces that make engagement, the state that people naturally and continually attempt to achieve. Furthermore, he makes a compelling case that engagement is not only natural, but, when achieved, it also creates a happy and productive workforce where employees are not only emotionally but also physically more healthy.

You will learn exactly how a business can not only cause this engagement to surface, but also how to sustain it. He presents a complete discussion of the "basics and beyond" that are required to support a system of engagement. He explains engagement as a system and how to interpret and utilize a system diagram using the "high leverage points" to further fuel and sustain engagement.

The book then provides a critical and comprehensive series of discussions of precisely what management must do to unlock the power of a fully engaged workforce. In addition to learning how to measure engagement, there are detailed discussions, along with two confirming case studies, of how to improve your levels of engagement.

Essentially, the author examines engagement from top to bottom integrating the theories of the scholars, with the experiences of the practitioners. In so doing he can explain, in simple terms, how engagement can be achieved and why people try so hard to create a fully engaged workforce with both the best of intentions and a true passion to achieve it … yet fall short.

There is a simple reason -- achieving engagement is all about management and the many changes that must be made, and that raises the crucial question: Is management both willing and able to recognize, accept, and execute the needed paradigm shifts? The stark reality is that the changes that must first occur are in the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the management team. This book gives you a path to follow that may achieve just that. And the remaining question for the senior management is: What are you prepared to do?

The mystery of achieving engagement is known, the science is known, the answers are not technically complicated, and now it comes down to a simple choice: Are you or are you not willing to change? And with that choice, there are resultant consequences. It is no more complicated than that.

Engagement Background and Theory

I

In this section, we discuss the basics of engagement and other human resource programs designed to activate the workforce and why these have failed to be successful cultural changing initiatives. We will discuss what the current state of engagement is overall and in manufacturing in particular. Next, we delve deeply into the psychology and sociology of engagement, from both a scholarly and a practical perspective. We explore, in depth, the weaknesses of these models and what must be added to make these models effective in the world of business. Finally, we end this section with a simple, practical definition of engagement.

Part I contains five chapters:

Chapter 1 Background Information

Chapter 2 History and Current State

Chapter 3 Engagement Theory – A Top-Down Perspective

Chapter 4 Issues with The Theory

Chapter 5 Toward a Practical Definition

Chapter 1

Background Information

Aim of this Chapter … is to discuss some background concepts necessary to our study of engagement. First, we will discuss the history of some human resource programs and why they were not effective. Next, we will briefly discuss the concept of business cultures and their relationship to employee engagement as well as the relationship between employee engagement to Toyota’s concept of respect for people. We’ll then explore how you should go about making the change and why you don’t want to have an “engagement program, project or initiative” but rather a cultural change. Finally, we will wrap up the chapter with three technical topics: a quantification of the business benefits of a fully engaged workforce; three common business strategies that must be avoided if you wish to attain a fully engaged workforce; and the data used in this book.

Some history of human resource improvement programs

There have been many efforts by businesses to achieve more with their available human capital. Numerous well-intended efforts have been started. They include:

■ empowerment efforts

■ improving the quality of work life activities

■ teams – with many adjectives added such as: self-directed; logical-work-group; and even matrix teams

■ the motivation and discipline movement

■ the “I don’t care about the method, just get me the results” approach

■ the effort to incentivize them

■ the accountability movement

■ the need to reengineer and reinvent …

■ and numerous others

Yet these came, and for the most part … they went.

Some created an initial positive effect; others had no effect. But a surprisingly large number of these initiatives, when officially placed in their casket, left the workplace worse off than if they had never shown up on the scene in the first place. They all sounded good. Most start very well with lots of folderol and initial energy, raised expectations and often some early gains. But finally, in the normal flow of doing business, and normally very quickly, those initial high hopes and desires get crushed by the reality of just doing business. Those hoping to get motivated, incentivized or teamed up, were left back at the starting line – but now with the bitter taste of disappointment and unmet promises still fresh in their mouth. Like Tom Sawyer said, “I had to sneak up to the attic and cuss for ten minutes just to get the taste back in my mouth”, and they do too.

Why did these efforts die??

Many of these initiatives died of their own weight as they were a bad idea to begin with. This includes the “incentivizing” and the “I don’t care about the method, just get me the results” approach; those were two really bad ideas. First, people do not need incentivizing; they come to work all ready to go. As for the “anything goes” or what I call the “Al Davis approach”, “Just win, baby”, which was his mantra with the Oakland Raiders of old, will work for any short-term gain, but the long-term issues are another story altogether. Some died because they were a decent idea but were poorly executed. All team efforts, along with quality circles, fall into this category. Others died because, even though they were basically good ideas, they did not mesh well with the existing and frequently dysfunctional culture. The empowerment and quality of work life initiatives were examples of this failure mode.

Leadership and management

Clearly, the subject of this book is engagement. But soon enough you will learn of the absolutely critical nature of “the actions of the top few”, the management team. In Part II, we will discuss this in depth, but while discussing engagement we will speak of leading and managing, so let me briefly define them here. Managers fulfill two roles. They must provide both leadership and management skills to make the business a success. The key distinction is this. Managers use management skills when they are dealing with the P&L statement or the plant metrics; managers exhibit leadership skills when they get the people to follow them as they jointly develop and execute plans.

I have heard it summarized two ways:

■ We manage things, but we lead people, or …

■ Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things the right way

Both are accurate, if not complete, but they can be used to clarify your thoughts until we cover this absolutely critical topic in Part II

The bottom line to the failures

Either quickly or in the fullness of time, the vast majority of these hoped-for “silver bullets” failed. The good and the bad ideas alike failed – for two common reasons. First, they were almost universally treated as if one could “just bolt them on” to their existing way of doing things. Second, and more importantly, these initiatives were treated as “employee” efforts and as such the management made little or no change in the way they, themselves, behaved.

The “bolt on” fallacy

Implicit in using the “bolt this thing on” approach are two underlying assumptions, which were:

■ they could start these efforts and they would not have an impact on any other part of the operating system, and

■ that the existing management system was fundamentally sound.

This penchant for managers to try to “bolt on” these changes to their existing systems failed because these assumptions were not only incorrect, they were often grossly incorrect.

The changes were “independent” and did not affect anything else First, any change to a complicated business culture will have multiple effects. Any change to one element will have an effect on many other elements, and the effects can be both synergistic and antagonistic. Furthermore, except in the very short term, these effects are very hard to predict. For example, change the pay structure or the reporting structure and other things such as motivation and morale change; in addition, you may have an unexpected spike in attrition. So if you try to just “bolt on this new thing” you are ignoring the concept of interactions, which is a reality in all systems as well as a reality in all cultures.

The soundness of the underlying system Second, if you are going to bolt on something, like a new hasp to your garden door, you will not do that if the wood in the garden door is rotten or decaying. However, managers by the droves are more than willing to attempt to “bolt on” this teamwork effort (e.g.), or this engagement effort (e.g.) to their existing business and management systems without so much as a review of what is currently in place. Quite frankly, the management norm is to presume the existing system is perfect and needs no change … which is NEVER the case. What normally happens is that when you make the changes to implement employee engagement (e.g.), which is a large cultural change, it will highlight weaknesses in other elements of the existing system. For example, in trying to bolt on something like employee engagement, it is very common to find that you need to make substantial changes to your systems of training, planning and supervision.

The big reason … They are not “just employee” change efforts

The more important reason these initiatives failed was that they were treated as “employee” efforts and as such the management made little or no change in the way they themselves behaved. Somehow, the management felt that the only people who needed to change were the rank and file. I have run across a variety of “reasons” given by senior managers that they don’t need to change … and all are wrong in the most fundamental way (see www.qc-ep.com, White Papers, “Lean Leader or Cheerleader” and “No Change Occurs Until Management Changes…Really!!!”).

I have found it to be axiomatic that the degree to which the rest of an organization is willing to change is dependent upon the willingness of the management to change. When there is no change in the behaviors of the management team, there will be no planned change in the day-to-day routines of the business. It is a litmus test.

Why are these problems so common?? The impacts of trying “to bolt this effort onto” your existing system with little or no change by the management team are so powerful that if they are not properly addressed they will render the rest of the transformation useless. You will find that as we address how to improve engagement, these two issues are addressed repeatedly in this text. Do not underestimate them. As Dr. Deming taught us, a full 94% of the problems in a business – and employee engagement is no different – are system related; and hence lie squarely at the feet of management (Deming, 1982).

But why?? The common thread to these failures is that the management team proceeded as if these large human resource efforts were some construction project or as if they were installing “a new thing” like a new piece of planning software. However, these broad-reaching human resource efforts have large intellectual and especially emotional impacts on the entire workforce. The management is not installing “a new thing”; rather, they are literally changing the way they do a broad range of activities, and when we change “the way we do things around here”, we change the culture. The common problem was that the management team grossly underestimated the size of the cultural change that is required and ignored the impact of these large human resource efforts on the existing culture.

The root cause of this problem is that the management team, top to bottom, was sufficiently unaware of their existing culture – and even sometimes sufficiently unaware of the concepts of culture itself – to proceed without any cultural review whatsoever. In so doing – while this approach may be convenient, and it certainly is easy – they ignored the large emotional and intellectual impacts that these human resource efforts have on the entire workforce. They ignored the cultural implications and forged ahead as if they were doing some minor tweaks around the edges … when in reality, they were changing “just about everyone and just about everything we do around here”.

To ignore the culture, to ignore everyone and everything they do – when put in those terms, it seems incomprehensible. Except that is what often happens and it explains the repeated and consistent failures of these human resource efforts, despite the input of significant effort.

So we are going to avoid those pitfalls; we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author
• Preface
• PART I ENGAGEMENT BACKGROUND AND THEORY
• PART II MANAGEMENT BASICS
• PART III THE SIX ECLECTIC MANAGEMENT SKILLS
• PART IV THE ROLE OF MOTIVATION IN ENGAGEMENT
• PART V CREATING A FULLY ENGAGED WORKFORCE
• PART VI IMPROVING ENGAGEMENT
• Appendix A: The Six Questions of Continuous Improvement
• Appendix B: Article on Engagement
• Appendix C: The Toyota Way, 2001: Toyota Motor Corporation, April 2001
• Appendix D: Key Paradigms Discussed
• Appendix E: The Five Tests of Management Commitment
• Appendix F: HK planning simplified
• Bibliography
• Index