Elevating Employee Engagement
Elevating employee engagement to have a more productive and committed workforce is part of every leadership or management agenda.
But some people excel at it while others fall flat. Wishful thinking doesn’t make it happen and in this episode we’ll explore what does.
What You’ll Discover About Elevating Employee Engagement:
* How elevating employee engagement can improve your bottom line
* The three types of employee engagement
* The role of empathy and self-awareness in elevating employee engagement
* And much more
Host: Hanna Hasl-Kelchner
Hanna Hasl-Kelchner is an advocate for fairness in the workplace. She helps organizations gain clarity to make more informed decisions by reducing complex concepts into sensible, bite size pieces. Hanna accomplishes this as a business strategist and through her writing, speaking, consulting, and popular syndicated podcast, Business Confidential Now.
Hanna brings a unique perspective to the table, growing up in an entrepreneurial family and running a business before age 30 and blending it with decades practicing business law. Those experiences enabled her to successfully bridge the gap between the two disciplines during her career as a trusted advisor to influential decision makers ranging from startups to the S&P 500, Big Tobacco, and the White House.
She has also been on the faculty at two top-ranked MBA programs: The Duke University Fuqua School of Management and the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes, especially:
Part 1: Unveiling the Truth: Workplace Fairness Myths vs Reality
Part 2: The Key to Retaining Top Talent: A Fair Work Environment
Part 3: Why Low Employee Engagement is Not an Employee Problem
Part 4: 5 Toxic Leadership Trends that Kill High Employee Engagement
Part 5: How to Keep Positional Power From Being a Huge Achille’s Heel
Contact Hanna and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Her new book Seeking Fairness at Work on Amazon, in print, ebook and audio editions.
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Elevating Employee Engagement From Ordinary to Extraordinary
Elevating employee engagement to have a more productive and committed workforce is part of every leadership or management agenda. But some people excel at it, while others fall flat and wishful thinking doesn’t make it happen. And in this episode, we’re going to explore what does. Stay tuned!
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. And today I’m going to do a deep dive into the process of elevating employee engagement. I also have an announcement for you about the show that I’ll share with you at the end. So stay tuned.
Now about elevating employee engagement. Some leaders think that their presence and good intentions will inspire higher performance. That he smiles some detailed instructions and then turning them loose is all you need to do. They soon find out that it’s rarely enough, and then when they try a bunch of different things that don’t get the results they’re looking for, it’s easy to be disappointed and take that frustration out on employees in various ways.
Only now you’ve really got a hot mess. And that’s definitely not going to be elevating employee engagement and performance. It’s quite the opposite. It’s a downward spiral. So time out.
What does work and why should we care? Why isn’t employees simply doing their job enough? And what’s the big deal about elevating employee engagement?
Well, first of all, high employee engagement is very valuable and powerful. Research shows those with a highly engaged workforce experienced 2.6 times higher earnings per share, double the net income seven times greater five year total annual shareholder returns 19.2%. Higher growth in annual operating income, triple profit growth compared to competitors, double customer loyalty and employee productivity, and 87% less employee attrition.
They stick around and that 87% less attrition rate is huge. It means less time and money spent on recruiting and hiring replacements, less disruption to teams, and more opportunity for them to gel and work together as a cohesive, collaborative whole. That’s powerful and improved.
Employee retention rate is also especially valuable when we’re experiencing a war for talent, because it’s tough to find good employees and in certain business sectors, it can even be tough to find any employees, so keeping the ones you have and elevating employee engagement is a really smart thing to do.
Okay, but how? How can we do that?
Well, let’s start with what employee engagement means and the degree of disengagement you may be seeing in your workforce. There are lots of definitions for what employee engagement is, but they boil down to one thing that extra level of discretionary effort employees bring to the workforce.
It’s about professionalism. It’s about a spirit of enthusiasm. You can call it passion or commitment to their role and how what they do moves the organization forward that inspires their performance and high productivity. In other words, they make a difference. Okay, good. Now what about the types of employee engagement?
Now wait a minute. I know you might be thinking there’s different types of employee engagement. We just said it means discretionary effort and commitment and enthusiasm. You either have it or you don’t.
It’s easy to think that, but that’s really an oversimplification because discretionary effort is variable.
It’s changeable. It depends on the circumstances, and it can be a matter of degree. On the one hand, you may have employees who already are highly motivated and actively engaged. These are the folks who are already demonstrating leadership, enthusiasm, creativity, ambition and a strong work ethic. They take initiative. They exceed expectations. They’re resilient, adaptable to change. These are the high performers and what many business owners would call their best employee.
Some of you interested in elevating employee engagement may be thinking, “hey, these aren’t the people I need to worry about.” But yet in some ways, it is because you want to figure out what’s working and what motivates them. And then keep doing that to maintain a high level of enthusiasm and performance.
A new manager coming in, for example, interested in elevating employee engagement, who starts imposing very structured daily status meetings that smack of micromanagement can quickly pop the motivational balloon of a high performer who values their autonomy and hates being second guessed.
Another example of how high performers can get demotivated is by providing professional development opportunities, without giving them the corresponding opportunity to use what they’ve learned. One example would be an organization who pays for those expensive executive MBA programs, and then expects the employee to continue in their existing role, with no prospect of applying their newfound skills.
So for your existing high performers, elevating employee engagement means identifying what you need to keep doing to keep them motivated and not screw it up.
But not everybody is a high performer. There are those who are not as engaged. These are the people who are emotionally disconnected from their work. They keep their head down, do the minimum to keep their job. But for some reason, they’re reluctant to go above and beyond. That element of discretionary effort is missing. There’s no spark.
Another name for this phenomenon is “quiet quitting” because they haven’t turned in their resignation. They’re still meeting expectations and haven’t really done anything to be separated from their employment. The State of the Workplace polled by Gallup puts approximately 59% of workers into that category. These are your Steady Eddies. They’re complacent, but consistent and reliable. Some of them did do more in the past and have now kicked it into a lower gear.
Now, before you start messing with them, you need to ask yourself what additional performance you’re looking for from them. It may depend on the nature of the position.
Someone who did do more in the past but has now kicked it in a lower gear, has potential. The key is to find out why their enthusiasm has waned.
Is it due to a lack of recognition or silos within the organization, keeping them from getting the information or cooperation needed to move forward more effectively? Are they overwhelmed by workload or deadlines? Sometimes people become a victim of their own success and then they get buried in it.
The only way to find out what is demotivating these folks is by talking to them.
It’s also entirely possible that what’s weighing on them isn’t work related, but things happening in their personal life such as a divorce, health issues, behavioral problems with children, or even a home renovation. They can all be distracting and tax someone’s energy, leaving less available for the job. They’re still doing their job, but that extra piece is missing.
In situations like that, demonstrating empathy can help ease their burden while being insensitive to it can guarantee to increase their pressure and make their performance worse, because now they’ll feel like they’re in a fishbowl with every movement being watched and scrutinized.
So if elevating employee engagement is your goal, listen and tread carefully.
Besides the highly engaged and the Steady Eddies, we also have the people who are now actively disengaged or “loud quitting.” These are the folks who are still doing their jobs but plain miserable at work, and they let people know it. Gallup’s poll finds that approximately 18% of workers fall into that category. And in my experience, employees rarely start out this way. If they do, you need to take a serious look at the recruiting process.
Most employees start new jobs with high hopes about what the organization and the position represent. They’re never more engaged than on that first day at a new job. And it’s only after the new hires discover how things really work in the organization, those unwritten rules, those norms nobody wants to talk about, but that they accept in exchange for their paycheck and benefits, that their enthusiasm and employee engagement drops faster than a new car depreciates when leaving a dealership.
It’s those unwritten rules in the workplace that I write about in my book, Seeking Fairness at Work.
Elevating Employee engagement of the folks who are actively disengaged is challenging. It means the chance to catch them on the way down has been missed. After all, they didn’t start out this way. But the good news for elevating employee engagement is that even angry employees typically still care about their work and the organization. If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t be angry.
Yet tapping into that energy and turning it around into positive performance takes more than saying, “I don’t like your attitude.” Frankly, those are fighting words at this point. They’re not specific, and that makes them unhelpful. They also reflect a lack of awareness that this attitude is a response to something that’s demotivating. It didn’t materialize from nothing.
Identifying and addressing demotivators is key to elevating employee engagement. Perhaps it’s as simple as clarifying a misunderstanding, and sometimes it’s bigger than that. You’ll never know without having a conversation with the employee to find out why specific behaviors miss the mark.
Now, I appreciate that it’s not easy to have difficult conversations. It requires empathy, the ability to actively listen without judgment and self-awareness of how we’re being perceived. Because sometimes an immediate supervisor isn’t the right person to have those conversations, especially if the employee fears retaliation. Enlisting the help of a trusted intermediary can be illuminating in many ways.
So to summarize and recap, elevating employee engagement depends on what your starting point is. Some employees may only need a small amount of support or encouragement, while others are going to need more. And expecting a one size fits all solution to magically motivate everyone is truly wishful thinking.
It also depends on the relationship you have with your employees, so being able to constructively articulate what elevating employee engagement would specifically look like for them, and then being able to ask for it and provide the necessary support; that’s step one.
Now, the ability to ask for it depends on your workplace relationship with them. Yes, I know you’re the boss. You’re in charge. But what is the nature or tone of your relationship with them? How self-aware are you? Do you know whether they trust you? That you’ll be fair?
Fairness has an enormous impact on elevating employee engagement, because the human bias for loss aversion causes us to be protective and shield ourselves from perceived threats, such as unfairness. If you’re interested in raising your employees game instead of their defenses, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book, Seeking Fairness at Work Cracking the New Code of Employee Engagement, Retention, and Satisfaction. And if you’re feeling generous, consider getting a copy for a friend, family member, or a colleague.
Now, at the top of the show, I mentioned that I had an announcement for you. And that announcement is that Business Confidential Now is about to change.
After more than 300 episodes and interviewing hundreds of amazing guests. The program is being retooled. It will still focus on issues hiding in plain view that matter to the bottom line. But instead of the broad portfolio of sales, marketing, finance, operations, risk management, and so forth, it’s instead going to relaunch biweekly on Substack as Business Confidential Now TGIF Edition.
And that’s going to happen in February of 2025, with a focus on management and leadership, people issues, the things that make us say TGIF, thank God it’s Friday.
What this means for you is a few things. Number one, I’m going to take a little break to enjoy the holidays with my family and friends, and in the short term, it means there’s not going to be any new episodes for a while. Existing programs will continue to be available on your favorite podcast app, and even though the show is going to be on Substack, it will continue to be syndicated on Spotify and Apple, including Apple affiliates.
Why Substack? Because you’ll be able to listen to the audio and read the transcript as you do now, and you’ll also be able to leave comments and ask questions. We’ll be able to have discussions about the topic. How cool is that? We’ll be able to create a community, and I look forward to doing that with you.
Business Confidential Now is and always has been dedicated to identifying issues, hiding in plain view that matter to the bottom line.
When I started this podcast in 2016, the focus was on all the business topics that impact that bottom line leadership, marketing, finance, human resources, operations, so on, because business owners need to juggle them all and it’s a huge task. You can’t be good at everything. And that’s why I brought in some great experts to share their insights and their experience to make it easier.
However, over time, I’ve come to realize that while they’re all important, they pale in comparison to having the right people in the right place and keeping them inspired and motivated. The major employee demotivators are the subject of my book, Seeking Fairness at Work, along with strategies for neutralizing them.
I view Business Confidential Now TGIF as the next step in the journey to “ruthlessly create a wonderful place to work,” which, coincidentally, was the title of my very first episode in 2016.
I love the way the show has come full circle, and I am so grateful to you, my listeners. I hope you’ll join me for this next exciting chapter, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side.
So in the meantime, have a great rest of the day and rest of the year, as well as an even better and more prosperous tomorrow and New Year.
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