Building employee engagement
Building employee engagement
We are very grateful and proud of having so many in our network share their experience and perspectives. One of them is Johan Book, a writer, educator, speaker, and advisor. He is also co-founder of the consultancy firm HejEngagemang! working to bring awareness to the importance of employee engagement.
Below follows a summary of our talk with Johan Book
Founded as a lobbyist organisation, HejEngagemang! Was partly created partly in reaction to the poor prerequisites for employee engagement and motivation across businesses in our society and work life and partly to the explosive increase in work related mental illness.
The organisation that today is a traditional consultancy firm primarily works in Sweden and targets decision makers, politicians, and those in power. They are an advocate for a more engaged and healthier business society, and their objective is to put employee engagement and motivation on the agenda, both in Sweden and globally. Their current goal is to inspire and educate 100,000 people on the importance of employee engagement and enable them to “start doing”.
Today they are enlisted in assignments, offering talks on the subject, holding workshops as well as facilitating longer evidence-based leadership programmes.
“Higher employee engagement and motivation is not an end in itself - it is about all the positive effects that follow.”
What is employee engagement?
When talking about the subject it is useful to think of it as a two-sided coin. Commitment being the wider concept, representing what an employee feels for his or her employer, their mission, their partners, their clients, or their patients. Motivation is a narrower concept that helps explain the employees´ amount of drive and quality of drive when they are carrying out their assignments.
Considering the large number of tasks that we perform during a workday; we do need the right prerequisites to be able to maintain and create employee engagement and motivation. Only then will we be able to reach those high-level goals set, and only when doing it together with the team or the organisation as a whole.
Our three psychological needs
According to Johan Book, the Self-Determination Theory has one of the strongest levels of evidence and is widely recognised. It speaks about our three psychological needs that exist regardless of the context – and that cannot be regulated with an on-off button. The more these psychological needs are met, the better we feel and hence perform.
First need: Competence
We have a strong need to feel competent and tremble at the thought of being criticised. Since many become defensive when criticised, feedback containing criticism should always be constructive.
A feeling of competence is also built on employees experiencing that they have access to the right material, resources, mandates, and decision framing.
This is something many organisations need to understand. We need to create inclusive objectives and provide employees with both clear instructions and consistent encouragement along the way. The how comes first, the result second, Johan Book states.
Second need: Autonomy
The second psychological need is autonomy. Employees have a need to experience a high level of self-governance. They need to be reassured that everyone´s opinion counts and that everyone will get a say. The latter is more important when it comes to the how than the what. Even after the what has been defined, the employees need to be involved in the journey, in the very how itself.
Third need: Relatedness
Employees need to feel that they are part of a team, whether the workplace is digital or physical. They need to be part of a group of people who care about each other.
– How can we make employees feel good and perform better?
– By meeting their needs and providing them with the right prerequisites. It is really up to the leaders; they have a huge effect on employees. According to global research performed by Gallup, what leaders do or choose not to do in how they behave towards their employees can affects 80 percent of their employees engagement and motivation, states Johan Book.
Clear goals and follow-ups
We all need goals to meet along the way. It doesn´t have to be about money, it can also be about quality, index, volume, customer satisfaction or patient mortality. Regardless of the objective, the goal must be broken down to its smallest elements so that the team and its individuals can get an understanding of how they can contribute.
Caroline Lornudd, a licensed phycologist with a PhD in Medical Management from the Karolinska Institute, coined the term “Från fluff till beteendepuff” (loosely translated: `from fluff to a behavioural nudge´).
According to Caroline Lornudd, employees struggle to understand how they are supposed to contribute in for example monetary goals or improving quality or customer satisfaction. Her advice is to move from fluffy objectives far in the future to behavioural nudges in the now. Breaking down goals into steps, activities, and behaviours enables managers and employees to get on it right away.
– How often do you work with objectives? Once a year? In that case I recommend that you start working with goals as soon as something new is introduced. Encourage a dialogue with questions such as `How will we manage to get there? ´. If you only look at the outcome, you´ll miss out on an explanation of why what happened, happened. Asking this kind of questions provides you with an explanatory model from which you can continue with improvements, Johan Book suggests.
- What should we do now?
- Should we do more, do less or do something different?
- Is there something we should stop doing?
- Are we doing what we said we would to reach our objectives?
- What is going well and what isn´t?
- What isn´t going well and what will we do about it?
According to some researchers, our most important management theory is the Goal Setting Theory. It´s about the prerequisites we need to reach our goals. Meta-analyses of after-action reviews have shown that working with clear goals regarding the what and the how – and following up on it both teamwise and individually – increases our work achievement by an average of 25 percent. Albeit time consuming, it pays off in terms of improved work performance.
According to Johan Book, the how is the very core of all successful strategy implementations. It is what defines success and what we should focus on. 20 percent of the employees are motivated by wanting to do something you´ve decided needs to be done, and 80 percent of motivation comes from what happened when you actually do the things you´ve decided upon. The key is to follow-up on, provide feedback about and praise that which the organisation has decided is important. Do this successfully, and the organisation will reach its objectives and the employees will feel great.
One of the biggest challenges in the modern work life
In way too many workplaces, employees experience the goals as insufficient. Unclear instructions regarding what they are expected to achieve and do all day – never really knowing when you´ve done a good job – is one of the major stress factors in our work life. With more people working in jobs that they feel highly committed to and engaged by, the more crucial it is to provide them with the right prerequisites to also feel good and perform well.
RISE (The Research Institute of Sweden) investigated several Swedish organisations where both employees and leaders had experienced a high workload. The challenges were related to stress and high sick-leave numbers tied to mental health issues and symptoms of exhaustion. The problem was often symptomatic for the organisation, that in turn attempted to tackle the symptoms instead of dealing with the main problem.
– What was the main problem?
– Many employees experienced indistinctness regarding their job description and what they were expected to achieve. Many also experience a fragmentation of performance indicators and too many different or unclear goals. They might have achieved four out of five from their more clearly defined goals, but their experience was that there was simultaneously another fifteen more vague goals or performance indicators that they never managed to act on, Johan Book explains.
– What could be done in situations like these?
– Increasing the amount of achieved goals by creating the clearest possible instructions. Leaders and employees must dedicate time to setting clear goals and expectations, and ensuring encouragement and feedback along the way.
In the 1940s and 1950s, work performance was all about getting the job done well. Today it´s viewed upon as a total work performance. As we become more highly educated and our work tasks become more complex, and this in a world moving at a fast pace and with challenging goals to reach, the employeeship is key to success in today’s modern work life. Research shows that it isn´t just your work assignments and what you do at work that matters. Your social impact and how you treat your colleagues is just as important. According to Johan Book, within the Psychology of Human Work and Performance, the concept of Total Work Performance is based on:
Great performance at work.
A positive social impact. We all make an impression on others and affect the wellbeing and performance of our colleagues. One bad apple can spoil the barrel. Research shows that rude, mean, and unconscientious co-workers can drag down the entire team´s performance by 30–40 percent.
A nice and a caring co-worker. In today´s work life we´re expected to achieve goals together. There simply isn´t any room for egoistic behaviour.
From an organisational perspective, short-term structures and reward systems that encourage egoistic behaviour should be avoided. Instead, Johan Book emphasizes, we need to create structures that promote being fair to each other at work, doing good things together, and following up on what we´ve agreed on. A successful business culture is created together, with everyone contributing through how they behave.
“In the end, all that matters is how we behave and what we actually do – not what we think, are able to, want to, or plan for.”
Change management
As opposed to what we might think, people can actually change quite easily – if they believe it will benefit them and are involved and allowed to take responsibility for how the change should be implemented in their own role. Organisations who want their employees to enjoy the idea of change need to work on their implementation of behavioural criteria.
A clear and attractive direction.
Clear expectations of every employee´s contribution.
Activities to raise the motivation. The consequences of our actions affect our behaviour.
Experiencing progress requires breaking down larger objectives into steps, which is just the short-term reward system that our brains love. This for instance also explains why so many prefer to escape into the world of emails rather than work on strategies that might or might not bring fruit or become profitable within one or three years. Being able to tick off a few boxes today makes us feel capable.
The more we know about our short-term reward system and how our brain works, the easier it will be to lead people and encourage them to do things they find motivating, fun, and valuable.
– We do need both the leadership and the employeeship working in symbiosis and both taking ownership over the work situation. Employees are naturally responsible for their own motivation and achievements, but employers are responsible for providing a working environment that supports the employees´ engagement, motivation, wellbeing, and performance. The prerequisites needed for engagement and motivation don´t appear automatically, they must be implemented into the organisation, says Johan Book.
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