“Keeping people is a huge challenge at our organization. New entrants come in so pumped up & ready to work then within a space of about three months the story changes…We’ve tried to no avail to turn around the situation. Our next experiment is to do a certain percentage of profit sharing across the system. We just want employees to do more, to feel like they have a stake in the business.”
The above statement was shared by a participant at a recent training. Thing is, this assertion isn’t new. It’s the same in many organizations where employers grapple with employees who move away to other jobs sometimes with the most ridiculous and insignificant margins on their pay! Often times employers feel like doing things differently considering that Performance Management can easily come across as a carrot and stick approach.
While it’s impossible to stop all types of attrition within our businesses (especially those induced by national factors aka Canada effect), the real question to ask is “All things being equal why should an employee choose to work for one employer opposed to another?”
Indeed achieving employee engagement can seem like an herculean, unattainable goal. In trying to achieve it feels as though the goal post keeps shifting!
To my mind and with respect to employee engagement it’s important to ‘sweat the small stuff.’ By small stuff I’m referring to intangibles. Those elements that we easily, conveniently overlook because they’re not as tangible as pay.
While all that businesses do in order to raise pay, provide health benefits, encouraging socializing and the like are all great to do, I believe businesses miss the mark when they disregard other salient factors leading to disconnects among their workforce.
First off, there’s a whole lot of conversation going on today about ‘Candidate Experience.’ and rightly so. A candidate can become very irritated with their very first encounter with your business say at point of recruitment. They attempt to make sense of it; they try to navigate the negative emotions which accompany the experience. They struggle with coming to terms with how disorganized the recruitment process was; how disrespectful and unprofessional the HR and Unit leads came across during the entire process. But they eventually take the job because they need it so badly.
But guess what? They’re already disconnected even before they join the organization! All the employer’s effort at preaching an ‘Employee Engagement’ message afterwards is therefore seen as a hoax. The new employee knows it’s just a gimmick to make employees feel like they’re valued just so the management can ‘milk them dry!’ And here lies the power of intangibles! – a recruitment process that was carelessly managed prepares the ground for a potentially productive employee to become less than that or worse – an exact opposite.
Emotions, though widely discountenanced in business is actually a powerful factor where employee productivity is concerned.
Research show that both negative and positive emotions have direct impact on human productivity. When feeling positive emotions, people are able to broaden their perspectives and expand their options ultimately producing more. Negative emotions do the exact opposite! Imagine the potential cumulative impact of achieving either of this phenomenon within an enterprise.
There are three elements within a business which the employee could feel connected to or otherwise. 1. The Organisation itself 2. The Manager 3. The Job.
In summary every organization will benefit immensely by doing everything in their power to raise the quotient of positive emotions achievable across these elements. This will be for the overall good of the entire enterprise.
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