It’s time to unpack Employee Engagement.

By now the benefits of having engaged employees – teams who come to work with their whole self and genuinely care about doing a good job – should be nothing new to you. But just in case they are, here’s a taste:

Highly engaged employees take 41% fewer sick days. They have 21% higher productivity, and 17% higher sales. They make 17% fewer mistakes.  This is what the actual statistics say.  Companies with the majority of highly engaged employees earn on average twice the revenue of companies whose employees drag their feet on the way to work.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If your team is dragging their feet on their way to work, then dragging their feet while they perform their work, they are not getting as much done as they could.  They are not happy, and that unhappiness has a big impact on your results as a leader.

But employee engagement goes deeper than that – much deeper. In fact, part of what I am about to show you is that by creating a workplace that enables a high engagement in your staff, you are actually doing something more meaningful than increasing your profit (although that is definitely nice). You’re doing a public service, and improving the community around which you work. You’re bringing happiness by reducing the effects caused by many workplaces like depression, anxiety and fatigue.  By improving your people, you’re improving the community, and by improving the community you’re improving the broader world around you.

In creating a workplace that has engaged employees, you are bringing meaning to your people’s work. Given that we spend the majority of our time at work (apart from sleeping), you are now giving meaning to their life. In giving meaning to a person’s life, you are meeting more of their basic and enhanced needs that, according to Maslow, bring happiness. In bringing happiness you are reducing things like depression. You’re reducing illness, as happy people have been proven to get sick less often (41% less often, actually).

But even more than that, you are becoming a leader that is loved by the people around you, because you have brought meaning to their life.

We can also dispel the myth that people naturally don’t enjoy their jobs.  A peer-reviewed study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that when a job met the right conditions, people actually found their greatest happiness in their work.  Not watching TV.  Not reading a book.  Working.  And given we spend more time at work than anywhere else, wouldn’t it be great to know what those conditions for great happiness are?  It’s all placed simply in the Engagement model below.

Employee engagement also isn’t just about the money – although increasing engagement in your teams will also increase the productivity and profit you produce. It’s about being a great leader. It’s about being that person who makes a difference in another person’s life.

Money by itself has already been proven not to be a motivator of your staff – by multiple studies in multiple different ways.

Award winning researcher Daniel Kahneman, along with Angus Deaton found that emotional wellbeing of employees rose in line with money, but only when it was up to $75,000 a year.  For money above $75,000, any increase in pay didn’t increase their happiness.  Other studies have found similar results – with one analysing 1.7 million worker responses in Gallup studies and finding $75,000 was the limit for emotional wellbeing also.  Even when adjusting for inflation, the limit is relatively low.

Everybody thinks money is what motivates others (and even ourselves) but it’s not.  Once the basics are covered, with the right foundation in place we feel comfortable and safe, and our long term happiness doesn’t move that much.

So if it’s not money that truly motivates us, what is it?  And what are the real causes behind engaged staff and disengaged or unhappy staff?

Well, the best place to start is stress.  And it’s a good place to start because it covers both the reasons why people are disengaged, and why they are engaged.  You see, as any psychologist will tell you, there are two types of stress: positive and negative stress – otherwise known as eustress and distress.  Eustress occurs when the gap between what we have and what we want is slightly pushed, but not overwhelmed. When we feel as though we have control over the outcomes and can stretch ourselves to reach that goal, but not too far.  Distress, on the other hand, happens when we are pushed to achieve something but we feel that we have no control over the actions or outcomes.  Distress commonly leads to anxiety, withdrawal, depression, and (you guessed it) disengagement in your work.

So now we know – there are a few basics that every human craves, but once they are covered we need to look deeper into what truly makes us happy and engaged in our work.

With that in mind, I bring you the Employee Engagement framework.  These three simple steps will help you become the leader that is loved by all, who brings meaning to people’s lives.

Broadly, they are:

1. Clarity
2. Checking in, and
3. Continuous improvement

And oh boy – just wait until you see the research behind this seemingly simple framework.  But first, a better explanation:

Clarity is making sure your team knows the outcomes you want, and the exact steps to get there.  It means creating outcomes collaboratively with your team, along with the plan to get there.  It means matching those outcomes to their skill-set and giving it a higher meaning.

Checking in means checking in with your team members regularly to make sure the tasks are on track, and that the tasks themselves are the right ones to be done. It means focusing on their strengths, and helping them remove “blockers” – things blocking their path to the outcome you collaboratively decided on. It is giving (and receiving) feedback personally, close to the time and place it happens. It is adjusting the flight plan and letting them fly the plane.

Continuous Improvement is letting your team work on the work – where improving the task itself is the goal, which helps the task become the motivation. It is focusing on continuously reducing the “steps” to make your outcomes easier to get. And it is acknowledging and improving the broader skill-set they are involved in, whether it is Sales, Project Management, Data Analysis, Leadership, Engineering, Writing, Coding, or hundreds more, and taking steps to improve every week.

The reasons behind this framework are huge.  Don’t be fooled by how simple they are.  They involve deep, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, a higher purpose and meaning for your team, and a natural flow or meditative state of happiness where your team have a higher chance of being motivated by the task itself (not just the money).

So while that’s a broad overview, and while they may seem simple (and even contrived), there is a mountain of research performed over more than fifty years by dozens of different professors, researchers and business leaders across dozens of different countries, and they all point to the same thing.  And here’s the catch: while their research was good, those professors didn’t quite put it all together in a way that would truly benefit business and technology leaders.

This framework is different to others you might see because the people who did the research were academics with an interest in motivation.  I am a business leader with an interest in research and results.  I’ve experienced dozens of menial and meaningful jobs personally along with their environments, and researched hundreds more.  I’m a person who works in the very environment I study, and continues to study each year with a focus on happiness, engagement, leadership and operational excellence.

That’s why I’ve picked up on things that the others have missed.

Here’s the other thing.  Business leaders, team leaders, strategic leaders all have one thing in common – they’re too busy doing the work in their actual jobs to really study what motivates their team – let alone create a simple step by step framework of exactly what to do to improve their employee engagement.  That’s why you see time and time again companies (both large and small) doing an employee engagement survey, getting terrible results, and not changing anything over the next year.  It’s because they aren’t clear on the exact steps it takes to gain deep intrinsic motivation, and it takes work to set up – especially if they don’t have the right framework behind it.

So with that in mind, let’s delve deeper into the three steps: Clarity, Checking in, and Continuous Improvement.

Step 1: Clarity

Let me ask you a question.  What happens in your job when you (or your people) are not clear on what their job is?  Or what their goals are?  Or what they need to do, explicitly, to reach “success”?

Let me tell you the first scenario: They end up doing all sorts of crap that doesn’t matter.

That supervisor from the other department tells them they should do something, and they have no clarity so they say yes.  Or worse, any request for help is met with a “That’s not my job”, because no one really knows what their job is.  Things don’t get done.  The wrong things get done.  Or if they do know vaguely what they’re supposed to aim for, the actual steps to get there have not been laid out clearly so they flounder around trying to do what you want, but end up making mistakes, taking forever or missing the mark because there is no clarity of how to get there.

And amongst this confusion, can you guess what happens?  With each tiny failure their self-esteem goes down.  They start to dread coming to work.  They start to blame others, put others down and gossip.  And they stop wanting to do a good job.

And that, folks, is why Employee Engagement matters.

Now, if “lack of clarity” is the devil when it comes to employee engagement, what does clarity look like?

It looks like this:

1. Setting clear outcomes, collaboratively with your team.

Why would we set clear outcomes, collaboratively with our teams?  For very deep reasons.  Research from Stanford (by the man who invented SWOT analysis no less, Albert Humphrey) found that there was a gap of 35% between what executives could have achieved, and what they did achieve in a given year.  That gap came down to (primarily) executives who did not set clear outcomes for their teams collaboratively.

It was also found that leaders setting goals and outcomes collaboratively with their team had staff who were far more engaged in their work.  The team saw their leader as a partner working towards the same things, instead of an authoritarian or blocker to doing a good job.

Why else is this important?  Well the Gallup Business Journal found in their study of millions of employees over many decades, that nearly 50% of employees aren’t actually clear on what’s expected of them at work.  And as we’ve seen, that clarity can have a big impact not only on their stress and wellbeing, but on your outcomes and profitability as a business.  They saw it too, with 34% more disengaged employees among those who weren’t clear on what was expected of them.

2. Making sure the steps to get there are clear.

Work can be complex, and it’s not always a straight line.  Even in a relatively simple job, if someone has to figure it out themselves it not only takes a lot longer, but also adds to the distress and frustration of your team. And guess what stress and frustration result in?  That’s right, low Employee Engagement.

Some business leaders go to the next step and only hire people who already have a process in their mind – a method or steps for getting the outcome they want – for example the photographer who has done that kind of photo shoot, the business analyst who has worked with that kind of database, the engineer who has worked on that kind of bridge and so on.  That is fine, but it can also backfire when the person you hire for their skills doesn’t fit the culture of your team.  It’s not the only way.  By making the broader skill the focus of their improvement (as you will soon see) you can hire for culture fit and often get a better long term outcome.

Either way, by working collaboratively on the steps to get the result, broadly to begin with then in detail over time, you are more likely to have a successful team who does things faster, better, and with less frustration that can lead to disengagement.

3. Matching those outcomes and steps to your team’s strengths.

In multiple studies over many decades, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people’s work was more likely to “flow” when there was an even match between a person’s skills and the task they had to perform. In fact it was when the task was just ever so slightly above their skill level.  Too high, of course, and stress kicks in.  But too low, and they become bored.

The Gallup Business Journal also found that focusing on your team member’s strengths was one of the main keys to high engagement.  By doing so, a leader is matching a person’s skills to the task, and reducing the frustration that leads to disengagement.

4. Give the outcomes (and steps) a higher meaning.

A study by the University of Texas found that people were more likely to do what you wanted (and do a better job of it) when the task was attached to a higher meaning than themselves. For our purposes, this can mean a few things:

The customer or community impact we have and the company brand we are associated with.  It can also mean meeting the person’s personal goals, or raising their status in the company.  If a task is also part of improving their overall skillset – for example increasing their broader sales skills, coding skills, project management skills, risk or quality assurance skills – then that not only brings them a higher meaning but it brings more safety in their career or if their job disappears.  And when a person feels safe, their mind is free to solve more complex tasks for you and your team.

5. Agreeing collaboratively on timeframes.

Lastly, it is important to give tasks a timeframe, and agree on that time collaboratively with your team. The reason for collaboration is that it doesn’t feel like a forced task (even though it may be), it feels more like a partnership.  The reason for setting a timeframe is also because of Parkinson’s Law – a natural personal inclination that makes work expand to fit the time allotted to it (in other words, if you give them a year, they will take a year and the task will become more complicated as a result).

Clarity’s part in Happiness, the Flow state, Mastery, and Purpose

There are many reasons why clarity is important, and they all relate to the deep intrinsic type of motivation that engages staff for years and brings them real happiness.

In other words, you can give someone a $10,000 bonus, and within a few weeks (or even days, or hours for some people) they will be right back to the same happiness level they were before the extra money.  It doesn’t move the needle – not truly.

Instead, can you think of a time when you enjoyed doing something so much that time just seemed to fly and you felt as though you could do it for hours?  Maybe you looked up and saw that it was 2am, or maybe you didn’t want to go to bed because you would rather be doing that thing you loved.

What I’ve described is the state of “Flow”, and you can engineer it in your work.

But for flow to occur, you first need three things: clarity of what the task is and the outcome you want, immediate feedback, and a close match of skills to the task at hand (not too hard to make it stressful, but not too easy to make it boring).  After all, can you imagine trying to fully engage in a task, but not knowing what it was?

Video games have these aspects to them, and are enjoyed by millions of people as a way to relax, and get in this “flow state”.  It is relaxing because there is a clear goal, the steps to get there are often clear (i.e. the rules of the game), it gives immediate feedback (you know your score and whether you’re winning or not), and the game often moves in levels that ensure your skills are matched to the task.

Having clarity of the task and the outcome also helps bring the other key motivator: mastery of a task. How often have you seen people work at something seemingly mundane and loving it, because they are trying to perfect it?  Carving a piece of wood, working on a piece of code – what seems boring can be addictive when you are working towards mastery of the task or skill.  Viral videos on YouTube show this frequently – one recently found students polishing a scrunched up ball of aluminium foil until it was a shiny solid metal ball.  Why?  To have that shiny output – the mastery of the task.

Lastly, it is impossible to have a deep purpose in your life if you don’t know what you’re aiming for.  A deeper purpose comes when you have clarity on where you are headed, why you are headed there, and have at least a rudimentary idea of how to get there.  Clarity is the beginning of that purpose, and our other steps will compound on its effects.

Step 2: Checking In

Bob started a new job recently, and his manager told him he needed to increase the output of his code (this could be anything – making more sales, taking more calls, or finishing more risk assessments.  Every task fits here), so Bob gets to work and hustles every day.  But Bob never sees the result of his code – he never sees whether it needs fixing or refactoring after he’s done it and someone tests it. So Bob never really knows whether he is doing a good job or not. Without feedback on his method – in the form of results, what needed fixing, coaching from a mentor or leader and advice – Bob will never know whether he is doing the right things to be the best coder or developer he can be.

Many organisations and teams are like Bob’s scenario, where very little meaningful feedback available, and it is often given crudely (so not accepted well) or given many weeks after the action has happened leaving no way to improve quickly.

Checking in means catching up with your team members at least once a week as a leader, and focusing on their strengths.  It means removing blockers they encounter to getting that outcome – whether it is coaching or advice on what to do or speaking with the right level of management in another department.  It means continuing to ensure the task is matched to their skill-set (or just above it) and making their progress visible.

Let’s look at each one in turn:

1. Catch up at least once a week

A study from the Gallup Business Journal showed employees engagement increased by up to 27% when their manager checked in with them at least once a week.  Comparatively, employees who were “ignored” by their leader, who didn’t meet, speak or check in at least weekly had an engagement rate of 0.5% (half a percent).

When we check in with our staff, we’re adjusting the flight plan and letting them fly the plane.

A study from the University of Texas shows us a few things we can do when we check in, among them to show empathy when things are hard, and genuinely care about their wellbeing.  This has quite a few benefits – for example there are many things which can interrupt the psychological wellbeing of your employees, causing their work to suffer.  It might be something at home, something at work, or something outside of their control.  When they know they are safe in your team their psychological needs can move upwards to something else – like achievement.

2. Focus on strengths to ensure tasks are matched (or slightly above) their skills

Both the Gallup Business Journal and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in separate studies involving hundreds of thousands of people over many decades have found that matching your team member’s strengths to the tasks you need to get done had a great effect on their engagement.

When there is equilibrium (or a slight difficultly only) in a person’s skill and the task they are performing, it is more likely they will slip into the flow state while doing it.

So check in with your staff, see how they are going.  If they are struggling, give them clear steps – a strategy, plan, or work with them on the things to do.  If they are bored, give them harder tasks, or if they are stressed give them easier tasks and help them master that task before moving upward.

3. Remove blockers

Removing blockers with your team member can mean a few different things. First, it could simply be giving clarity and coaching them on the next steps or giving them names of people to contact or work with.

It could also mean meeting with people in leadership (at your level or above) to help smooth the path for something truly blocked.  Maybe another department is not assisting when they should or not performing well enough, and those conversations need to be had.

I other words, you’re removing blockers or giving them the skills to remove blockers themselves.  Either way, helping to shape the path to the outcome you both want helps reduce your team’s distress (coming from a feeling of lack of control) and helps get to that outcome.

4. Make feedback immediate and use the Ham Sandwich

I remember one company where customer service operators would take calls from customers every day and they would be judged on certain things they had to say during a call.  Someone from a Quality Assurance team (far removed from the work) would listen in to the call remotely and check things off on a tick sheet, and the feedback would be given a full month after the call was taken.

A full month later!  Improvement in those tasks never happened, because team members had all but forgotten about the call and the reasons they did what they did.  Having no power to immediately correct their actions and being judged on a historical version of themselves had a severe impact on their engagement (and results).

What is the moral of this story?  Make sure any feedback is given as close in place and time to when it happens, so it is fresh and they can adjust immediately.

Giving feedback can also be hard – it can open raw wounds and it can sometimes feel like a personal attack.  Research has also shown that any perceived negative feedback has zero effect on their improvement, because it doesn’t match up with people’s version of themselves (most people never see themselves as “bad” and when asked most will rate themselves as above average). So use the “Ham Sandwich” approach. This means the bread, ham, then bread again, where the bread is something they’ve done well, and the ham is feedback on how to improve.

That means giving them a compliment and finding something to praise (their progress or work so far), then showing them what was wrong and giving clear steps to the way you want (giving clarity), and finishing with something they are doing well again.  This will ensure feedback has an impact, isn’t personal, and is focused on getting the outcomes you collaboratively agreed to.

5. Make progress visible

Teresa Amabile wanted to find out what the biggest motivators of people were.  But when her team asked employees, they got the standard answers – “More money”, “Better benefits”, or “More flexible time” and so on. The only trouble was, when they implemented those things they didn’t see an uplift in engagement or productivity at all.

So she tried a different approach.  She gave people journals and asked them to write in them periodically throughout the day.  After a few months she had collected information on what people’s inner-most thoughts were, and when they were feeling their best (or worst).  She found that progress was the biggest motivator – a sense of progress in their work.

When people felt stuck they were also de-motivated.  But when they made breakthroughs and work was flowing freely they described feeling on top of the world.  In many cases a sense of progress kept teams working longer and harder than they usually would – all to get that next breakthrough.

So make progress visible with your teams.  Put it on the wall, on your homepage, or somewhere you can see it.  Measure something meaningful with them too – from the outputs you want (customers served, processes complete) to their progress in improving their broader skill-set (e.g. an analyst, sales, management or testing certification).

This Is Why Agile Works, and Has Become So Popular

Many of you reading will have heard of the Agile way of working – a method of working that began in technology and has branched out into everyday business practice.  It was created to help products get delivered to customer specifications faster and with better quality.

For those who haven’t heard of it, the three primary methods of Agile are:

1. Kanban: Where tasks are placed on a board that everyone can see (whether physical or virtual), and are moved through columns like “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done” so everyone can clearly see their progress. A “burndown chart” shows a line graph of the cumulative tasks as they are checked off towards all being complete.
2. Scrum: Where teams meet for a 15 minute daily “stand-up” to update the team on their tasks, move them on the Kanban board and remove any blockers.
3. Extreme Programming: Involving a few practices such as pair programming where one person codes and the other shoulder checks their code.

Notice anything familiar?  It clearly involves lots of visible progress, checking in as a team, and removing blockers.

This method was created without necessarily knowing all the research behind why those things are powerful.  Nevertheless, the Agile methodology has taken off as a result.

Checking In’s part in Happiness, Flow, Autonomy and Mastery

Now we’ve seen that employees who feel “ignored” have very low levels of engagement.  No one wants to be ignored, and the research shows we can use this, by checking in each week or more, to improve engagement in our teams.

We’ve also seen that immediate feedback is a key factor in producing the “flow state”, when we lose ourselves in the task and the task itself becomes the goal.

We’ve seen how giving people tasks that are closely matched (or just above) their skill-set can encourage this flow and “eustress” (positive stress) as opposed to “distress”, where people feel as though they have no control.

Speaking of control, by checking in and coaching or removing blockers for your team, they know you are on their side, feel emotional support and have an increased feeling of control in their work.

There is one more step to increasing the deep intrinsic motivation that makes our teams happy and productive at work: Continuous improvement, of the task, of themselves, and of the product they create.

Step 3: Continuous Improvement

We’ve covered a lot on the road to true employee engagement so far.  And you can see how the simple framework of providing clarity, checking in, and now continuous improvement might seem narrow, but runs very deep.

Continuous improvement for your team is the final piece of the puzzle, and it is important because it helps your team find their reward in the task itself, instead of the task being separate from the reward.  For example in the majority of jobs, people go to work for the money.  Separately to this, however, they will be completing projects for themselves at home or with friends.  They will be living for the weekend to get their fix of meaningful things like checking in with friends, making progress on their house or yard, or performing hobbies that give them meaning.

In this step we take the deep intrinsic motivators of making progress, working towards mastery of something and reducing stress and blockers over time to make it easier, to ensure that the motivation is the task (not just the money).

Continuous improvement then can mean a few things.  We can problem solve ways to improve the process with your team each week, by reducing the steps to getting the outcomes you need or want.  This helps make the task itself the goal over time.

We can focus on improving the broader skillset with each individual: for example working towards improving (or even being the best) at Sales, Project Management, Leadership, Engineering, Coding, or any number of other broader skillsets related to their job.   This makes the skill the goal.

Let’s look at each one in turn:

1. Focus on improving the work itself, every week

This could be an hour meeting with your team, coming up with ideas.  Or a more structured approach as I prefer, looking for ways to reduce the steps to getting the outcomes you or your customers want, error-proofing the process, and using visual cues to help show progress.

Dozens of different studies have shown that even when people want to do a good job, it is the environment that really determines their success or not.  For example, teens in one study were found to be far more likely to binge drink and drive under the influence when they lived within close proximity to a liquor store.  It was always there, it was easier to access, and they drank more as a result.

Another study found that simply by reducing the plate size – to a salad plate instead of a dinner plate – participants ate less and lost weight.  In the same way, the environment you put your team in affects how well they do. By focusing on making it easier to get the outcomes you collaborated on, you are reducing their frustration, increasing their flow and happiness, and increasing the engagement in your team.

Additionally, when your team knows it’s OK (and encouraged) to think in terms of improving the work itself, something magical happens.  First, you start getting all sorts of ideas from them that they had bottled up inside or never thought to mention.  After all, they are doing these tasks every day – they see the outcomes, they know the blockers, and they already have ideas on how to make it all easier.  Secondly, they start thinking of the work itself as something to master – not just as a task to be done, but a task they have input into and control over.

Are you starting to see the patterns?  We already mentioned the difference between positive and negative stress, with a key component being a feeling of control.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found the “flow state” occurred when his participants knew what to do and had control over the outcome.  Autonomy occurs when people feel they have control over the outcome. And improving the work leads to mastery.  It all points in the same direction, and that direction is a deep, meaningful engagement in one’s work.

2. Focus on improving the broader skillset

In the same way that improving the work makes us happier with the work and makes the focus on “Mastery” as opposed to just getting through the day, focusing on the broader skill-set makes the focus about mastery too.

When someone is focused on mastering a skill, their short term intentions are fewer – they start thinking long term. Money becomes less of an object (once past a certain point, as we saw in the introduction).  Satisfaction in the task itself goes up.

And there are thousands of “broader skillsets” that one can master – almost as many as there are jobs out there.  For example:

They could be aiming to be the best project manager, change manager, risk manager, or just plain old manager by studying leadership.  They could be a better coder, or tester, or customer service officer, or electrician, plumber, accountant, lawyer, tradesperson or builder.  They could be a better marketer, a better analyst, a better photographer.  And all of these things have trade certifications, diplomas, regular meeting groups and communities (whether online or in your city), degrees, books or blogs to learn from and improve.

There is another benefit of improving the skill set, and that is your people feel more safety in their jobs.  Especially if the industry you are in is shrinking, ensuring your team are skilled and could easily find another role will help meet their basic needs of safety and wellbeing.

3. Connect With Those Who Benefit From The Work

A study by Adam Grant of Wharton found that lifeguards who were given stories of people whose lives had been saved and benefited from the work lifeguards do saw their output from normal work hours increase by 40%.  Other lifeguards who were simply told the benefits of being a lifeguard (think perks, pay or bonuses in the corporate world), made no improvement at all, and kept working at the same pace.

The people who benefit from your work also have ideas on what they want, what they need, and what could be done better.  Your employees can improve both their tasks and their broader skills by listening to this feedback.

Now of course in some cases you can’t connect your staff to customers every day, or even every week.  Maybe they are back office staff, or maybe their role is a long way from the people who actually benefit from your work.  If that is the case, you can still show testimonies or stories, customer comments, or find a way to get them to check in with the beneficiaries once a month (instead of daily or weekly).

Brushing Your Teeth versus Winning a Marathon

If you remember from the introduction, we mentioned that the employee engagement and motivation factors of clarity, checking in and continuous improvement will work better if the basics of human needs are covered first.

And you remember Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, don’t you?  Maslow discovered a way of looking at motivation, where each person tries to meet their needs in order of importance.  First, we look for food, water, shelter – the very basics.  Then we look for personal, emotional and financial well-being, and we saw how the study on basic levels of income matched up with Maslow’s theory perfectly.  Once those are taken care of, our team can look to social belonging, raising their self-esteem and finding meaning and self-actualisation.

This also matches up with Frederick Herzberg’s theory that there are certain “hygiene factors” that need to be met before teams can focus on doing great work.  Things like job security, salary, fringe benefits, work conditions etc all make a difference, but once those hygiene factors are met teams can move on to “motivating factors”, which Herzberg says is challenging work, recognition for one’s achievement, responsibility, the opportunity to do something meaningful, involvement in decision making, and a sense of importance to an organization.

Do you notice how even though the research is coming from multiple different people, countries and timeframes it always points to the same things?  And all of these things are met with the engagement model of Clarity, Checking In and Continuous Improvement.

Now You Have a Framework, Use It to Win

The reason CEOs all over the world do employee engagement surveys, get terrible or average results, and then do nothing about it until next year is not because they are incompetent.  It’s certainly not because they are lazy, although many people who poke fun at them would like to think so.  After all, they got to where they are by using their wit, skill, knowledge and tenacity and it is not an easy road.

No, the reason companies do nothing is because they don’t have a clear, step by step path that shows the results they will get. At least, they haven’t had one until now.  Using the Engagement Model of Clarity, Checking In, and Continuous Improvement is the way forward for your teams.

It is designed to be scalable so any leader can take it and start using it immediately – you don’t have to make huge changes in your business to get some incredible results.  By ensuring that anyone who leads a team uses these three steps you will notice a huge difference in the engagement of their teams as it starts to rise. A person’s direct leader is often the lens that they see the business through too, so by improving the leaders you are improving the way your company is seen.

So if you take anything away from this let it be this: you can do it.

You can do it because it is a simple, scalable framework you can give to any leader to improve the engagement in your company, and win.

I’ll talk to you soon,

David McLachlan

See the research sources for this manifesto on Employee Engagement here.