Truth 5. Employee engagement isn’t for sissies
It’s easy to underestimate the full impact of employee engagement and how it’s going to challenge you, not only as you implement it but also as it helps you carry your company’s values into the future. In its simplest definition, you could say that employee engagement is about getting the absolute best effort from your employees by making them feel good about the work they do. What could be so bad (or hard) about that?
Employee engagement is not a namby-pamby trip to Candyland—just another employee commitment fad. Trivialize employee engagement and you’re going to be playing the Hell edition of Twister. And that won’t be any fun at all. Not one little bit.
If you take employee engagement seriously, you take on a no halfway, no turning-back high adventure of finding out just how far your personal and organizational courage will take you. Here’s why you had better be really sure you want to do this:
Trivialize employee engagement, and you’re going to be playing the Hell edition of Twister.
• Once you’re in, there’s no getting out. If you’re going to do engagement right, you must go public with your commitments to align your company’s actions to its stated set of values and mission. Once you go public, you’re stuck with your promise. If you ever withdrew that commitment, you would break valuable bonds of trust, and in the process rip out a lot of heart and talent. Recovery would be long and painful—if you could achieve it at all.
• You have to be able to take a good hard look at yourself. You can make a list of ideal values for your company, your department, and your own personal life as idly as leafing through an upmarket catalog. Everything looks so delightful and so within reach. But fantasy and real world collide when you tally the potential costs of every must-have. You have to decide what you can’t live without and what is a luxury. Which values do you prize over all other values? Which would you quickly abandon when times got tough? Know the difference between the two sets, get real with yourself, and base your commitments on your limitations.
Which values do you prize over all other values?
• You have to be prepared to choose passion over profit. There will be times when the most expedient response to an issue is the one that will make you money. If that choice violates the engagement bond that you’ve established with your organization, you will start paying for that so-called profitable choice almost instantaneously as your actively disengaged employees rise up—or go underground, which could be even worse.
• You can’t finesse or ignore the numbers. Companies that are serious about improving their culture will invest in high-quality, well-designed employee surveys. There will be numbers that relate directly to the way you manage your direct reports. When the scores come back, you have to face them head on and then let your people know exactly how you intend to improve your performance to serve them better.
• You must be willing to cut loose the star players. You will face some agonizing decisions as you move forward with your engagement initiative. One of those choices may be what to do with the bullies who are also the ones bringing in the big numbers. The star players who are the top performers in every one aspect of their jobs—except for the fact that they make life miserable for others—are more expensive than you can know. They cost the company in reputation as a best employer, and they chase away employees who know that they can do just as well elsewhere and be happier. They may even stain the company’s external reputation by the way they treat customers and vendors. Getting rid of these people will be painful (especially regarding your department’s performance), but keeping them will be even more painful.
• You must be able to keep the faith over the din of the skeptics. You’ve just given your starting lineup the boot. Your numbers are dipping (temporarily). Your quarterly report requires some explaining. The stockholders are becoming disenchanted with this whole engagement thing. You think, “If I hear the word values one more time, I’m going to quit.” That’s when you have to keep the faith and be willing to stand toe to toe with the skeptics (especially the one in the mirror) and remind them that no one said that engagement was going to be easy.