Guidelines to Help You Sustain Employee Engagement

Guidelines to Help You Sustain Employee Engagement

by Thomas O. Davenport | Talent Management

 

Spiking engagement is one thing; sustaining it is another. As performance pressure mounts, workplace relationships fray, patience with customers suffers and even energized people can become frustrated and burned out. In the highest-performing organizations, managers pay attention not only to what increases engagement, but also to what sustains it.

 

Towers Watson research has identified two factors required to sustain employee engagement through challenging periods:

 

a) A workplace climate that promotes employees' overall health, also known as well-being.

 

b) A work environment that ensures employee energy will produce results, also known as performance support.

 

Fostering Well-Being

 

Well-being comprises three related elements:

 

1. Physical health:

Overall bodily wellness, encompassing general health as well as specific medical conditions. Physical health manifests itself in factors such as low absenteeism and high levels of employee stamina and energy on the job.

 

2. Psychological health:

Optimism, confidence and perceptions of satisfaction and accomplishment, which balance factors such as stress, anxiety and feelings of frustration. Psychologically healthy people express happiness, a positive attitude and enthusiasm for their work.

 

3. Social health:

Quality of relationships with supervisor and colleagues. People who experience high social health say that they get along well with fellow employees, feel treated with respect and are able to balance the demands of both their work and personal lives.

 

A study done by a team of Swedish doctors and academics produced a specific list of manager behaviors that contribute to employee well-being in a dramatic way - by reducing ischemic heart disease. The study team identified four manager behaviors strongly associated with lower incidence of ischemic heart disorder:

 

a) Providing the information people need to do their work.

 

b) Effectively pushing through and carrying out changes.

 

c) Explaining goals and subgoals for work so that people understand what it means for their particular parts of the task.

 

d) Ensuring that employees have sufficient power to perform their responsibilities.

 

"Psychosocial stress has been shown to increase the progression of coronary atherosclerosis. One could speculate that a present and active manager, providing structure, information and support, counteracts destructive processes in work groups, thereby promoting regenerative rather than stress-related physiological processes in employees," the researchers have said.

 

Ensuring Performance Support

 

Performance support is the presence of factors in the work environment that contribute to employee productivity and success. These factors include proper training, well-functioning equipment and a clear fit between roles and skills.

 

Performance support implies both adding and removing. Managers must ensure that the work environment is rich with productivity-enhancing elements. This means ensuring ample amounts of factors such as training and up-to-date tools.

 

But managers must also lessen or eliminate work environment elements that hinder productivity, such as unclear reporting relationships, ambiguous role definitions and frustrating internal politics.

 

Does manager and organizational success at delivering these factors make a difference to enterprise performance?

 

In a study of 50 global companies, moving from relatively low levels of engagement to high engagement can add more than four percentage points to operating margin, Towers Watson research shows. Companies that further bolster and sustain engagement by enhancing well-being and performance support add another 13 points to their operating margins.

 

Effective managers release this latent performance through their day-to-day actions to support employee health and ensure that employees' investment of energy produces results. The highest-performing organizations bring this responsibility to life by ensuring that supervisors' and managers' jobs are structured to give them the time, tools and competencies required to create engagement-rich work environments. They don't expect managers simply to find time in an already overburdened schedule to pay attention to employee well-being and make sure people have the support they need to perform well - these aren't afterthoughts to the managers' job; instead, they are central components of the role, elements that should appear on the top lines of the manager's position description.

 

 

[About the Author: Thomas O. Davenport is co-author of Manager Redefined: The Competitive Advantage in the Middle of Your Organization.]