How a Flexible Approach Ensures Your Employee Engagement Programme is Truly Engaging

How can a flexible approach ensure your employee engagement programme is truly engaging? Employers want well motivated, creative, learning and flexible employees; employees want a workplace that uses their skills, recognises them as human beings, enables them to succeed at work and have a great life. 

Is this really too difficult for employers to facilitate and employees to work with?

What is it that gets in the way of everyone being successful? It could be old thinking, being scared, being protectionist, having all the answers, speaking in categories or making assumptions about people.

Our view of the world is based on old paradigms where employees are made up of Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Generation X, the MTV generation and Millennials whose particular drives and wants are categorised and pigeon-holed. Where work lasts for at least a five year span, where technology makes the difference and the demographic profile of countries has the constant supply of replacements, new people and where later stage employees retire at a consistent age.

 
Employee engagement has been sold on the basis of increased happiness, increased productivity and increased profit and this is true for the organisations that get it right but getting it rights starts with the right thinking.

Six further reasons why engaging employees is so important:

1. Science is learning more about how we really react to change
2. People are changing due to their relationship with technology
3. Work is changing
4. The demographics are changing
5. Complexity in our world causes problems
6. Autonomy, fairness, purpose and mastery are the keys

 
In many of the studies and reports I have read, there is a tendency to put employee types and stages of career into nice little boxes which I guess is some of the old paradigm coming into play. We are in a V.U.C.A. world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). For employee engagement volatile means today’s requirements and not tomorrow’s; uncertain is a constant way of being; complex is a way of life, and ambiguous is the dilemma that we all live with.

 
The thinking and way of working promoted in Western Europe and the USA is the predominate factor in looking at employee engagement solutions. Perhaps what we need is a more all encompassing approach with better practice being adopted no matter where it originated.

By changing our terminology from employee engagement to engaging employees we promote the concept that it is an ongoing process and something to be constantly worked on.

Peter Mayes eBook Employee engagement: Getting the best from everyone, not just another survey explores where employee engagement has come from, what helps it to work, how to do it and where it is going.

Themes discussed in the book:

• What’s the difference between engagement and engaging employees?
• How can leaders be engaging and work for the benefit of everyone?
• What are the keys to success and the pitfalls to be avoided?

Flexibility in thinking is the key and we need to think creatively and follow through with a passion.

More interesting articles:

• The Secret to Organisational Success in 2017
• 5 Essential Communication Skills Everybody Needs
• Employee Appraisals: Are They Any Useful? (Spoiler: Yes.)

 
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