Has the pendulum swung too far?

At a time where there’s a talent shortage and organisations are trying to manage the ‘great resignation’ and the ‘quietly quitting’, there is a growing need for organisations to look for ways to better engage their people.

Engaged employees are highly involved in, and enthusiastic about, their work and workplace. They are psychologically invested, drive high performance and innovation, and move the organisation forward. Being ‘engaged’ means our people are more likely to tap into that discretionary effort. That is, the level of effort they could give - if they wanted to – over and above the bare technical minimums of their role. As employers, who doesn’t want that?!

But in striving for an engaged workforce, have we handed over all of the responsibility of achieving this to organisations and not left enough with their people? Have we swung the pendulum too far away from personal responsibility?

Here’s the problem as I see it.

When an organisation openly drives engagement initiatives, they run the risk of reinforcing a perception that employee engagement is the sole responsibility of the organisation rather than a shared and symbiotic effort, requiring the employee to work with their employer, taking a proactive role in a process from which they stand to benefit themselves. A degree of personal responsibility is required for the outcome, is it not?

As an example, it’s not uncommon for organisations to run engagement surveys only to find that employees are waiting for the organisation to make sweeping changes to slightly bump up the engagement score from last year’s result.

The net result of this is the development of a culture where employees can sit back and ask the question – ‘How are you going to better engage me?’.

My response to that question is always ‘What are you going to do to engage yourself’?

In my experience, to be engaged in anything in life as an individual, including as an employee, it means fulfilling our own unique set of personal values. Given we all have different values – shaped by our different life experiences – to be fully engaged, we all need to take some personal responsibility in promoting our own values.

Can you imagine an organisation where it’s trying to promote each person’s unique set of personal values? Fragmented, misaligned, a lack of cohesion…the list could go on!

This is why at Synergy Health we promote Healthy Habit number 10, ‘Engage Yourself’.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying here. I genuinely don’t believe this is a case of employees not wanting to be engaged. Rather, it is more a case of our people not knowing how to be engaged, or the steps they can take (in - and outside of the workplace) to enhance their engagement and fulfilment in life.

In a time where ‘Business as Usual’ is ‘Busyness as Usual’, and many people are experiencing change fatigue, employees are rarely able to step back and ask themselves ‘What can I do to be more engaged?’.

Or perhaps a bit more specifically:

‘How can I strategically design my week to better promote my personal values’?

Without clarity on our personal values, we are more likely to feel frustrated when those values are being compromised in some way, without ever really understanding why. This can lead individuals to assign blame to often unrelated factors that have nothing to do with what is actually creating the frustration.

Our leaders can spend a lot of their time and energy trying to manage ‘issues’ (often at the expense of their personal engagement) that will never resolve the true source of an employee’s frustration, let alone improve engagement levels.

To drive engagement, organisations must continue to focus on realistic workloads, clear performance indicators, and a strong vision and values, while ensuring sufficient support mechanisms are in place.

In my experience, however, an absolutely fundamental aspect of an organisation’s engagement strategy must be in educating our people on the importance of them taking personal responsibility in understanding and promoting their personal values.

We can and should support them, providing a roadmap on how best they can build this engagement based upon the type of person they are. But for the sake of our overall engagement levels, the employee absolutely must own that.

Our engagement levels depend on it. If you want to learn how your employees can take more responsibility for their own engagement, contact us for a chat.