Over the past three weeks I have looked at disengagement within the organisation, what happens when individuals and organisations disengage, why it happens and finally today I look at ways to re-engage people and businesses proactively.
Some of the steps may seem obvious but in my experience, often everything falls down on the fundamentals and if your steps are uneven, too steep or just misaligned, then the impact can be enormous. On individuals and the organisation.
1. Get Individual
The reasons for disengagement are usually individual, whether relating to work or private life and most people find it difficult to successfully divide their life. It is not organisations, nor even teams that create engagement and performance in the business but individuals. Remember as a manager and a leader, to leave a space for people to be individual within their work and to develop and follow their passion. Once an individual is engaging their passion then they are in what Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘Flow-Zone’.
2. Work out Where You Are & Where They Are
As an organisation, you need to know where you are before you know where to go, and the same can be said for individuals. When you get congruence between an organisation’s goals and an individual’s goals, then engagement will follow.
Remember that negative behaviours, such as disengement, can be unconscious or automatic – so bring them into conscious reality and discuss in an adult way with the person concerned. Psychometric Assessments allow organisations and people to know where they are, the baseline to work from, so that their goals can highlight the work that needs to be done to achieve behavioural change.
Human Factor Resilience Health-Check, a new assessment offered by Cognitions enables individuals within an organisation to rate the ‘human-factor dynamic’ in ten critical areas of the organisation and to identify healthy areas and relevant gaps in Human Factor Resilience.
3. Be Curious & Discover the Reasons
As an individual or as an organisation, be curious. Ask yourself why things happen and encourage regular critical thinking and self-reflection – and not only when things go wrong. Reflect proactively. The skill of Critical Thinking is an invaluable asset to the Engagement of people and self-awareness and awareness of others and the impact of unresourceful behaviours inevitably follow on from this.
Look for the reasons behind disengagement; when did it start, what may have caused it, how disengaged? And then look to do more of what works, as best practice. It may sound simple and obvious but it often doesn’t happen – talk to your people, your staff and your colleagues. And definitely talk to yourself – self awareness is paramount.
4. Be Flexible – One Size does not Fit All
Just having one strategy for engagement of employees, whether it is remuneration, bonuses, commission structures or other types of benefits, remember that one size does not fit all. In recent research about the motivational drivers in Generations X & Y, then very different drivers were identified for both groups.
Even though it may go against organisational policy, Flexibility is King. Be Creative & Innovative – look at new ways of doing things such as with working hours, holidays and motivational rewards. For example, trust your employees to work from home – research has shown that employees tend to give more time to work when they work from home compared with the many distractions in the workplace. Just be willing to be flexible.
5. This is a Partnership – Shared Responsibility
Engagement within a business or an organisation is a partnership and with equal responsibilities for each – Engagement is a Two-Way Street. Despite the pressures of the current climate, don’t look for blame but look for shared responsibility and how the situation can be resolved quickly and effectively.
And talk! So often, disengaged individuals and organisation develop strange ways of one-dimensional or two-dimensional communication – via emails, instant messaging, texts and worse still through social media. If there is a difficult conversation to be had, have it – face to-face.
In Transactional Analysis we call this communicating from an ‘Adult’ position rather than from Parent or Child. Misunderstandings happen and escalate when we communicate from unresourceful positions.
6. Come the Revolution – What Goes around Comes Around
Remember that people learn engagement styles from the people around them. Surrounded by engaging leaders and managers, the likelihood is that a person will be engaging in their own right, demonstrate engaging behaviours and model engagement to others. Engaging organisations and people are contagious and it spreads fast. Remember too that behaviours can be modelled up in an organisation as well as down. People forget that they can have an influence on their managers as well as on their peers and junior staff.
7. Have a Plan – Be Proactive rather than Reactive
Nothing is resolved without knowing where you are going and a goal without a date is simply a dream. Starting off with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey puts it, is one of the habits of highly effective people and even if the plan changes along the way, it is a critical aspect of Engagement.
And there is also a need for an organisation to be aware of the pitfalls of disengagement, that it can happen and frequently does and rather than deal with it in with a negative and reactive approach, to deal with it in a pro-active and positive way. Plan to avoid disengagement and Plan for Engagement.
To understand more about Engagement in your Staff and Organisation using the new Human Factor Resilience Health-Check then contact John Aspden at Cognitions on +44 20 8123 7049 or direct on +44 7837 650312
Cognitions. The Power of Partnership
© Cognitions 2011