What Most HR Directors Overlook – Even the Engagement Pros

Posted by on Sep 30, 2011 in Blog | 6 comments

What Most HR Directors Overlook – Even the Engagement Pros
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If employee engagement isn’t really improving for us and our organisation, when will it?

Are we still trying to solve engagement by doing more of the wrong things?

From our recent ‘Obstacles to Engagement’ Research Study we identified six key challenges to effective employee engagement. You may recognise some of them:

1. Ineffective Solutions

“The engagement initiatives we have put in place aren’t getting the results we had hoped for. In fact the more we give our employees the more it seems to create a whinge entitlement culture”

2. Employee Clarity

“Most employees know what they don’t want; fewer know what really motivates and engages them.  If employees don’t know what motivates them – how am I, as their people leader, going to have any chance?”

3. Skills, Tools & Resources

“Our people leaders/managers aren’t psychologists, counsellors & coaches. They don’t have the confidence, skills or tools to have a meaningful discussion (Stay Interview) with their employees around motivation and engagement”

4. Time Poor

“We pay our people. That should motivate them. Also I’m too busy…engagement isn’t part of my KPI’s … anyway it’s a human resources issue isn’t it?”

5. Inaction

“We are not sure what the ideal engagement solutions are for our organisation. We keep procrastinating and our indecision means we haven’t really committed to any engagement initiatives yet. Yikes – it’s almost time to do our next staff engagement survey!”

6. Buy In

“We haven’t been able to get full support for employee engagement from the most important areas of the business yet”

Source: LifebyDesign.com.au “Obstacles to Engagement” Research Study 2011

Solution = Employee Activated Engagement (EAE)

The solution to all of the above engagement challenges is Employee Activated Engagement (EAE): The self-responsibility approach to engagement.

More on EAE in future posts. But in the meantime, lets get the conversation going – so please leave a reply and your thoughts below.

 

 

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  • Karen

    Virtually every obstacle mentioned is stopping our engagement strategy. How do we best overcome each of them?

    • Ian

      Hi Karen,

      The Employee Activated Engagement(EAE) approach – helping employees to take responsibility for their own motivation is the key. Blending face-to-face programs with a solution like http://www.meCentral.com (http://www NULL.meCentral NULL.com) has been successful for many organisations.

      It helps solve and deals nicely with ineffective solutions/inaction, employee clarity, the time poor, buy in and gives everyone at every level systems and tools – all in one hit!

      Hope this helps – let us know if you want to discuss further :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Muhammad-Zafar/100002556613156 Muhammad Zafar

    Vola! This is super amazing and I am really excited to test EAE. I believe it will make the employees more self responsible which will improve their performance.

  • http://www.lifebydesign.com.au/ Life by Design

    Employees need clarity on what really motivates and
    engages them. The problem is that most employees know what they don’t want;
    fewer know what really does motivate them. If employees don’t know,
    organisations can’t truly engage them and then the employees default driver can
    become “give me more money!”

  • James

    Liz, unfortunately the answer to such a question would be “Less workload”, “More pay” and “Better workplace environment”. All great ideals for having very happy employees, but not always possible with the new imperative set by executives.

    What is this new imperative? Reduce resources but make sure they maintain or increase the amount of output. During turbulent times, the traditional management strategy – especially for publicly traded companies – applied to HR is ‘Cut Costs’. The strategy fed to line managers often plays out like ‘Maintain workload. This is business as usual with less resources. Make it work’.

  • http://www.lifebydesign.com.au/ Life by Design

    Be aware of the sleeping giant #2 Employee Clarity.  If employees don’t really know what they want, organisations can’t engage them.