Engaging Your Employee in the Business

Want your employees to be completely involved in the success of your business?
Use the following information to create a work environment where involvement will flourish.

“Complete involvement is created when goals are clear and challenging, feedback is immediate and employees have the appropriate skills. The appropriate skills are essential because they allow the employee to take control of the activity.”*

“Flow isn’t limited to golf games and crossword puzzles. You can find flow at work if you have a job that interests and challenges you, and that gives you ample control over your daily assignments. Indeed, one recent study by two University of British Columbia researchers suggests that workers would be happy to forgo as much as a 20% raise if it meant a job with more variety or one that required more skill.**

So, if you want your employees to think and act like business partners rather than hired hands you’ll need to develop a strategy and tactics for providing them with the proper education, information and training. Done properly, training is longer an expense. It becomes an investment with an expected ROI.

* Flow – The psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
** Money Magazine – Can Money buy Happiness, August 2006

Reward Systems Create Complete Involvement

In his book "Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience," Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observes that complete involvement occurs when 4 elements are present:
1.) Rules that require learning
2.) Goals that are challenging and clear
3.) Feedback that is timely
4.) The appropriate skills to perform well

Well designed reward systems, that contain these 4 elements, help participants achieve a well-ordered state of mind that is highly enjoyable. As Maslow observed in his Hierarchy of Needs; people seek to actualize their potential...and reward systems provide the means to do so.

Meaningful Work: Element #3, Feedback, provides the opportunity for coaching and to develop skills that allow participants to address new and more difficult challenges.

If highly engaged employees are missing from your workplace perhaps you should look to the design of your reward systems.

New American Workplace

Excerpt from the book: The New American Workplace (Palgrave Macmillian) by James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III.

Executive Summary

"According to O'Toole and Lawler, as local retailers disappear from Main Street and old-line manufacturing companies downsize, they are being replaced by three emerging types of organizations:
1.) low-cost operators (like Wal-Mart),
2.) global competitor corporations (like Microsoft)
3.) high-involvement companies (like WL Gore).

These differ radically in terms of their business models, labor productivity and working conditions."

"Low-cost operators hire retirees, young workers and students, less-educated workers with few options, immigrants with limited English-language skills and those who are unable or unwilling to take jobs requiring more responsibility. Employees in these organizations are paid close to the minimum wage, receive few, if any, benefits, have no job security and are given only the amount of training needed to do jobs that have been designed to be simple and easy to learn."

"Global competitor organizations are enormous in terms of both size and geographic reach but they offer little stability for employees. Despite this, these organizations are often considered the "glamour companies" of the age, and employees in them enjoy the highest pay found in corporations anywhere in the world. Many are hired on a contractual basis, creating relationships that are more transactional than loyalty-based. "

"High-involvement companies can be found in many, if not most, industries and offer workers challenging and enriched jobs, a say in the management of their own tasks and a commitment to low turnover and few layoffs. They promote mainly from within, offering clearly defined career paths and extensive training and development opportunities. They are relatively egalitarian workplaces with few distinctions between managers and workers, both of whom typically share in stock ownership and profits. "

Our Comments
In our opinion, high involvement creates the most value.
Some of the best companies nurture high involvement by developing a culture of partnership.
1.) They use management practices that educate, enable, empower and engage their employees.
2.) They manage employee expectations by clearly communicating their roles, rights, responsibilities and rewards.
3.) They are dedicated to fulfilling customer expectations of commitment, cost, care and culture.