Engaged – but at this rate it won't be for long
By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum
In light of our forthcoming Employee Engagement Conference 2008 in Sydney, we're running an interesting poll on the Internal Comms Hub. The question is, "How engaged are your employees?"
This may seem like a fairly standard question, but the problem of engagement/disengagement seems to stem from lots of things and, while individual factors aren't always significant and may seem peripheral, it's what they add up to. For example, exasperation from inept managers, frustration from a version of Lotus Notes that's 8 years old, poor support and understaffing, nasty coffee in the canteen, no access to online banking despite working 16 hours a day at a bank (with no time for a lunch hour either), needlessly rigid working hours, endless meetings that result in very little...
These problems and many more sap the energy and productivity of employees but are easily dismissed as part and parcel of working life and costly to consider resolving (so get over it). And yet, dealing with small problems can go a long way to making work life easier and keeping people focused on their jobs, which in turn is better for business.
"People are engaged," says Ivana Crestani, one of our workshop leaders for the Sydney event. "It's just that they can't keep working at the rate they are and they're at the risk of burnout. The engagement levels in many companies are completely unsustainable."
Ivana's company has done a lot of research into this area, including a foundation-building survey of over 4,000 full-time employees from building, construction, agribusiness, shared services and information technology businesses.
"Ultimately," she adds, "organisations must ensure that they’re engaging a sustainable, healthy and productive workforce. For some organisations, this means getting back to basics and investing in their people, moving from treating employees as a cost to providing value."
"Employee wellbeing" might be a laughable term in some companies. It may even conjure up images of a distinctly un-work-like workplace. But, when you look at it from this perspective, the careful nurturing of employees is a long-term business necessity. After all, we've all heard the metaphor of the farmer who reduces the food of his animals to the bare minimum and then, as they die, lament that he nearly had them surviving on nothing.
So, how engaged are your organisation's employees?
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