Can your leaders go from governance to guidance?

By Sona Hathi, Assistant Editor, Melcrum

According to Wayne Clarke, managing partner of the Best Companies Partnership and John Smythe, partner and deputy chairman of Engage Group, they'll certainly have to if they want a truly engaged workforce.

Both Wayne and John spoke at an IABC event last night on employee engagement: the drivers and the importance of leadership. The Best Companies Partnership is the company behind the Sunday Times Best Companies to work for, so with this insight, Wayne had some pretty interesting points. Leaders are seeing employees demotivated and unproductive at work, yet many still don't get the need for engaged workers. If you need to sell it, try mentioning them that analysis of the best companies list shows that those who invested in the organizations on the list made more money or lost less less money than those who invested in companies not on the list. It's a powerful finding, while money isn't what engagement's about, it might get leaders to sit up and take notice.

Out of the 8 measures of engagement in order to select the "best companies",  one of the most interesting was "Fair Deal". It's a common misconception that high salary = more engaged. But the relationship between engagement and salary is actually all about how employees' salary compares to that of their colleagues. Which explains why, say, investment bankers can often be far less engaged than McDonalds' restaurant staff.

Key driver of engagement is involvement
The first step to a more engaged organization, says Wayne, is for the executive board to ask themselves why the company exists - what's the company's purpose in the world? Front line employees will not be more engaged once they understand the company strategy - no matter how fun and innovative your comms campaign around it is! They'll be engaged once they know how the work they're specifically doing is contributing to the company's purpose.

This brings us to transparency, organizations need to ask themselves how they're making a difference to the world, whether it's a product, or a service, if you're making a valuable difference or contribution to people's lives, and employees understand and believe that the work they're doing on a day-to-day basis contributes to this difference, they'll feel more engaged.

John Smythe discussed the experience of governance, or leadership, as a primary driver of engagement. Leaders need to let go of control, and instead start to guide. "Being God, being in charge is being corroded, leadership is now about guidance, setting the frame doe others to succeed," said Smythe. He compared engagement drivers from the old world to drivers of the news world. Telling and selling needs to change to inclusion and co-creation. Decisions need to be made collectively. He talked about a shift in engagement drivers. Old world drivers include advocacy, loyalty, fairness, motivation, whereas new world drivers include involvement, change, and personal contribution. Again it's all about involvement.

Another point made was that engagement is really a concept rather than something operational, which is why it's so hard for many leaders to understand, and getting buy in from senior leaders - many of whom are of the old school way of thinking - is still a challenge for communicators. Both John and Wayne advise communicators to put their energies into those who DO understand engagement and not try - and inevitable fail - to get 100% buy in. Because even within the companies at the very top of the best companies list, there's still a percentage of people who don't feel engaged and a percentage of leaders who don't believe it's something worth thinking about. Let those who don't get the importance of engagement live in blissful ignorance. Positivity and advocacy are infectious and and like my favorite Novo Nordisk case study demonstrates, sometimes when you don't include people in something great, they'll come and find out what you're doing off their own accord - out of sheer curiosity.