Not everyone would want the pressures of being in such demand. Asked how he manages, Phillips just lets out a contented sigh and says, “I’m a lucky person. I love my job.”
Regarding employee engagement, a topic he admits is a flavour du jour, Phillips says there’s a difference between just liking a job and being right into it. Only employees who are truly engaged in what they do tend to give it their all. That, he says, is why employers aren’t doing satisfaction surveys anymore. They’re doing engagement surveys.
“I can be very happy at work but not very good,” he says. “An engaged employee is likely a good employee.”
People who care try harder. Hence the inspirational and empowering environment in Montessori schools, which have long operated on the concept that satisfaction, contentment, and joy result from the child feeling like a full participant in daily activities.
While adults are very different from children, people of all ages thrive on positive reinforcement, independence, and responsibility.
There’s a place in midtown Palo Alto, Calif., that helps companies engage and inspire employees and has been dubbed a “Montessori for adults.” KnOwhere Inc. is a consulting service and retail business that uses innovative learning techniques and high-tech tools to help companies redesign and reorganize.
It promises to solve big organizational problems in a few days or hours in creative, refreshingly non-corporate ways that include performing skits, building models, or playing with teddy bears.
Fortune 500 companies have paid handsomely to enlist these services, understanding how critical it is that employees be engaged.
Phillips says fun events — whether expensive sales retreats or just handing out popsicles on a nice day and taking a break to sit outside — are an important way to humanize the workplace. Technology, he says, is largely responsible for dehumanizing it and making employees feel increasingly isolated.
While phones and internet are great for allowing a computer programmer on Vancouver Island to interact with a colleague in Bangkok, the flipside is that a worker can be completely disengaged from a co-worker two cubicles down. That’s why those fun events serve a purpose.
Though someone will always be cynical about the potluck lunch or holiday party, Phillips believes it’s incumbent on leaders to make time to do those things — especially in an era where managers have more people to manage and less time than they would have 10 or 20 years ago to know them individually.
There’s no argument that company baseball games or pizza lunches can do wonders for a staff’s team spirit and morale. Employee engagement, however, is about not only playtime, but also the desire to work. As much as employees want to let loose, they also very much want to be treated like adults.
The joy of a clear plate
Studies show that disengagement not only fails to motivate employees, but also causes stress, burnout, absence, high turnover, and can even be associated with stress-related physical and mental illness, such as depression or cardiovascular disease.
So what exactly do employees find engaging?
Jim Clemmer, a keynote speaker, workshop and retreat leader, and management team developer in Kitchener, Ont., writes in one of his many articles that, “People want to take pride in their work, belong to a winning team, and be part of an organization they can believe in.”
He cites a study of computer programmers whose top three motivators at work were: full appreciation for work done, feeling they were in on things, and sympathetic help with personnel problems. This, Clemmer writes, was very different from what the programmers’ managers thought would be the programmers’ top motivators (wages, working conditions, and fair discipline).
The workplace, says Clemmer, is in a morale crisis. “More and more workers are frustrated or have just kind of resigned themselves to saying, ‘What’s the minimum I need to do?’ or ‘What do I need to do to just get by?’ ”
Some employers invest significant resources into addressing the problem.
When Stephen Liptrap was hired as vice president of human resources of ConAgra Foods, he had the awesome task of assembling 100 independent companies, operating as separate entities all over the world, and creating one international division.
He and president and CEO Ian Troop wanted a consistent way to share strategy and get buy-in. They wanted all 1,500-plus employees in 20 countries to be very focused on what they spent their time on, all with common, aligned agendas.
A tall order, perhaps, but they decided to base the entire process on employee engagement, because they understood that engagement drives results.
“We wanted to be an employer of choice, and provide a progressive environment where one person could make a difference,” says Liptrap.
What they came up with, after a few trials and incarnations, was a simple solution they call the “personal impact planner.” It started with setting annual objectives for the company, then breaking those objectives down into manageable 60-day chunks for each employee.
As a critical part of the process, managers sit down with employees in one-on-one bi-weekly or monthly sessions. The employee’s list of 60-day priorities serves as the agenda for these meetings.
It all seemed to go well, at first, but employees still struggled with too many priorities.
“They’d have 20 things to do that were all equally important. Or they’d focus on whoever hit them with something that day,” says Liptrap. “We really needed them to focus on what were the fewest things that made the biggest difference.”
So they broke those priorities down into four categories: critical business-impacting priorities; other things that really need to get done; things that can wait until after the current 60-day period; and Liptrap’s personal favourite, “Things I can stop doing.”
That simple act of permitting employees to wipe something right off their plate, he says, has done wonders for morale. If ever an employee (even a manager) is struggling with an upcoming work obligation or task, his or her boss can say, “If it doesn’t have anything to do with your 60-day priorities, don’t do it.”
These tasks can be delegated elsewhere, postponed, or eliminated – like an out-of-town meeting or conference that has nothing to do with those priorities.
Management’s efforts at ConAgra Foods have done more than just simplify the task of setting priorities. This tool – which is really just an agenda for one-on-one discussion – addresses some of the factors that make such a key difference between engaged and disengaged employees. It lets employees be heard, frequently; empowers them to make decisions about their job; and clearly shows them their role and value within the whole organization.
“It has really helped us get across some of the cultural borders,” says Liptrap, “because it’s given us a common language. Mexico, India, they’re all talking about priorities, about focus. It’s really fun, and it’s really ingrained in the culture.”
No job too dreary
Even with manageable workflows and a fun team environment, are some jobs simply too repetitive or dull to ever be engaging? Clemmer doesn’t think so. He believes that any job can be enriched.
“At a company like Toyota, for example,” he says, “what they have tended to do is organize into teams. They tend to rotate positions, rotate work, have a lot more participation in problem solving. They’ve found ways to take boring, repetitive work and enhance it, enrich it.”
He says engagement is about getting people owning more of their own work, finding ways to enhance and improve it, and helping employees to become more effective.
Sure, he says, it’s easier with some jobs than with others, “But it begins with a basic mindset or ethic that I want to do that with the people in my organization, versus treating and seeing people as really just an extension of the computer, extensions of the machine or just a cog in the process.”
In other words, seeing how they fit into the big picture and being full participants makes the daily grind more worthwhile for employees.
Phillips agrees there are great and awful jobs in every field – great and awful receptionist jobs, great and awful steelworker jobs, great and awful call centre jobs. Management, he says, makes all the difference.
“Different jobs appeal to different people, but there are better places to work . . . and even within organizations, there are some parts of organizations that really figure it out. Usually, if you want to find the answer, somewhere it involves leadership.”
Michelle Morra is a freelance writer and former editor of Workplace News.