2. Employee Engagement

The secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds.

—Casey Stengel

The Boss Is to Blame

Would you like your boss to be fired? No? Well, statistics show that one out of three of your employees would like you to be fired!

In fact, they would forgo their annual raise if it could happen this year. And, by the way, half of your employees are looking for another job right now.

Shocked? Well, those are the statistics on how employees feel when they are not engaged at work. Offered a better boss or a pay raise, studies show that 35 percent wanted the better boss. Other benefits such as pay, time off, flexible schedules, and retirement plans can cause a slight increase in engagement, but these have been shown to be temporary.

Gallup is the leader in data on employee engagement, and they report that unengaged employees cost $550 billion a year in extra sick days and lost productivity to U.S. corporations.1

They have also found that only 30 percent of U.S. employees are engaged at work and 70 percent of an individual’s engagement score is based on the employee’s relationship with their direct supervisor. Their statistics showed that engaged organizations have 21 percent more profitability and 41 percent less absenteeism.

Who’s Rocking Your Boat?

Taking Gallup’s findings even further, if you filled a rowboat with ten employees from any U.S. organization, there would be two engaged employees upfront, rowing toward the organization’s mission. In the middle would be five employees unengaged, not rowing, and there would be two in the back actively disengaged, rowing against the engaged employees in the front.

What can you do? With the two in the back, it’s easy. Actively disengaged employees are undermining what their engaged coworkers accomplish. They are disruptive to the organization and need to be given corrective action and possibly fired.

With the 50 percent of your employees who are unengaged in the middle of the rowboat, the answer is not as easy, but it has the most potential to change an organization. These employees are not being disruptive and they are meeting the minimum requirements of their job description.

The problem is, they are just sleepwalking through their day. They are doing the bare minimum on their jobs because their heart isn’t in it. They are watching the clock and checking social media whenever they can sneak it in. They dread Monday mornings, maybe even sitting in their cars for a few extra minutes, before walking in with a sinking feeling in their stomach to begin their workweek.

These 50 percent of employees don’t feel connected to the organization, don’t see how their job moves the organization’s mission forward—and in fact probably don’t even know what the mission is. They have no real relationship with their boss and don’t feel like he or she knows or even cares about them as a person.

They don’t feel a sense of team or a feeling of belonging. They feel distant from what may be going on overall in the organization and are isolated, not knowing if they are doing good or bad work, until their annual performance evaluation.

These unengaged employees are halfheartedly looking for another job, but feel that the next place may be just as bad as this one. They are basically checked out, and even their family feels their unhappiness and the weight of spending their workdays in a place they don’t want to be, doing work they don’t want to do.

Does this sound familiar? Is this a description of your employees? Or maybe even yourself?

If you picked up this book, you may already sense that this is a problem in your team, department, or organization. Maybe you even had an employee engagement survey that showed these results.

So, how can it be fixed? How can you change your unengaged employees into “rowers”—engaged, rowing toward the organization’s mission?

You may not be able to rely on your company for help. Your organization may not understand the importance of engagement. Do you sense that you couldn’t sell the changes needed to your “C” suite, or even to human resources? Maybe there is no budget for any initiatives to increase employee engagement.

The good news is that everything you are about to read in this book is something that you as a supervisor can do to increase engagement among each of your staff. Plus, you can start today, and it won’t cost a thing.

Your best chance to make a difference is with the 50 percent of your people who are unengaged. If they can be turned on to be engaged and turned into “rowers,” your organization can sail forward with increased productivity, better customer experience, increased safety, lower turnover, and increased profitability.

With the data showing that over two-thirds of an employee’s engagement at work is directly due to their relationship with their supervisor, your employee’s engagement score can be changed by things that you can do that will increase their happiness, fulfillment, and productivity at work.

Your HR department cannot raise your department’s employee engagement score. They can only affect their own department’s score. Each supervisor needs to engage their own employees. No set of mandates from the “C” suite, training programs, newsletters, employee appreciation events, or incentives will do it. You have to do it.

You are in a unique position to impact someone’s life in a positive way, to make them a happier, more productive human being, and to affect their impact on their family.

What a gift!

Every interaction you have with your employees today influences their engagement.

Roger’s Story

Roger is an experienced paramedic working in an Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agency, responding to the city’s 9-1-1 calls. His excellent clinical skills helped him gain a promotion to supervisor over a shift of paramedics.

Roger is young, but conscientious. He does an excellent job on the clinical side of supervising his staff, developing their patient skills. During his shift he supervises and assists with all trauma and cardiac patients, helping his young charges to sharpen their skills with CPR and handling traumatic injuries. He helps develop their customer service skills and handles patient complaints. Back at the station, he finishes up his shift with a review of the patient care reports from his staff and has the satisfaction of another successful shift with lives saved.

Meanwhile the mayor has directed city government departments to provide employee engagement survey results for a report he is preparing to highlight his accomplishments while in office. The EMS chief implements a survey to obtain the results for his agency.

Roger already struggles with engagement among his young staff. He had previously been their peer, but once he was promoted to their supervisor he had trouble separating the relationships. During emergency situations, the staff is a professional team working to save the life of the patient, but this changes between emergency calls when they engage in horseplay and do not file their reports on time.

Roger is also responsible for developing a “bench”—the next group ready for promotion—but he doesn’t see any of his employees as mature enough to be a supervisor. When Roger gives his staff any negative feedback on their performance, he experiences pushback when they claim he is picking on them. As a result he avoids any uncomfortable conversations with the staff and just tries to concentrate on getting through each shift.

He doesn’t trust his staff enough to delegate any new tasks or projects, so he takes on all new duties himself—he doesn’t want to hear the complaints and would rather know it was done right by doing it himself. His turnover is high as his staff moves to other agencies that are offering sign-on bonuses, so Roger is spending a lot of his time onboarding and training new employees. As a result, he is overworked, stressed, and thinking about leaving his position and going back to school.

Roger’s team is not engaged. Roger is probably not even engaged himself.

You Know It When You See It

What is employee engagement, really? It’s hard to quantify, but as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in 1964 about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

An engaged employee stands out. They are committed to doing their jobs in the best way they can, and giving that extra effort to make sure they help move the organization’s mission forward.

It’s about intentions—the willingness to put in extra effort to help the organization succeed. It’s about the emotional connection the employee has to the mission and the organization. They go above and beyond the requirements of their job. They enthusiastically strive to help the organization reach their goals, and they are happy and fulfilled at...