The takeaway: If being better connected to your people is the cornerstone of engagement, employee relationship management must have its emphasis on the word relationship.
Chapter 9: The Strength in Numbers Is Collaboration
Welcome to the new cooperation. It's bigger, better, and more meaningful. Collaboration is the new teamwork. It's more productive and more innovation inspiring. Boundaryless collaboration speeds up problem solving and learning. It also enables improvements in business outcomes from productivity to innovation, revenues to retention. When you look over the fence, connect and then collaborate with your coworkers, your customers, your suppliers, perhaps even your competitors, you get a multiplier – a performance multiplier. People engage and the business benefits. Competitive advantage kicks in. The deeper the connections, the better the collaboration. This goes beyond teamwork: super collaboration allows for input from nontraditional sources. Great leaders manage at the fringe as well as at the core of the business.
The takeaway: In this chapter, we dig deep into the need for collaboration and take it beyond borders and into powerful partnerships. Further, faster, together, safely. Knock down silos and open the doors to other teams – inside and outside your business.
Chapter 10: Building Community: 1+1 = 3
The more connected we are, the more we collaborate, the more we yearn for communities of practice and communities of kindred spirits. We feel and perform better when we are part of something. Community brings engagement into the lifeblood of the business and your teams, enabling them to see past the immediacy of today's issues and into the future. Community creates an army of engaged minds striving for a common outcome – great results from great work.
The takeaway: When companies view community building as a stepping-stone to engagement and therefore as a way of creating new levels of performance, it's a sign they have recognized the power of the “home-team advantage.” Communities lift everyone up, together.
Chapter 11: Growing Capability: We Yearn to Learn
Continuous learning isn't just good for business; it's good for people's health and well-being and a key to life satisfaction. It's also good for continuous improvement. When managers and leaders learn how to coach, they enable and energize others, and you've got a cultural change that can turn into a movement. Coaching is another multiplier. It enables skill development, transformations, performance improvement, and engagement. Giving people opportunities to learn through experience and coaching can provide the learning element that they are thirsty for.
The takeaway: The 1.5.30 is a powerhouse tool for capability development, but coaching is king. Gone are the days of annual performance reviews. Routine check-ins build routine coaching into your culture. Ask all your people before they go home each day: Did you learn anything new today? Make sure they did.
Chapter 12: Freedom: The Great Facilitator
The most engaged people at work are those who have freer rein to do what needs to be done, without having to automatically defer to someone else. In the past, this has largely been the privilege of entrepreneurs and senior leaders, and their engagement scores showed. A truly HeadsUp manager's challenge is to step back and give people the freedom to think, to decide, to try, and to grow. Being a manager without taking a sense of freedom away from others is the challenge of the future. Manage to engage.
The takeaway: Check in rather than check up to create freedom rather than boundaries. The intersection of people and technology can absolutely free up people to be remarkable.
Chapter 13: Making a Difference: Engage. Enable. Energize.
Because every organization and workforce are different, and no two employees are the same, you need the right techniques for your workplace.
The takeaway: HeadsUp and the engagement scorecard of 2 Fs and 7 Cs offer the unique tools that engage, enable, and energize your organization. Together, these become the bedrock for long-term business prosperity as the outcome of engagement.
Conclusion
It's up to us, as leaders and managers, to understand and accept that everything we do influences engagement and, drawing on the HeadsUp tools, the toolkit of 2 Fs and 7 Cs, find new ways to explore and bring to bear the meaningful work experiences our people need. Now more than ever, we will reap what we sow. Let's sow the seeds of positive engagement so we can truly flourish in the future.
Notes
1 1 Qualtrics, 2020 Employee Experience Trends (Singapore: Qualtrics EmployeeXM, 2020). https://www.qualtrics.com/m/assets/au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL_SG_EX_Trends_ Report_Ebook.pdf
2 2 Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report (Gallup, 2017). www.slideshare.net/mobile/ adrianboucek/state-of-the-global-workplace-gallup-report-2017.
3 3 Klaus Schwab, Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum, 2019). www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/davos-manifesto-2020-the-universal-purpose-of-a-company-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/
CHAPTER 1 People Matter: We Need a Healthier Way of Working
Having an engaging environment goes far beyond the workplace itself. When people feel a connection to their jobs, they are more willing to embrace bigger visions, ones that require them to take a leap of faith. They feel a part of something bigger than themselves. They engage in shaping the future. It's the great leader that makes that happen.
—Lorena Schoenfeld, Proudfoot chief of staff and executive director
Prior to COVID-19, and if you look closely at the cover page of Gallup's State of The Global Workplace report1 published in 2017, in tiny print it says 85 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged in their job. With that bleak statistic, it's surprising that companies got any work done at all. Although increasing numbers of companies realize that what's good for people is good for business, something was clearly still amiss. During my 30 years of management consulting, I have pored over study after global study looking for what is wrong – what businesses across the planet are doing (or not) to create and foster a happy, satisfied, and high-performing workforce. Sadly, the picture that emerged was anything but heartwarming: rather, we appeared to have been living through (and barely surviving) a continued Ice Age – categorized by disconnects, disenfranchisement, and disgruntlement; an epidemic of underengagement and ineffective management solutions. For the billions spent on engagement efforts, organizations had failed to engage with their people. As a result, people were not exactly chipper about showing up at work each day. Many had mentally checked out. We had an army of the “quit but stayed.”