employee engagement…and performance link?
If you are in a management position you will have heard about employee engagement…
The REAL challenge is what is it and why is it important..
Isn’t organizational HEALTH as measured by appropriate levels of accountability, communication, fairness, relationships, growth opportunities, leadership effectiveness and trust as the foundation more important?
A smart approach these days is to run a streamlined team that leaves no room for anyone to hide and to have clear transparent accountability for performance all the way through the organization.
We know that unequal performance should bring unequal rewards, and would work best in a company culture that communicates this upfront. Performance tracking and publishing of key performance metrics during the year can lead to recognition among staff of who is pulling their weight and who is not.
Even in our Staff team buildings we see varying levels of engagement, commitment, trust and energy.
Beware of the Peter Principle…
Peter Principle means that most companies are run by incompetent management /leadership who do not have the skills to deal with the non performers or slackers in the company.
As well as lacking the skills, they feel most at ease with an environment with slackers and let the group dynamic of the teams be dominated by this low and poor work ethic.
Once the slackers have control of the group dynamic, it is almost impossible for the high performance hard workers to turn the culture around. They eventually stop trying and leave because it just wears them down as it is a losing battle.
The poor managers know that doing nothing is the easiest “solution” and so the slackers will always win. Culture is King! we know from experience 70% of leaders … Aren’t!
See here from leadership iQ’s definition…
We then measured employee engagement using the Leadership IQ “Hundred Percenter Index” (our proprietary engagement survey). We define engagement as the willingness of an employee to give 100% of their discretionary effort to the job and their willingness to recommend this organization as a terrific place to work. And what we found was that in 42% of those 207 organizations (i.e. 87 companies), high performers were less engaged than low performers.
So are your teams engaged? Are they delivering sustainable optimum results?
So where does the pressure to perform STOP?