These are just some of the headlines scrolling through our newsfeed in the last couple of weeks:
- Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work
- The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis
- Employee Engagement at an All-Time Low
In an attempt to validate this, we recently sent out a survey to all our readers and asked them the #1 topic they needed help with and the results came back loud and clear: Employee Engagement.
It seems to me that if we recognize that Employee Engagement is at an all-time low (according to recent Gallup surveys), instead of asking how, How, HOW do we improve it, we would do well to ask “WHY” is it so low, to begin with?
Keeping in mind the law of cause and effect (yep, we’re getting deep here), low engagement is the effect of some root cause.
So what’s the root cause of it? Because if we spend our time trying to solve the effect, it’s like a doctor giving you a prescription for your symptoms without ever determining the underlying cause of your ailment.
(Don’t even get me started on how health/mental professionals do this!!)
Without going into all the reasons – and there are plenty – there is one that we suspect is often overlooked in the conversation of how to engage employees and that is how people are intrinsically motivated.
It’s not that we can’t create initiatives and programs as an organization to improve the culture or environment that will improve people’s experience AT LARGE.
And it’s not that we can’t make sure we are doing everything possible to improve the leaders in our companies because as we know, people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers.
But these initiatives are often focused on EXTRINSIC motivation (Think carrot and stick. Or worse, whip and stitch!) and we often make the assumption that people are motivated by the same things.
Yet, if we really want to get down to a ROOT CAUSE that is MOST OFTEN overlooked, I would say we need to consider people’s INTRINSIC motivation.
All people are motivated. They might just be motivated for something different than what we are and what we want them to be.
Ultimately, people do things for their reasons, not yours…as infuriating as that may be.
So when we attempt to motivate someone and we apply the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as YOU would have done unto YOU.”), we actually miss the mark!
Instead we must apply the Platinum Rule “Do unto others as THEY would have done unto THEM.”
So that puts the onus on the Manager to find out what people are most motivated by – besides NOT losing their job like a General Manager at TGI Friday’s wrongly assumed when he made a flippant comment to me (if you missed this story, it was in the last article!) – and make sure that motivation is getting satisfied in their job.
And before you throw up your hands and shake your fist in the air cursing me as the messenger… “Why is it my job to figure out what people are motivated by – they should just come in and do their job – that should be their motivation” let me just, first, welcome you to 2018 and second, reassure you that there are strategies and tools that can make this part of your job a lot easier!]
What the GM failed to recognize is a basic principle of engagement.
For people who are intrinsically motivated by their job, you as a manager have ONE main job…
DO NOT DE-MOTIVATE THEM!
Think about that. Instead of wondering and worrying about how to motivate and engage employees, all you have to do is make sure people are matched to JOBS that satisfy their INTRINSIC motivation and then get out of their way!
To further drive this point home, a study published in Journal of Sport Psychology in 1984 found that positive feedback tends to increase intrinsic motivation while negative feedback tends to diminish it. Something I experienced rather quickly after the GM’s careless remark.
This doesn’t mean you have to stop doing the broader, company-wide things that focus on engagement. It means, however, that you don’t assume that every individual employee is motivated by the same things as we will discuss further in future articles.
