Sorry to disagree with much of what you have said.
Disengagement is always for the same reason in every person - because they feel they are not valued and respected. Every person has the same basic needs: to be heard, to be respected, and to have autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The extent to which management meets these needs dictates the engagement or performance level of the employee. As Stephen Covey senior told us, the possible performance gain is 500%.
For a brief explanation on how to create fully engaged employees, please look at this video.
How to Create Engaged Employees (Leadership Skills Training Series)
I know this because I have personally created several fully engaged workforces, the largest being a 1300 person unionized group. The services I offer are at my website.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
70Disengagement is always for the same reason in every person - because they feel they are not valued and respected. Every person has the same basic needs: to be heard, to be respected, and to have autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The extent to which management meets these needs dictates the engagement or performance level of the employee. As Stephen Covey senior told us, the possible performance gain is 500%.
For a brief explanation on how to create fully engaged employees, please look at this video.
How to Create Engaged Employees (Leadership Skills Training Series)
I know this because I have personally created several fully engaged workforces, the largest being a 1300 person unionized group. The services I offer are at my website.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Hello Bensimo
It is a nice discussion.
The real challenge in employee engagement is to keep them constantly and contnuously enagaged.Once they are enagaged at one level, they will raise the bar of enagagement to the next level. Will the management be under constant pressure to enagage an employee that too a talented one at that? How to handle it ?
Secondly an employee not merely yearns for respect but also earns for comfort. An employee struggling to keep pace with rising social standards may find it difficult to enage himself. Do you think a reward and incentive or compensation system will still fail to motivate an employee to be enagaged ? An employee who wants to be fully engaged These are the isues that confuse HR professionals about the significace of rewards & incentives & compensation in employee enagement.
B.Saikumar
HR & LabouR Law Advisor
From India, Mumbai
It is a nice discussion.
The real challenge in employee engagement is to keep them constantly and contnuously enagaged.Once they are enagaged at one level, they will raise the bar of enagagement to the next level. Will the management be under constant pressure to enagage an employee that too a talented one at that? How to handle it ?
Secondly an employee not merely yearns for respect but also earns for comfort. An employee struggling to keep pace with rising social standards may find it difficult to enage himself. Do you think a reward and incentive or compensation system will still fail to motivate an employee to be enagaged ? An employee who wants to be fully engaged These are the isues that confuse HR professionals about the significace of rewards & incentives & compensation in employee enagement.
B.Saikumar
HR & LabouR Law Advisor
From India, Mumbai
Dear All,
Greetings!!!
Great Discussion!!!
I will agree with Ben and i also feel that Maslow's need hierarchy theory is a more general way of pinpointing needs. Maslow has not lost his relevance but needs have undergone a sea change, the society at large has undergone a sea change. An engaged employee today looks for everything. If they want respect, they also want money; if they want autonomy, they also want constructive supervision; if they want challenges, they also want employee brands.
Employee engagement, is, thus the entire HR process. What ever we do as HR, whether it be compensation, recruitment, reward etc. becomes a part of the overall employee engagement process.
Comments welcome!!!
From India, Delhi
Greetings!!!
Great Discussion!!!
I will agree with Ben and i also feel that Maslow's need hierarchy theory is a more general way of pinpointing needs. Maslow has not lost his relevance but needs have undergone a sea change, the society at large has undergone a sea change. An engaged employee today looks for everything. If they want respect, they also want money; if they want autonomy, they also want constructive supervision; if they want challenges, they also want employee brands.
Employee engagement, is, thus the entire HR process. What ever we do as HR, whether it be compensation, recruitment, reward etc. becomes a part of the overall employee engagement process.
Comments welcome!!!
From India, Delhi
B.Saikumar,
You asked - "Will the management be under constant pressure to enagage an employee that too a talented one at that? How to handle it ?"
The vast majority of executives and managers today are attempting to create better products and services, better control of finances, selling more, purchasing better parts and material, engineering better products, and the like or all of these depending on their position. They are in fact attempting to manage/control the work. What they are not doing is managing the people.
Once they shift to managing the people meaning helping the people to decide what to do, how to do it and then do it as concerns all the functions of doing the work whether it be production or selling or purchasing or whatever, people will slowly but surely become more and more engaged. The more engaged they are the less problems they create and the more problems they solve on their own. Pressure/stress on management decreases and so does the number of hours management must put into their work. Fully engaged people are self-managed, self-directed self-starters who love to come to work and are at least 300% more productive than if disengaged.
You also wrote - "Do you think a reward and incentive or compensation system will still fail to motivate an employee to be enagaged ?"
Rewards and incentives generally have negative effects and thus are very dangerous to motivation (read Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" as he thoroughly destroys the behaviorism of "doing this will get you that"). Compensation is different. It must be adequate to meet the employee's financial needs and not be out of line with other employers.
Besides, management cannot actually motivate employees. Each employee has their own motivations and no other person will ever be able to accurately know them. So it is a waste of time for management to attempt to motivate employees. That said, every employee wants to be a Superstar and no one likes to be told what to do. That is true for you and for every other person in this world. Think about it! Executives and managers who spend their time helping employees to become the Superstars they want to be will be rewarded by their devotion to doing a better job today than they did yesterday and throwing everything they have at their work.
The script to create a fully engaged workforce is quite simple. Rather than spending its time trying to control employees with directives, goals, targets, orders, bureaucracy, mission statements, corporate value statements, visions, and the like, all of which mainly serve to disengage employees, management listens to whatever employees have to say. Management does this often enough to more than satisfy the employee's need to be heard. Management then responds to what was said in a timely and respectful manner to the satisfaction of the employee or better thus satisfying the employee's need to be respected. Once employees realize this will always be done, they realize that they can influence everything in the workplace. This ability to influence everything begets a sense of ownership - that this is just as much their workplace as it is anyone's. In the same way, a sense of ownership begets commitment. This process will also satisfy the employee's needs to have competence, autonomy, and relatedness and with all needs satisfied, they will choose to become engaged.
That simple process will get you a fully engaged workforce. Along the way, you will learn a lot of details from making mistakes such as how to listen, how to conduct sessions to listen to employee complaints, suggestions, and questions, how to respond to what you hear, the values employees have and how they use them, and most importantly how to convert the ~95% of employees who are followers into non-followers (this may not be possible to learn through making mistakes, but it is easy to do and does have a very positive effect on productivity, innovation, and creativity).
Hope that helps, Ben
From United States, Tampa
You asked - "Will the management be under constant pressure to enagage an employee that too a talented one at that? How to handle it ?"
The vast majority of executives and managers today are attempting to create better products and services, better control of finances, selling more, purchasing better parts and material, engineering better products, and the like or all of these depending on their position. They are in fact attempting to manage/control the work. What they are not doing is managing the people.
Once they shift to managing the people meaning helping the people to decide what to do, how to do it and then do it as concerns all the functions of doing the work whether it be production or selling or purchasing or whatever, people will slowly but surely become more and more engaged. The more engaged they are the less problems they create and the more problems they solve on their own. Pressure/stress on management decreases and so does the number of hours management must put into their work. Fully engaged people are self-managed, self-directed self-starters who love to come to work and are at least 300% more productive than if disengaged.
You also wrote - "Do you think a reward and incentive or compensation system will still fail to motivate an employee to be enagaged ?"
Rewards and incentives generally have negative effects and thus are very dangerous to motivation (read Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" as he thoroughly destroys the behaviorism of "doing this will get you that"). Compensation is different. It must be adequate to meet the employee's financial needs and not be out of line with other employers.
Besides, management cannot actually motivate employees. Each employee has their own motivations and no other person will ever be able to accurately know them. So it is a waste of time for management to attempt to motivate employees. That said, every employee wants to be a Superstar and no one likes to be told what to do. That is true for you and for every other person in this world. Think about it! Executives and managers who spend their time helping employees to become the Superstars they want to be will be rewarded by their devotion to doing a better job today than they did yesterday and throwing everything they have at their work.
The script to create a fully engaged workforce is quite simple. Rather than spending its time trying to control employees with directives, goals, targets, orders, bureaucracy, mission statements, corporate value statements, visions, and the like, all of which mainly serve to disengage employees, management listens to whatever employees have to say. Management does this often enough to more than satisfy the employee's need to be heard. Management then responds to what was said in a timely and respectful manner to the satisfaction of the employee or better thus satisfying the employee's need to be respected. Once employees realize this will always be done, they realize that they can influence everything in the workplace. This ability to influence everything begets a sense of ownership - that this is just as much their workplace as it is anyone's. In the same way, a sense of ownership begets commitment. This process will also satisfy the employee's needs to have competence, autonomy, and relatedness and with all needs satisfied, they will choose to become engaged.
That simple process will get you a fully engaged workforce. Along the way, you will learn a lot of details from making mistakes such as how to listen, how to conduct sessions to listen to employee complaints, suggestions, and questions, how to respond to what you hear, the values employees have and how they use them, and most importantly how to convert the ~95% of employees who are followers into non-followers (this may not be possible to learn through making mistakes, but it is easy to do and does have a very positive effect on productivity, innovation, and creativity).
Hope that helps, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Teamgrouphr,
Maslow is not really off base, but the theory of what motivates us is best expressed by the "Self-Determination Theory" espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their work over the last 40 years has caused many other researchers to expand on it and has become well accepted within the community of psychologists. My experience in managing people for over 30 years makes me agree 100% with their findings although I believe their estimates of the effect of having a highly motivated workforce to be way low. I support Stephen Covey senior's view that the possible performance gain is 500%, not 5% or 50% but 500%.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Maslow is not really off base, but the theory of what motivates us is best expressed by the "Self-Determination Theory" espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their work over the last 40 years has caused many other researchers to expand on it and has become well accepted within the community of psychologists. My experience in managing people for over 30 years makes me agree 100% with their findings although I believe their estimates of the effect of having a highly motivated workforce to be way low. I support Stephen Covey senior's view that the possible performance gain is 500%, not 5% or 50% but 500%.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Dear Ben,
Greetings!!!
The depth of your statements itself speaks of your experience and knowledge of the topic. I have not read "Deci and Ryan" but i will definitely do that , time permitting.
In your reply to Mr. saikumar , you have questioned an established and more practiced way of engaging employee. If i understand correctly, your method is to squeeze all these activities in a simple listen-respond mechanism. But there has to be techniques of listening and responding in such a manner in order to have such amazing results . Kindly elaborate on that !!!
Teamgrouphr,
Maslow is not really off base, but the theory of what motivates us is best expressed by the "Self-Determination Theory" espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their work over the last 40 years has caused many other researchers to expand on it and has become well accepted within the community of psychologists. My experience in managing people for over 30 years makes me agree 100% with their findings although I believe their estimates of the effect of having a highly motivated workforce to be way low. I support Stephen Covey senior's view that the possible performance gain is 500%, not 5% or 50% but 500%.
Best regards, Ben[/QUOTE]
From India, Delhi
Greetings!!!
The depth of your statements itself speaks of your experience and knowledge of the topic. I have not read "Deci and Ryan" but i will definitely do that , time permitting.
In your reply to Mr. saikumar , you have questioned an established and more practiced way of engaging employee. If i understand correctly, your method is to squeeze all these activities in a simple listen-respond mechanism. But there has to be techniques of listening and responding in such a manner in order to have such amazing results . Kindly elaborate on that !!!
Teamgrouphr,
Maslow is not really off base, but the theory of what motivates us is best expressed by the "Self-Determination Theory" espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their work over the last 40 years has caused many other researchers to expand on it and has become well accepted within the community of psychologists. My experience in managing people for over 30 years makes me agree 100% with their findings although I believe their estimates of the effect of having a highly motivated workforce to be way low. I support Stephen Covey senior's view that the possible performance gain is 500%, not 5% or 50% but 500%.
Best regards, Ben[/QUOTE]
From India, Delhi
Teamgrouphr,
You asked if I would elaborate on the techniques of listening and responding.
In my response to B.Saikumar, after mentioning that the executive or manager must listen more that enough to satisfy their need to be heard and respond to their satisfaction or better (to their satisfaction or better are key words), I wrote - "Along the way, you will learn a lot of details from making mistakes such as how to listen, how to conduct sessions to listen to employee complaints, suggestions, and questions, how to respond to what you hear, the values employees have and how they use them, and most importantly how to convert the ~95% of employees who are followers into non-followers (this may not be possible to learn through making mistakes, but it is easy to do and does have a very positive effect on productivity, innovation, and creativity)."
So the answer to your simple question would take many pages. In fact, I wrote a book with all the details one needs about managing people and it is available at my website. I wish I could give you a quick answer, but there is no such quick answer. If you try meeting with people solely for the purpose of listening and responding to whatever they have to say, you will develop most of the details in a year or two if you concentrate and keep correcting your errors to the satisfaction of your employees or better. The only one really hard to learn by trial and error is what followers are and how to convert them into non-followers.
Sorry I cannot be of more help. I do coach executives and managers if you are interested.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
You asked if I would elaborate on the techniques of listening and responding.
In my response to B.Saikumar, after mentioning that the executive or manager must listen more that enough to satisfy their need to be heard and respond to their satisfaction or better (to their satisfaction or better are key words), I wrote - "Along the way, you will learn a lot of details from making mistakes such as how to listen, how to conduct sessions to listen to employee complaints, suggestions, and questions, how to respond to what you hear, the values employees have and how they use them, and most importantly how to convert the ~95% of employees who are followers into non-followers (this may not be possible to learn through making mistakes, but it is easy to do and does have a very positive effect on productivity, innovation, and creativity)."
So the answer to your simple question would take many pages. In fact, I wrote a book with all the details one needs about managing people and it is available at my website. I wish I could give you a quick answer, but there is no such quick answer. If you try meeting with people solely for the purpose of listening and responding to whatever they have to say, you will develop most of the details in a year or two if you concentrate and keep correcting your errors to the satisfaction of your employees or better. The only one really hard to learn by trial and error is what followers are and how to convert them into non-followers.
Sorry I cannot be of more help. I do coach executives and managers if you are interested.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Dear Ben,
Greetings!!!
I will go through your book.
I am based in India and you seem to be in US.
If you ever make a trip to India for coaching/seminar, kindly give me a buzz.
You may also add my email id for your newsletters.
From India, Delhi
Greetings!!!
I will go through your book.
I am based in India and you seem to be in US.
If you ever make a trip to India for coaching/seminar, kindly give me a buzz.
You may also add my email id for your newsletters.
From India, Delhi
Shantanu,
I would love to get your comments on my book.
I am in the US, but may get to India day. I understand that lightning does strike on occasion and if it does I will certainly look you up.
I currently do most of my coaching via teleconference. I plan to make a complete course available in the not too distant future.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
I would love to get your comments on my book.
I am in the US, but may get to India day. I understand that lightning does strike on occasion and if it does I will certainly look you up.
I currently do most of my coaching via teleconference. I plan to make a complete course available in the not too distant future.
Best regards, Ben
From United States, Tampa
Dear Bensimo
Sorry for being late in my response as I could see the mails to day only.Thank you for clarifiying my questions and elaborately sharing your views.What I understand from your reply is that the key to employee enagement is to create a sense of owneship in the employees by making them realise that they can influence the work place through listening and responding to them and that sense of ownership begets commitment and that sense of commitment will lead to a fully and contnuously engaged work force. I agree with your views. Perhaps the management's role in the process of employee enagement is altered from directing and controlling the efforts of employees to coordinating and collaborating them to sustain the sense of ownership in employees.
B.Saikumar
From India, Mumbai
Sorry for being late in my response as I could see the mails to day only.Thank you for clarifiying my questions and elaborately sharing your views.What I understand from your reply is that the key to employee enagement is to create a sense of owneship in the employees by making them realise that they can influence the work place through listening and responding to them and that sense of ownership begets commitment and that sense of commitment will lead to a fully and contnuously engaged work force. I agree with your views. Perhaps the management's role in the process of employee enagement is altered from directing and controlling the efforts of employees to coordinating and collaborating them to sustain the sense of ownership in employees.
B.Saikumar
From India, Mumbai
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