What does employee engagement really mean to your company? Part 3

 

In the previous blogs of this series, we discussed what employee engagement is not.  I shared two examples of what activities some companies may say is employee engagement, a typical Joint Health and Safety Committee (JHSC) or a social committee.  In Part 2 of this series, we began to discuss some tools that companies can use as part of their employee engagement strategy, starting with identifying a compelling business need, with clear objectives and goals.

In Part 3, we are going to discuss another tool to drive empowerment - how a team, a JHSC for example, can truly integrate employee involvement, interaction, and accountability.  We will focus this part of the series on giving employees the time that is needed to be successful on project or process implementation, continuous improvement efforts, or safety results.

How much time do the team members at your business actually spend on team activities?  Is it the hour each month for the meeting?  To really be involved, it needs to be more than that.  The rule of thumb that I use for most teams, whether they are meeting weekly or monthly, is one hour of "work time" for each hour of meeting time.  That other hour is spent in completing any action items that they are assigned to on the action plan and following up on getting updates.  Every single team member needs to be assigned something from each meeting - how novel of an idea is that?  If they do not have the time, the skills, or the experience to complete items for that team, then, in all honesty, they are not needed on that team.  

As managers, we need to be sure that each team member is given time away from their normal jobs in order to do that.  It is very common for me to see teams functioning without many of the team members at the meetings, because they are not given the time from their jobs to do that.  Action items that they were assigned to are not completed for the same reason.  When this happens it is frustrating to the team member, the team leader, and to the company because the team is not effectively achieving results and meeting their goals.  Of course, there are always going to be times when emergencies come up and team members cannot be there, but that should be the exception, not the rule.  The teams then must hold the team members accountable for completing the items to which they are assigned, and completed on time.

I sometimes get feedback that businesses simply cannot afford to give their employees time to be involved in anything outside of their regular jobs.  But I challenge that - if the team is successful, the employees are highly motivated, and goals are achieved, then it will result in bottom line results.  So the team basically pays for itself.  But this cannot happen just because a team is put together.  There are other vital components that need to happen, as part of your employee engagement strategy, to ensure that employees truly feel as if they are part of the successful achievement of goals and objectives, which we will continue to identify in upcoming blogs.

In this multi-part series, we will explore how to develop a key employee engagement strategy, which tools to use to make that strategy successful, and how to sustain it as part of an integrated culture.