Events

How can leaders drive engagement and make a real impact in their organisations? This is a question confronting nearly all business leaders.

Polls by Gallup found that worldwide employee engagement is startlingly low, with just 15% of workers indicating they are engaged with their work.

With so many employees not engaged with their work, what does it really take to make an impact on engagement in organisations? Here are 4 tips to help leaders drive engagement and make a real impact at work.

1. Take an Interest in People

I believe Leadership is the key to engaging today’s workers. You can have the noblest commitment but without leadership you don’t have anything. In my opinion, lack of leadership is a leading cause of today’s high disengagement numbers. Leaders who don’t think about how they are influencing others often undertake patterns of behaviour that drive people away from their commitment, creating disengagement and conflict.

What kind of leadership does drive engagement? Increasingly, it’s leadership that takes an interest in the personal development of employees. Gallup recently found that 59% of Millennials and 41% of Baby Boomers are seeking opportunities to grow and develop at work. Leaders that understand this can influence their employees and inspire them to bring their best to achieving the organisation’s commitment.

2. Make Connections to Bigger Commitment

People may not always realise it, but their future is happening now. The future you envision is what empowers you in the present. Employees who see a future for themselves with an organisation where they can make a difference and express their talents are more empowered in their day-to-day activities. When people feel connected to their organisation’s commitment and understand why what they do is important, they are more satisfied and productive.

That sense of connection comes from aligning organisational and individual commitment. You want people to experience their contribution and fulfillment inside the organisation. Everyone should be working toward the same overarching commitment, from the CEO to the post room.

3. Give Space to Fail

One of the most crippling challenges in any organisation is fear of failure. It can lead to resistance to change and limits an organisation’s ability to generate and act on ideas, innovate and adapt. This fear can corrupt an entire culture, leading to higher levels of disengagement.

Creating space to try and possibly fail allows an organisation and its individuals to learn from their failures, which can ultimately be empowering. Failure is a necessary part of growth, an organisation needs to provide space for that and provide support for staff when they are feeling most vulnerable.

4. Don’t Forget to Have Fun

In many organisations, people are encouraged to “work hard, play later,” as if the two were mutually exclusive. But a study by the University of Warwick indicates this is the wrong approach. According to the study, workers who were happy and had fun at work were actually 12% more productive than those who were not.

Fun is important due to its critical role in generating engagement, having fun is at the core of a company’s success. If you look at employee engagement, we are asking people to consistently be engaged and give those extra ounces of energy that they might have otherwise given elsewhere in their lives. Having fun, enjoying the work and the people they do it with helps to create energy and influences people to give more of themselves.

One reason fun is so important is the idea of employee choice. Studies show that employees are not choosing to stay with employers as long as they did in the past. A recent survey indicated that the average length of time an employee stays in a job is down in 2016 to 4.2 years, compared to 4.6 years in 2014. Among younger workers the decline was even starker: workers between the ages of 25 and 34 sank to 2.8 years.

If you really want to make an impact and transform your organisation, begin by taking an interest in what truly influences and motivates your people. Build stronger connections by aligning individual and organisational commitments. Most importantly, remember that people and organisations are more than the sum of past successes and failures, and that fun is a critical part of creating a more engaged organisation.

We live in a world where meaning is attached to almost everything. But we don’t see we put the meaning out there and talk as if it is real! If we remove the meaning, what is left?

I love this lightbulb moment on Frasier.  In this clip Frasier’s subconscious take the form of his ex-wives and his mother! A perfect illustration of putting the past in the past 🙂

There’s a lot of gloom in the press about what looks increasingly like the re-emergence of the extreme right wing in politics, feeding, as always, on resentments within the population about the way the pie is shared.  How terrifying that these resentments have had reason to grow to the point that people succumb to the temptations of deeply rooted evolutionary instincts towards xenophobia, racism, nationalism, protectionism.

The Empathy Instinct sets out that the ills sketched out above testify to an empathy deficit in society. The books explores how the lack of empathy has been at the root of most of the 20th century’s horrendous acts.

But it also sets out how we can change society and create the sort of world most people would choose to live in with a “Empathy Charter”. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to make a difference in the world.

Audits are standard in both personal and business finance, but in many ways, life audits are much more crucial. That’s because life audits evaluate well-being not just in one area but in basically everything. They can mean massive changes to relationships, work, activities, and even what you put on your plate. If you haven’t conducted your own life audit, these are some of the top questions you need to be asking yourself.

• What are my assets and liabilities (not just things but also personality traits, skills, habits, etc.)?
• How could I be kinder to or support myself?
• How could I be kinder to or support others?
• What would I still like to learn and how could I do so?
• Do I have one to five good friends I can trust and count on?
• Do I feel energized, neutral, or let down about my work?
• Am I in good health or pursuing it to the best of my ability?
• Do I spend my free time doing a variety of enjoyable activities?
• What emotion is dominant for me?
• What do I get excited about consistently?
• What core principles (e.g., honesty) do I have, and how does my way of living reflect them?
• What would I do with more or less money?
• What am I grateful for and why?
• What do I regret and why?
• How close is what I’m doing professionally to what I dreamed of doing?
• Am I consistently challenging myself?
• What fears do I have?
• What are the top five words I think others would use to describe me?
• What are the top five words I would use to describe myself?
• Are the motivations behind my original goals still present?
• What do I find myself daydreaming about when I’m supposed to be doing other things?
• What is my financial or material standard of living, and have I achieved it?
• What in my current environment do I like or dislike?
• How am I influencing others for better or worse?
• Is my income stable?
• How is my weight?
• Do I feel confident in my appearance?
• Do I feel like I have worth?
• Can I do most things with independence and confidence?
• Am I able to make decisions easily?
• Am I able to lead myself and others spiritually?
• What goals do I have?
• Why didn’t I meet goals I’ve previously had?
• Am I engaged in personal development?

Life audits aren’t something you need to finish overnight. They’re supposed to make you really consider what you’re doing, where you can improve or have strengths, and what you want or need. That can take some time to sort out mentally and emotionally. So if going through these questions takes you a while, you’re probably on the right track. You don’t have to look at these questions in any particular order, either. Just be honest with yourself for each one, have determination, and commit to moving forward.

1. Situation —  You’ve had enough. Enough of your financial problems, enough of your uninspiring career, enough of that extra 20 pounds you’ve been carrying around, your relationship heading for the rocks.

2. Dissatisfaction — Whatever you’re doing doesn’t work for you anymore. Maybe it’s not profitable, and maybe it’s not fun. Maybe you’re tired of not having the energy you know you need to accomplish your desired result. Your current approach might have been successful in the past, but it hasn’t adapted to your current conditions.

3. Threshold — Change becomes a “must.”

4. Insight — You get an insight, or deep understanding of something, and that creates an opening.

5. Opening — A door opens…and you step through right through it.

Breakthroughs begin with holding a picture of what could be. Then from being committed to something even if the path to achieve it is unclear. Breakthroughs aren’t something we make, because to make something is to take what’s there and change it. A breakthrough is to take what isn’t there and have it be. Breakthroughs evidence themselves quantifiably, they’re always moving in a positive direction. Breakthroughs allow for sudden powerful insights that take us past our self-imposed limitations. Breakthroughs alter our sense of who we are, alter the quality of our life, alter being alive. Breakthroughs are brought forth, created, generated through a bold declaration.

We don’t give the idea of breakthroughs a whole lot of thought, we mostly focus on the day-to-day business of living. If we get stopped or stuck along the way, we naturally attempt to figure out more, better, or different scenarios to accomplish what we are after, but most often do so within the same framework, leading only to incremental improvements. Given, however, that both what we’re engaged with and how things occur for us are shaped by language, we have the power to be the author of our lives. Language gives us direct access to ourselves, to who we are, to creating possibility, not possibility like options, but possibility like the boundless dimension that’s added to the world by the human ability to create. Things that live as a possibility have a much different impact on the quality of our lives than those things that live like more, better, and different. Breakthroughs are about creating an extraordinary life as a place from which to come, rather than a place to get.