Improve Employee Engagement By Boosting Management Support

Adrian Swinscoe,

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter A. Hunter, an author and authority on employee engagement 

During the interview, Peter shared a story of how he built an engaged team. The story revolved around his time in the Navy when he was put in charge of a team of very experienced people. On meeting them, he realised that there was no way he could take a ‘traditional’ approach to managing them, ie. telling them what to do, as they knew much more about the job in hand than he ever could. Rather, he worked out that the best way for him to ‘manage’ the team, and get the best out of them, was to find out what they needed to complete their work and then get it for them.

The result was a team that produced incredible results, cared about themselves, their work, their colleagues (inside and outside of their team), and the wider organisation.

I really like Peter’s approach as it focuses on management as facilitation rather than management as control.

In the interview, he then went onto suggest steps that any manager could take to help improve engagement in their team. These include getting your team together, on a regular basis, and asking them a series of questions:

• What have you just done?
• What went well?
• What went badly?
• What can we do to ensure that things continue to go well? and
• What can we do to avoid things going badly next time?

Now, this part of the interview reminded me of another conversation, one I had with a global HR Director of an international financial services firm. We were chatting following a talk I had just given at their firm about the link between customer and employee engagement when she:

“I believe that if we could make all of our managers better managers then we’d have a more engaged workforce”.

I think she is right and this builds on the idea that one of the main influencers of engagement in the workplace is the relationship an individual, or a team, have with their immediate boss.

This could be helped more and better management training. But, before going out and commissioning lots of extra training, how about another approach? Could we not better support managers by helping them focus a little more on engagement as part of their regular management duties? Could that not be done by the managers of managers asking the following questions of them on a regular basis:

1. Is your team engaged?
2. If yes, why do you think that?
3. If no, what can you do to help them do their make their jobs easier?

When it comes to employee engagement, rather than more training or more surveys or other responses, could we not generate better results by spending more time helping our managers help their own people succeed? As Peter says:

“The culture we want to create already exists. We just need to let it happen.”

And

“People, generally, want to show up for work and do a good job. They want to be proud of what they do. They want to use their education, creativity and imagination to do work that they are proud of.”