Employee Engagement is a Two-way Street
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is September 21, 2024.
Last week, I talked about the organizational cultural impact of directive return-to-office (RTO) policies and their effect on employee disengagement. My message to employers was this:
Hey leaders! Did you get the memo that your people hate being treated like coin-operated machines and that improvements in employee engagement can significantly enhance your company’s culture and its bottom line? Note that your decisions to play big brother and force your people back into the office based on your feelings that people work better face-to-face, or to improve the ‘payoff’ to your existing real estate investments are adding to employee dissatisfaction and disengagement. Oh, and if you’re contemplating geo-tracking your people like PwC will start doing in the UK to ensure compliance with your office policies, I would seriously reconsider doing so. Treating your most valuable resource—your people—like children is the fast pass to more disengagement.
This week, we’re going to continue the discussion on the cultural impact of return-to-office policies and their impact on employee engagement by looking at the other side of the coin—the actions of employees. When talking about organizational culture and employee engagement, it’s critical to recognize that employee engagement is a two-way street.
If you’re not a member of the c-suite, it is a false narrative to imagine that the company you work for owes you a positive work environment and that it’s leadership’s sole responsibility to nurture a positive organizational culture. Unfortunately, many individual contributors and mid-level managers have bought into this narrative. They sit back and expect that it’s someone else’s responsibility to deliver on the cultural promise of the organization they lend their time and talents to. If this is you, you’ll be waiting a long time and will, in the end, be disappointed when organizational culture doesn’t live up to your expectations.
Let’s pause here and take a step back to define culture. culture is typically defined as the values, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs of the humans who work together toward common aims in an organization. Great cultures are built with intention and the words that describe and set expectations for the values and behaviors which guide employee and customer interactions are aligned with actions. Weak cultures are typically established by informality, assumptions, mistrust, and an environment where words and actions are not aligned. Conspiracy theories abound, people imagine that folks in other departments are out to get them, and rumors at the water cooler are the primary source of organizational information.
So if we revisit PwC’s recent decision to use geo-location tools to track employee whereabouts to police and enforce their return-to-office policies in the UK, leadership is likely responding (in an unhealthy way) to unhelpful employee behaviors as it relates to RTO. The most likely scenario is that leadership put a new policy in place for remote work and there was variable compliance. Instead of collaborating on a mutually-agreeable solution, the company said, “fine, for you bad apples who want to ruin it for everyone, we’re going to make everyone miserable. This is all your fault for not complying with our request in the first place!” Sounds like a fight between a frustrated parent and a recalcitrant seven-year-old.
So my message today is for employees:
Hey employees! Employee engagement and great organizational cultures are a shared responsibility. If you don’t want to be treated like coin-operated machines or like children, then don’t act like one. It’s your responsibility to do the hard work of defining your personal purpose, your vision, and the roadmap for your future success and happiness. It’s your responsibility to align your personal purpose and vision with the company that you choose to work for. It’s your responsibility to determine your non-negotiables, your belief system, your values, your behaviors, your attitudes, and align them with the best possible working environment. If you feel stuck or that you don’t belong in the business your work for, don’t hang around and make everyone else miserable. First, talk to your manager and see if there’s a way forward for better alignment. If there isn’t a way forward, be courageous and opt out. You’ll be happier and so will everyone else. Employee engagement is a two-way street.
If you need help defining your personal purpose and a vision for your future, I’ve got a tool that can help—the Personal Planning Guidebook. I encourage you to periodically engage with this work. It’s exhausting to live with perpetual negativity and a fixed, blame-based mindset. Yes, leadership has a responsibility to create and nurture a positive working environment for the business’s most valuable asset—you. It’s also your responsibility to ensure that the fit with the company you work for is right, and your responsibility to not drag everyone down your rabbit hole of misery if you haven’t done the difficult, but highly rewarding, work of figuring out who you are and where you can add the most value.
