Miserable Employees Aren’t Engaged…

When I mention making sure our team members can measure their performance, have a clear understanding of its relevance, and know their significance in the process, it doesn’t sound all that hard - and it’s not! But don’t mistake this simplicity for something that requires no effort at all… The magic in each of these things comes when we can personalize them to meet the needs of each individual on our team!

In all those years I worked in manufacturing, I can’t think of many things we didn’t measure at one time or another. The Fitbit wasn’t mainstream yet so I don’t recall ever logging heart rates or zone minutes but there were numerous scenarios where we counted steps… Like many large organizations, us minions at the plant level had the opportunity to receive quarterly and year end bonuses based on whether or not our facility met a certain set of metrics. With all those things we measured on any given day and those bonuses in place, one could assume that the immeasurability that Lencioni said contributes to a miserable job would never be an issue - and one would be very wrong…

The simple act of measuring or recording data has little to do with driving engagement when those things we’re measuring have nothing to do with our behavior. If I can’t directly connect my contribution, be that for good or for bad, to the results that are being measured or are tied to those bonuses, it’s tough to really buy into the idea. Be honest here, how many times have you had to log and analyze data that you had no control over? How much did that motivate you to give it every ounce of energy you had? Through nearly two decades of quarterly and year end meetings reviewing plant financials and receiving news on whether or not we’d be receiving a bonus payout (after it was ravaged by taxes), I don’t know that I was ever able to connect what I did on a daily basis to the result. Don’t get me wrong, I still did my best every day I showed up but that was not driven by the clarity that can come from being about to measure how our individual efforts impact the overall goals. All that said, I have no doubt that measuring things that were within my control, things that I could connect directly to the overall goals, would have resulted in at least a slight increase in my effort. The real key in making things measurable is in keeping it personal - tying those measurements directly to the things our team members are doing daily.

With regards to relevance, I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who wants to work hard just for the sake of working hard. Having a clear purpose is critical. Knowing the effort we put into something makes a slight difference in the final product can help but having complete clarity around why every meticulous step we need to follow in a tedious process matters to every other individual involved, as well as the end user, is often what separates good enough from excellence! I remember having to measure parts I was making through a stamping press to ensure the pattern fell within a certain tolerance. The range was fairly broad so staying within the tolerance was easy enough. In most cases, I didn’t need to adjust anything from model to model to maintain the tolerance. When I learned how much more productive the folks responsible for the next step in the process could be when I make sure those parts were at one end of the tolerance - exactly - every single time, I was able to make a slight chance in how I did my job that helped them achieve remarkably better results with a lot less effort. That change required a little more time in my set up but I saw purpose in making the adjustment. Not only did it help improve overall quality slightly, I could see how it helped my coworkers immediately. Any time we can tie more relevance to a task, the odds of earning an increase in engagement go up!

To illustrate the final step we can take to remove job misery and earn higher engagement, I’ll start by asking a question: have you ever worked for someone, directly or ever indirectly, who just never got your name right? My name is pretty simple; three letter first name and four letter last name. When someone isn’t sure about the last name, I relate to the bird, the chocolate, or the soap. Doing this usually draws a chuckle but it also helps solidify it in their mind. I recently had the kid at our grocery pickup beat me to it; I had clearly made an impression… All that said, I’ve seen situations where supervisors, managers, or even coworkers got someone’s name wrong every single time they interacted with that person. In some cases it was as innocent as mispronouncing it. Sometimes though, it was a blatant case of being so self-absorbed that they hadn’t even tried to get it right. Think back to the quote I shared before from Dale Carnegie that ties to this, “a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” That certainly applies to recruiting and retaining great team members, but it also applies to earning engagement. But to earn even more engagement, it’s not as basic as knowing their name… When we’re willing to invest the time and energy into getting to know about their lives, their families, and even their hobbies, we show they we value them for more than just what they produce - which almost always results in more engagement and higher production!

If we can build each of these simple things into how we interact with our teams, I have no doubt that we’ll be well on our way to earning that big increase in discretionary effort that comes from higher employee engagement and we’ll have yet another profitability killer under control. Before wrapping up our look at addressing the cost of disengaged employees though, there’s one final thing we need to consider and we’ll do that next.