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Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
Join James and Coby from Roman 3 as they diagnose issues and prescribe solutions to today's most important workplace challenges.
Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
What Does Employee Engagement Look Like When Done Badly?
In this episode, we explore common yet ineffective employee engagement activities. We recap some points around employee engagement from past episodes, while providing some clarity on why what you might be implementing is not working.
Our prescription for this episode is to understand that employee engagement actions are different from the outcome of having engaged employees. What most companies do not realize they are actually looking for improvements to the employee experience.
Past Episode Referenced:
Season 1 Episode 14: Why Is Employee Engagement So Difficult?
Season 1 Episode 24: What Makes Employee Engagement Actually Work?
Season 2 Episode 11: Should Companies Be Doing Employee Engagement?
Season 2 Episode 22: Is Fun A Dangerous Expectation In Organizational Culture?
Season 3 Episode 11: What Is Some Practical Psychology For The Workplace?
Season 3 Episode 24: What Do I Need To Know To Be An Effective Leader?
To talk more about employee engagement and the employee experience, reach out to us at info@roman3.ca or through our LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/roman3
Don't forget to sign up for our New Quarterly Newsletter that launched in the fall of 2024!
About Our Hosts!
James is an experienced business coach with a specialization in HR management and talent attraction and retention.
Coby is a skilled educator and has an extensive background in building workforce and organizational capacity.
For a little more on our ideas and concepts, check out our Knowledge Suite or our YouTube Channel, Solutions Explained by Roman 3.
Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.
[COBY]:Did we lose a patient?
[JAMES]:No, that's just my lunch.
[COBY]:Hey, thanks for joining us. I'm Coby, he's James. And let's get started with a question. What does employee engagement look like when done badly?
[JAMES]:Ah, the simple answer is, unfortunately, what most people actually experience with employee engagement activities. It's a survey that we never see any changes from or it's a pizza party or a forced odating or, you know, a fun Friday. It' really, in essence, when it's done poorly, it looks like an afterthought. Right. It looks like it's shallow and it's disconnected from what people actually experience in their workplace on a daily basis. And kind of similar to how we, to our conversation that we've had about the four faces of hr, I kind of wanna talk today about the four profiles of poor engagement practices.
[COBY]:M yeah. And I think it's important to. Before wegin to dig into the four of ineffective and broken engagement strategies that we kind of look at how we got here. Why is it that, ah, this is so common, as you were saying. And I mean, we'talked before about employee engagement a number of times. So I mean, I don't want to rehash those old conversations, but I think we should just kind of pull some of the stuff from them. So you know that because it, it's relevantah. and one of the things that I think is a really important one to start in is that we talk about a lot when we're talking about kind of employee engagement with organizations and other consultants and stuff like that is we talk about the difference between the verb engagement and the noun of employee engagement. And the idea that the noun is having engagement being the engaging with engagement, existing it something that is kind of in people and it is kind of like in the culture and it's something that you have. Whereas the verb of engagement is more about engaging with people. It's the act of doing engagement.
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:And the idea of like, you're engaging with, you're doing actions that have it that are engaging with people and you're doing stuff that's connecting with them and everything like that.
[JAMES]:You're communicating to people, you are sending them messages, you are broadcasting information to them, you're surveying them, you're collecting data, you're engaging with. Right. It's the social media sense of engagement of. Yeah, right. If you talk to somebody that is an engagement.
[COBY]:Right. When it's a verb. Its a process, something that youre doing something it steps, it things that you can see, you can measure and its touch points, those kind of things. But I mean, I think that when we talk about the benefits of employee engagement, we're talking about the benefits of having engagement. In employees. The noun of engagement exists they people.
[JAMES]:Who are actively engaged in the work, who are showing up with motivation and enthusiasm. That's what we are. That's what people talk about. But that's not what people do. Right. That's what we say we want when we talk about engagement strategies. We want people who are highly motivated and engaged in the work and then we send them a survey.
[COBY]:Yeah, yeah. And I just said, I mean when we're talking to kind of corporate clients that have like big engagement initiatives and engagement surveys, anything else like that too, is that they're unknowingly switching back and forth between the noun and their verb of engagement. They're like, well, we want the noun so we'll do the verb. Not realizing that those are two completely separate things, that their confusion is why what they're doing is often being done badly because they're again, almost like using the process of engaging with people, the verb, and thinking that if we engage with them, that creates the noun. And that's a very false equivalent. And that math does not work out well.
[JAMES]:One is an activity, the other is an outcome. Right. And we're getting stuck on the activities. Right. Where we are by doing something. Doing something is better than nothing is kind of the mentality. Right. So we'll do something in that should lead to engagement. But the problem that we see so often with in, you know, employee engagement activities or departments that are running engagement activities is that they are so focused on individual activities that it's not connected to part of a larger strategy. There's no yes in and of itself. I listed a few things like pizza parties and odings and Fun Fridays and engagement service. And there's lots of those examples in and of themselves. Each one of those is not inherently bad. It's that they're completely disconnected from any strategy. And the thing that always drives me nuts is that there are initiatives that tend to be made at the corporate level that really have no bearing or impact on the day to day experience that people have. And if you want people to be motivated and show up and be engaged in their work, make their daily work better.
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. And I think anybody having a conversation that at the corporate level, at the boardroom level, talking about employee Engagement. I think the smartest thing they could do is to take a beat and ask, okay, are we talking about engaging with people or creating engagement in people or talking about the action or the outcome? What I mean, like the verb or the noun? And I think that. Because if, because you're right, because the key to creating the noun, the outcome, the having engagement in people, is about the everyday employee experience, whereas the key to creating the verb, the action, is doing things that connect you to people. It is communications. It is maybe the one off events or those types of things. Right. But I mean, its realizing that they are two completely separate things and unfortunately share the same name and theyre EAs to confuse. And if youe in a conversation talking about employee engagement and youre not trying to decipher which are you talking about, the noun or the verb, the action of the outcome, then youre ultimately doomed to do it badly because youre misunderstanding what youre actually trying to achieve and youre bringing the wrong tool to the problem. Right?
[JAMES]:Yeah. And I mean, in terms of how we got there, I can see how we got here. Right. Because I mean, I'm a data geek. I love looking at data. So employee engagement surveys are actually really good sources of data, but in and of itself, it's not enough. Right. We need to actually use that data to make changes and communicate with people about, here's what we heard from you and here's what we're doing as a result. That's one. The other piece is that it is easier to measure actions than it is to measure outcomes. And we get stuck in performative solutions of, well, we need to, we know that we need to do engagement. So here are the things that we are going to do. And as long as we are checking those boxes, as long as we are performing the actions that we set that out, to do, we can measure that and we can say that we have been large, wildly successful because we did everything that we set out to do. It's easy to measure actions, but getting that outcome is more difficult because people are messy and complex.
[COBY]:Yeah. Yeah. And again, like, you know, when kind m of big initiatives happen and they do the surveys and that like that, and then they have that, they have that great data, then they're like, okay, so now what?
[JAMES]:Well, and what kills me every time we take a look at the data is most employee engagement surveys will have a question framed around essentially asking, how likely you think it is that change is going to happen as a result of this. And I've never seen results that are more greater than 50% on this. Right. Like when we're working with corporate clients and they have these great data sets to pull from your front line are telling you over and over again that they don't see any benefit to them. No positive change. They're not expecting that this entire activity that you're going through is actually going to make a difference. And theyre largely right.
[COBY]:Right. But the reason why theyre largely right is because theyre wanting the outcome. Theyre wanting to feel motivated and enthusiastic. Theyre wanting to feel connected and recognized and they want to feel engaged.
[JAMES]:They want that positive experience in their work day to day.
[COBY]:Exactly. And what theyre given are the things you mentioned before. They're given the fun Fridays of the pizza parties or these one off pieces or the end of the year Christmas parties or these types of things. And then but like they'like yeah, this isn't what I'm asking for. But the problem is you're not asking me in your surveys the right question. I care about the employee experience. I don't care about, you know, forced hangouts after work every third Wednesday.
[JAMES]:You can't frame the question like as a corporate initiative, as a when you're crafting the survey questions, you can't use language like employee experience. You have to get to the result without using the buzzwords. Right. Because employees are not going to tell you I want a better employee experience. Well, some might but generally it's I want less of this garbage that is bogging me down on a regular basis and I want more of this stuff that makes my job easier.
[COBY]:Yeaheah. I want less swag and I want managers that listen. Right, Right. It's of. And we've talked a number of times and actually I think the conversations that we've had about, about management skills and stuff like that and good leadership, those are hugely beneficial. To kind of talking about the how do we really create engagement? Because much so much the employee experience is defined m by someone's direct supervisor. Right. Yeah. So I mean like, so it's an idea of like there's a lot there but I don't want to dwell on that because we just have a conversation about that. but it is really just kind of getting down to how we got here is misunderstanding the difference between again the action and the outcome, the verb and the noun but also thinking well we need to be able to measure it. And measuring survey results. Measuring, measuring interactions and touch points and those kinds of things and events and those types of pieces are communications going out there. Right. The internal comms actions. That's really easy to capture that data. So it's so, you know, because we misunderstand the point and we're using the wrong tool for the problem. We'using the verb when we want the noun. And using the verb is really easy to measure. That's why we're where we're at.
[JAMES]:Yeah. We've taken the path of least resistance.
[COBY]:Yeah. Whether or not we were looking in the right direction.
[JAMES]:Yeah, yeah.
[COBY]:So, yeah. So I think that again, so. So, it's important for us to talk about what I think next. What does it look like? And I mean, so you mentioned before, we kind of have the like, kind of the profiles, kind of the four broken employee engagement strategies. and what's so funny is these are things I think anyone that's worked for like more than five years can probably be like, yeah, I've experienced probably all of those, or at least three, out of four of those because we're so prevalent. so we'll go through them kind of each individually and then we'kind of, hopefully we'll get to a point where we can make some recommendations on. Okay, so we talked about how we got here, we talked about what it looks like, but what can we do about it? So hopefully we'll get to that. But, let's start with the first one, the one that we call the broadcasters. So this is like the initiative or this is like the approach that many, many, many organizations take, especially at the corporate level, where they're talking about what we just said before, about engaging with people, focusing on the actions, focusing on the verb. It's just like, you know, we just tell you stuff. And because you have access to things and you've heard from us and you've opened up those emails. Engagement achieved.
[JAMES]:And it sounds ridiculous when we frame it this way, intentionally, but it's far too common that engagement is looked at as purely a communications activity. Literally listening to, clients and stories of, thinking that the problem is that people just don't understand what it is that you have to offer. And if we just told them the same information in 47 different ways with 47 different touch points, with emails and with posters and m, okay, there could be a communications problem, but you're not going to communicate your way out of bad practices. You have to actually change the bad practices. And this broadcaster mentality of, well, it's not us who are wrong, it's obviously the employees who just don't Understand how flippin amazing we are as a corporation. They're the ones who are wrong. So let's do more communications and let's blast them with more emails and make the managers do big communication sessions during their morning meetings. It doesn't work.
[COBY]:No. And the thing too is like IESS So again, we see this a lot when organizations are like, especially corporate organizations are trying to improve motivation in people. So, so though, okay, we want toa make sure it's really clear how great it is to work here and the people can you like we're making a difference or you know, we're really trying to kind of have them connect to how lucky they are to work here. So they do campaigns where they hire these very attractive models to wear the store uniforms and pose and like laughing and stuff like that. And they put them up in the break rooms or they broadcast those kind of own social media and they're like, boom. We're, you know, we're engaging with people. We've got stuff for people to see this really easy, measurable pieces. So we're pretty great. So we're nailing it.
[JAMES]:Yeah. It's like a grocery store celebrating how they, you know, m buy produce locally. That's a good thing. But it doesn't actually make any difference to the daily experience that your employees have. So putting up more communications of look how great we are because we are doing this marginal benefit to the community, then they leave the break room and they're inundated with all of the crap that they have to deal with on a regular basis. Right. Your communications and your actions do not align.
[COBY]:Yes. Now I think it's really important for us just to make it clear that we're not saying that broadcasting, putting a lot of information out there is a bad thing because one of the things we also hear from people that impacts their, their motivation and enthusiasm is not knowing enough about what's going on. But imagine how frustrating it is when you're in, you're at work and you don't understand the why stuff is happening or you don't know what's going on or things are changing constantly. You'especially to kind of keep up and the stuff that you want to know you're not really getting access to. It's not the conversation in the morning meetings. There's not lots of information available to you online or in the break room or whatever. But those posters are up. Those like the banners of we're buying local or we donated this much money to charities last year or those types of broadcasting is, there's effort being put into that. But you as the everyday employee don't really know the stuff you need do to do your job well. That is compounds how frustrate and how unmotivated, how unenthusiastic you are. Because they can take the time to tell us that, but it can't take the time to tell me what I need to be able to provide good customer service or be able to follow through my work or bring my best self to work or whatever. Right?
[JAMES]:Yeah, you're right there'for. Any of these, kind of profiles that we are talking about, the actions themselves aren't. Actions are largely neutral. Like these activities are largely neutral. They can be really good, they can be really bad. It really depends on is it connected to a larger strategy? Is it connected to something that will actually improve people's ability to be engaged in the work if the outcome is tied to the action. So if your action is just being a broadcaster and the outcome that youre looking for is more broadcasting than you have failed, right?
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And ultimately is the broadcasting or doing about improving the everyday employee experience?
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:And if it's not, you're doing it wrong.
[JAMES]:Like if you have started a new initiative, a new pilot program or a new initiative or new something, there's new processes in place that are going to help people in their work on a regular basis. Broadcast the crap out of that.
[COBY]:Absolutely.
[JAMES]:But if you're just talking about how great you are without changing anything that affects your employees, ##ting, you are not going to get the engagement outcome that you think you are.
[COBY]:Right? Yes. Or if you only think the way to create engagement in employees motivation and enthusiasm is through, broadcasting and engaging with people. Its just through communication activities, then youre again bringing the wrong tool to the problem. All right, let's move on to the next one. Oay the next one, it will be called the arcade. So the second broken employee engagement strategy is the arcade. And this is about when workplaces try to be fun, and are trying to be like showy or were progressive and like that. And it tends to be like a lot of distractions or a lot of, a lot of effort in looking hip and cool and fun. sometimes there's like, you know, we have gamification elements, we have leaderboards of like sales things or you like, we've got just. It's about, it's about trying to be hip and fun and cool and showy and thinking that fun is what is needed in order for engagement to Happen. And again, this hard to do. Well, it's hard to do authentically and it's hard to just not be blme when your focal point is just is the arcade.
[JAMES]:Yeah. It comes across as really shallow. I mean, your employees are not stupid. Yeah, Right. If you are an employee in a large corporate entity, ah, that has multiple or dozens or hundreds of locations and what they get from you is a leaderboard for a $20 gift card to your own bloody store. It's wasted.
[COBY]:Yeah, you're right. But I mean, this is also kind of when often like the fun pizza parties or the crazy casual Fridays, you know, those are, those often kind of live in, in the arcade because it's.
[JAMES]:About being fun, it's about being hip and we are such a fun place to work. So in the 10 minutes that you actually have to sit down and take a break and catch your breath engaging these really fun activities and then go back out into the madness. M. Right. Or even worse, we're going to have all these fun activities after work and we're not going to pay you to show up.
[COBY]:Right. right.
[JAMES]:So spend your day at work, work your tail off and then on your own time, come on back for some great fun with people that you've just spent the entire day with.
[COBY]:Yeah. And like, again, we also see this in like, like tech startups too.
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:And like, it's the idea, like, you know, we're tech, we're cool, we're hip, we're doing the like, bean bag chairs and yoga balls instead of office chairs. And we did an episode, I think it was last season we talked about, like, is how effective is fun, as an expectation of your organizational culture. And we pretty much lambasted that concept and really shut down the idea that fun is a terrible, like, value proposition for, organizations to kind of try and achieve if they actually want to be a good employer. Right. and a lot of that is. So I'll make sure that'referenced we have that episode, listed in the show notes. So people want to check with that episode. It's a good one. But the idea of this is kind of embodying the arcade. It's like, we're not. The job is hard, we don't respect you. we don't train our managers. But you know, pizza and T shirts on Fridays.
[JAMES]:Tech is, Tech is bad for this. I mean, it's so often, especially in tech startups, they want you to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week, to build this, culture to Build this, amazing next, whatever. Right. we're going to be the next Google, we're going to be the next Amazon. So get in on the ground floor, work like a dog. But don't worry because we've got foosball.
[COBY]:Yeah. Yeah.
[JAMES]:Right. It's. Again, we are taking it a little bit to the extreme to show the ridiculousness of these mentalities, but these are unfortunately way too common as the focal point for engagement strategies.
[COBY]:Yeah. Now again we've seen elements of the arcade done well as part of a larger strategy.
[JAMES]:Yeah. Right.
[COBY]:Like, I mean again we've work with clients that have, that allow like have a pet friendly policy. People can bring their pets to work. There's some rules around it and everything like that, but it's well maintained. But like, you know, it's about providing kind of a casual environment that people can actually, you know, feel like, you know, that there's, that they can have some, some other things like you know, the, they try and take off like Friday afternoons in order to do something that will be kind of a stop building.
[JAMES]:P. I would love to have a foosball table or pool table. Right. In a games room or a break room where, you know, if I'm working away and I need, you know, a few minutes to recover and just take a break and clear my head, that would be, I would enjoy that. But if that's all I get from you. Then I'm not going to be satisfied.
[COBY]:Right? Yes. And yeah, if it's, if it's a. Again, like part of the arcade is, is if you're putting too much weight on making up for all the other things that you're not able to fix, like the quality of your managers, the skills in your management team, or the ridiculously long hours and low pay and you know, like just the, the you're burning people out intensity. Exactly. yeah. And you're like, you know, and you're saying, well we can balance that by again, fooball tables, pizzas, you know, those types of things, leaderboards, you know, that's, that doesn't work. But if you're in a workplace where you're like, you know what? We don't have to be stuffy, we don't have to be super serious. We can be laid back within but still be productive and still be effective and still provide you what you need to bring your best self to work and to not feel burned out while you're here. And we listen when you got good suggestions on stuff that would make the experience you have as an employee, more effective, more engaging, so you're more motivated. You'through ##husiastic and optimistic about working here. That, it rings very differently when it's done well with authenticity than when it's meant to be the making up for all the other stuff that we just don't feel like investing and fixing.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And I mean, you hit the important word there. It's authenticity. Right. If you are authentically trying to provide people things of value, provide things that it's not about necessarily balancing the scales of. We've got a really stressful, high intensity, high workload, long hours. So to balance that, we're going to give you these token, games that you can play. That doesn't balance the scales because it feels very shallow because you don't. It doesn't feel like you actually care about what people are experiencing. it feels like all you're trying to do is distract them from the reality of the workplace rather than trying to fix the problems in the workplace.
[COBY]:Yeah, that's a good way to put it. All right, let's move on to the third one. So we talked the first two. Just recap the broadcasters. everything's about communication and about putting stuff out there. What we just talked about is the arcade, the fun workplace, that kind of show we lot the distractions. The third one is what we call the friendsters.
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:And this is when companies kind of like force group hangouts or trying to manufacture bonds between employees, as a way of, like, manufacturing friendships among staff. And I mean, what's funny is there is real data to suggest that morale and camaraderie and personal connections between employees is a major factor in employee retention. That people don't leave jobs, they leave teams and they leave managers. So there is an absolute need to kind of have an environment that fosters natural professional relationships and camaraderie 100%.
[JAMES]:But the key is professional relationships. Yeah, right. Like, personally, I don't take myself too seriously. I mean, I'm serious when I have to be. it's not surprising if you've been listening to the podcast. And I like to joke around. I like to have fun at work. I like to just be a little irritating. it's kind of my m. MO it is fair. But outside of work, the people I like, the people who I work with and in previous jobs, I've had great friendships that have been developed as a result of work that have carried on beyond that. But when work stops, I want to Go home. I want to spend time with my family. I want to decompress. I don't want to be forced into a social setting, that makes me spend more time thinking and talking about work. Because these great professional relationships that I've built and these friendships that I've built are still built on the foundation of the commonalities that we have around work. Right? So you end up in these social gatherings where all you're really doing is just talking more about work. Right. Not everybody wants to engage in social activities outside of work. Not everybody is able to engage in social activities outside of work. People have a lot of other commitments, family commitments, childc care commitments. The, the thing that drives me absolutely bonkers is these, social activities at bars. Right? We're gonna go out on you every Friday afternoon. We're gonna let you out an hour early so that we can all get together at the bar and have a drink. Not everybody drinks. Not everybody wants to drink. Not everybody feels comfortable in bar for any host of different reasonseah. Right. It'the again, it's the forced activity. It's rather than facilitating a natural desire for people to engage in social activities, it's the, it's forcing it upon them. And the problem is if you make it optional, then people still feel like because the commonalities around work exist and our conversations when you're out socializing with your cowork workers still end up revolving around work. Those who don't show up feel left out. Because there's still work that's happening, there's still conversations that's happening. And it ends up being an exclusionary tool rather than an inclusionary tool.
[COBY]:Yeah, no, and you're 100% right. And I mean like the thing that there's lots of people that have like I said before, that are unable to participate in the after hours stuff, like childare reasons, all kinds of stuff. But we talked about, in one of our Psychology for the Workplace episodes, we talked about introverts and extroverts. M and I mean the idea of what difference between introvert and extrovert is where they get their energy from. And extroverts get their energy from other people from social situations from like interacting with, with groups were introverts that drains them. They are recharged by solitude or they're recharged by meaningful conversations with a small group of people. And it's very much of all the other kind of like demographics that are exclusionary, when it comes to kind of like the social events Those kind of pieces like that too. A massive amount of your employees are introverts. And they are having to put a lot of energy into not being excluded by attending, these things. And again, it takes a lot out of them to sit down at a bar and have a shallow conversation with Pam from payroll. Because this is what we were supposed to do. This is part of the work requirements. Right. And again, it'it's. To me what drives me crazy about the Friendster approach is the we acknowledge is not great to work here. So instead of us fixing that, we're going to make you all each other's support system so you can continue working here and we don't have to fix anything.
[JAMES]:Yeah. Ah, yeah. It. This is the one that I don't know if it is the one that bothers me the most. I think so. because it just, it feels, it feels like it's done so badly so often. Because when do we schedule social events? Friday afternoon? Friday evening. Right. Friday after work. Or even worse on a Saturday. Right. By the end of the week. I like, I am very fortunate. I love what we do at Roman 3. I enjoy it. It in many ways fills my bucket. It, you know, you're not terrible to work with.
[COBY]:that's you say on camera, off camera, totally different.
[JAMES]:Yeah, exactly. It's far harsher. But like, even for me, who I recognize that I am quite lucky in being able to do something that just I really enjoy doing. And yet by the end of the week I am tired. Right. How I can remember being in other positions, other organizations where I did not feel as fulfilled by the work getting to the end of the week and not wanting to talk to anyone. Right. And yet the Friendster approach is let's take a Friday after work and all get together for a forced social activity. No thanks. Yeah, but yet the expectation becomes if you don't do it, you're not part of the team.
[COBY]:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, and there's just, you know, it's like say I get again the thought of why it's a valuable piece. Like I say, there'lots of research to show that it's our coworkers that end up being a huge motivator in why we stick with the jobs we do and how we can lean on the people that we work with when we have a bad day because they understand what we've gone through. And again, there's lots of very valuable benefits of having real human connection with those you work with. Absolutely. The problem is you can't Manufacture that.
[JAMES]:Right.
[COBY]:If you want that to happen, you need to be in a culture that is designed to support each other, that is designed to help each other out. We've seen organization, we've gone into and we'worked with companies that have trying to change their culture that their old culture used to be pitting people against each other and departments against each other and managers against each other and then expecting them to go out on Fridays for the after work hang and they're sitting across the people that they'just been like fuming at all day but they got to show up because that's expectation and this whole thing. Right. Whereas. And that just exacerbates the problem. So part of we've gone in there, we've torn down those walls and create psychological safety and build stronger bonds with employees by helping them collaborate more, resolving issues and then building actual human connection.
[JAMES]:Not having people compete for resources. Right. Giving people what they actually need to be successful rather than creating this false competition for as if there's a. There's winners and losers and we're only going to ever support the winners and the rest of you. Well, right.
[COBY]:Yeah. Again there, there's a lot of workplacess that are highly competitive and there's often like war between the like finance or admin department and the like sales department or kind of like the maintenance departments or these other kinds of pieces or production whatever it is.
[JAMES]:The old work ve versus office work versus like we've seen so many different splits in organizations and competition'not bad but m forcing people to compete for resources is right.
[COBY]:But there'often managers that legitimately are like like, you know, when we talk about like you management skills and stuff like that, like you know we've talked about this before that they'll often kind of like to stay relevant or to stay like or kind of have their team dependent on them. They'll pit their team against other departments. So that way the manager is more crucial to the functions of the organization or the functions of their team.
[JAMES]:Right.
[COBY]:As a way of like self preservation things. Right. So and then you know, and then yeah. And then that's the environment that they're like go hang out together with these people ve even feuding with all day. Right. Again, those are kind of extreme situations. But that is a reality in many, many, many workplaces. Which is why the FR prter approach to employee engagement is so broken. It's done so badly because often makes is probably the one that makes the problems worse. Probably at least half the time where the Other ones are often annoying and benign. That one can actually be more damaging at the end of the day.
[JAMES]:Yeah, I think that's fair. I think I've seen far more frustration and damage come from improper use of force of like social activities or for social activities or like that friends to approach than I have with like as, as lame as the arcade can feel and as ineffective as the broadcaster can be, they generally don't make things worse.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:Unless you are just absolutely terrible at it. but yeah, the Friendster is actually a problem.
[COBY]:Agreed. All right, so let's move on to the last one. So the last one is what we call the award show. And the award show is kind of when we save all of the recognition and all of the kind of engagement and acknowledgement and support for employees for a big showy event or retreat or some type of like saving everything up for one big shot, at doing it altogether. And, and it's often, often it's about patting the company on the back more than it is about actually engaging employees. We say it's an event for employees, but it's often really at the end of the day it's kind of marketing how great the company is to those employees, reminding them how lucky they are to have their relations. But we see this with, that's when they do like the employee awards and all those kinds of stuff too. And like the problem we have with this is there lots of problems with it. One of them when it comes to recognition is we hate it when they save up all the recognition that happens throughout the year for the big showy event for the award show instead of when it would actually would have made a difference would have been like immediately it would have been timely. Right. Would have been something that if I had known when it happened this was great, I, had kept doing it or I would have felt great at the time. But now where it's months later and I've long forgotten about it and I.
[JAMES]:Appreciate that but like, yeah, great. Okay.
[COBY]:Hard toorrow.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And so in order for recognition to be really effective, it needs to be timely, it needs to be authentic and it needs to be appreciable. So timely. That kind of makes sense, right? there should not be a six month gap between when somebody does something well and when we recognize them for it. Authentic is just what it sounds like. We should be legitimately trying to show our appreciation for the work that people are doing. And appreciable means that we need to do it in a way that people actually Appreciate that they understand. So for me, personally, I don't really care about plaques or awards. they don't do a lot for me. trophies or like these types of things. They. Okay, I mean, I guess thanks that it'll go in a box in a drawer somewheres. I don't display them. it just, it's not how I would prefer to be shown appreciation. So, again, it's not that this in and of itself is a bad thing. It's not that you should not have an annual, event or, retreat or award ceremony. It's when we do these things to the exclusion of everything else, when we think that the action will automatically create the outcome divorced from any type of strategy, that it becomes an exercise in futility. And it feels very forced, it feels very cheap. Especially we've seen this in very large, organizations or very profitable organizations where the big thank you to employees at the end of the day is a company picnic. But you have to bring your own blanket and you have to bring your own picnic basket and you have to bring your own, like, m. Yeah, it just, it feel. It's not a way to show people that they are actually valued and appreciated. Which should be the intent of these initiatives, right?
[COBY]:Absolutely. I mean, and there is that feeling of, okay, well, I know it's April and you're overworked and it's, you know, and you're burned out and you're tired and, you know, but just wait till December because when we have that Christmas party. Oh, you're going to feel great.
[JAMES]:I'm going toa. Thank you for all the work that you did in April during our busy season.
[COBY]:Yeah, exactly. Right. Again, we, again, we talk about these, you know, we ridicule them to the point of absurdity. We acknowledge that. But, this is the perspective what.
[JAMES]:Deserve to be ridiculed to the point of absurdity.
[COBY]:Well, this is the perspective that the employees feel. This is, this is you. Like you said before, when you're doing, like, information gathering, you don't need to use terms like employee experience, not one they're going to grab, but these kind of ridiculous examples that we're giving. This is actually what runs through their mind when they're burned out, when they're stressed about going into work the next day, you. When they're frustrated after the exchange they have with their manager. The ridiculing ridiculousness that we're saying is what's running through their mind. This is where their head is at and this is why it's so Important for businesses to take a step back and say are we doing this badly? Are we looking at the actions when we you'looking at the outcomes. We're looking at the verb, we should looking at the noun of engagement. Right. It's, you know, these are all the things that are, are important for us to understand if we actually want the real benefits of employee engagement. If you want higher productivity, if you want higher employee retention, if you want the more profitable and higher performing people that stake around longer, that are easier to recruit and hold on to, then we need real employee engagement. We need the noun, we need the outcome. And again, looking at the four broken strategies, the broadcasters, the arcades, the frontiers and the award show, these are not how you're going to get them.
[JAMES]:What I will say is that you can use those activities as part of a strategy. Again, it's not performative, it's not about we have to do something. So let's do a survey. Cool. Survey done, check box is checked. Let's move on. We've got a couple minutes left to talk about what can you actually do. So surveys are actually really good tools. But it is a tool, it is not an end in and of itself. So if you are going to do an employee engagement survey, one, make sure that the questions that you're asking are actually in plain language and they are getting to the heart of what people experience in their work on a daily basis. Two, if you are doing the survey, you're collecting that data, you need to tell people what you're doing with it. If you are making decisions based on that data, you need to let people know, you need to let them know that here's what we heard from you, here's what we are doing with that information. Thank you very much for sharing your opinions with us because it's going to cause now we are going to do X, Y and Z. That communication has to happen. If you are asking people for their opinions, you need to let them know what you're doing with it. If you're not doing anything with that data, don't frgin collect it because it's just a waste of time.
[COBY]:Right. And again and we're saying that these four broken engagement strategies, the broadcaster, the arcade, the Frenrs and the award show, like you said, they're not bad in and of themselves. Combine, they could actually be effective as adding to your strategy to improve the employee experience. Like if you're collecting data and you're saying this data from these surveys are how we're going to improve your everyday life. Employees broadcast that, put that out there, let them know and then if things are going well and you want to add a little bit more levity, a little bit more casualness to that experience, some elements of the arcade could be a great thing. If you want to create in the environment where employees can have a chance to kind of connect and chat and support each other, then elements of the front they are done during work hours authentically m and making sure that they're there to support each other can be very beneficial. And then on top of all these things, you also want to show them that they're valued at an award show that is reinforcing all the great recognition and all the stuff that's been going on through year. As a recap and highlighting that can be great as ah again, actions that support the strategy of improving the employee experience.
[JAMES]:Yeah. I think fundamentally if you are relying on any one activity to fix your engagement problem, you have an issue to address there.
[COBY]:Yeah, agree.
[JAMES]:And you need a strategy. You need to know what you're trying to accomplish. And our strong recommendation is that your strategy should be focused on fixing the daily experience that your employees have.
[COBY]:Absolutely. I think those last few comments for both of us, probably as good as we're gonna get for a summary. I don't think I could do any better. So yeah, all right. I think that's about. Those are for us. So for a full archive of the podcast and access to video vers and hosted on our YouTube channel, visit Roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these, don't forget to visit us at www.roman3ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employee breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, aversion to the sound of James' voice, desire to find a better podcast…
