- juliakala
Engagement: It’s time to shift the focus
In our previous blog, we suggested that too often engagement is not being approached in the right way. One of the most prevalent approaches to engagement has been to overly focus on the perks or benefits that is assumed employees will enjoy. Whilst understandable, that has not driven productivity, performance or engagement – certainly not in the long term.
We believe that we need to shift our focus to:
Creating the conditions for people to do meaningful and challenging work in a high performing team.
Providing them with the tools, environment and support to do their work.
Enabling, supporting, coaching and giving feedback on how they’re tracking.
Allow them the freedom and autonomy to deliver, create and solve.
It is an approach that clearly differs from the predominant organisational paradigm that has been used over the last 150 years. But, if we truly want to engage the hearts and minds of employees, we need to shift the hierarchical, command and control, task focused approach to one that prioritises organisational performance and the positive management of people.
An ‘agile’ approach, based on cross functional team performance, looks to be the paradigm shift required. There is plenty of thought leaders discussing this, and evidence from forward thinking organisations that is testament to the impact on growth, performance and engagement.
The data offers great insight. When we shift to giving people – and teams – responsibility for their own performance, development and output, there’s a significant change in productivity, engagement and motivation.
Giving people responsibility for their performance involves a change in mindset and behaviours – throughout the organisation. The employee needs to be given the power, permission and tools to drive their performance.
Leaders need to be supported to make this shift possible. For some, relinquishing excessive control and management of tasks, processes and people can be challenging – we need to expect this to be evolution not revolution.
The 5 hallmarks of this approach are:
Employee engagement is a topic that we are hugely passionate about and was the reason we developed our tool, Pulse 360, which aims to support real employee engagement and performance.
For employees, it supports taking charge of their own development, and for real-time feedback to be requested and shared.
For organisations, it helps leaders collate information on key issues and provides an opportunity for the employee voice to be heard.
Used across an organisation, it can lead to a shift to a high-performance feedback culture.
About Us
Pulse 360 has been developed and created by Foundation SP - a three-time winner of Great Place to Work ® and a thought leader in employee engagement and workplace culture.
We are passionate evangelists for modern ways of working that support organisational growth and employee impact. Pulse 360 is a fresh approach to feedback and employee development from an award-winning employer.