Think about the first job you had during summer vacation when you were young. Were you a fair attendant? Were you a waiter in a chain restaurant? A cashier in a chain supermarket? Or were you a sales representative in a department store in a shopping mall? You probably did those jobs for a couple of reasons: money and work experience. In many entry-level jobs, the employer may be happy just to have any employee at all, and so they hope that the money earned or the fact that you have a job to put on your resume will be enough to keep you working for a while.
However, some employers may have a similar view of the employee, not only for entry-level jobs but for all levels of work. In their view, it is enough to provide employees with the basic training and requirements to do their job. But people need much more than basic needs and knowing how to do their jobs! First of all, just providing employees with basic training is not enough to retain them. What's more, your hard-to-retain employees won't put much effort into retaining your customers. In other words, they will not provide a superior service to your customers. The key, of course, is to have engaged employees or to lead people on how to be engaged in their work.
Teaching the Basic Principles of Work is Not Enough
Global companies and some institutionalized firms that understand the importance of people, even in entry-level roles, offer much more than a training manual that tells an employee how to do their job. Such guides approach the "human being" as a complex being with a variety of needs, wants and emotions and base the induction guide on this. The experts who prepare these guides know this very well, so they include supporting information about the psychological aspects of the job and the elements of commitment.
Not all companies provide such supportive guidance, so some of us learn about these issues too late or not at all. Performance at work and Employee Engagement are closely interrelated.
When I was 15 years old, I first started working in my brother-in-law's shop during the summer months. I continued to work in part-time roles during high school and university, and I never left business life afterwards. My career has always progressed on an upward curve. When I look back now, I realize that I put my heart, mind, soul and hands into all the work I did. Work always had a meaning beyond work for me. Most of my career was spent working for a multinational company. Although the company I worked for was very satisfying in many aspects such as status, income, benefits and success, after a while, the incompatibilities between the people and leadership processes and my values made me lose my commitment to my job. However, in those days, I found it difficult to name the change in my mood in a way that everyone could understand, because I had never encountered the idea of "employee engagement" in my professional work life until that day. In fact, the company I worked for had many good practices to satisfy employees, but the company did not have an approach to creating engagement. Many people were satisfying themselves with elements of satisfaction (hygiene factors), some, like me, were catching the elements of engagement in the natural process, and some were not catching them and leaving. After establishing a consulting company that "measures and improves employee engagement", I fully understood that one of the reasons I left was that the basic factors of Employee Engagement disappeared over time. Having grown up for 20 years in an ecosystem of multinational companies in the IT sector and regularly spending 30% of his annual income on domestic and international trainings, even I only learned what Employee Engagement was when I was 35 years old. So I can tell you clearly that giving your employees only the basic competencies to do their jobs and trying to retain them with satisfaction factors leads you to lose them after the excitement of satisfaction factors wears off. While there are many reasons for losing employees, the top reasons for not retaining them are neither salary, nor relationships, nor hygiene factors. The most fundamental factor is that you haven't taught them what employee engagement is. Because employee engagement is about meaning, employees who do not find meaning in their work and do not know how to find meaning, attribute their internal unhappiness to external factors and make constant demands on the company and their managers. And if their demands are not met, then their turnover accelerates.
Employee Engagement Transforms Your Business
What led to our current partnership with Decision Wise was reading their book "ENGAGEMENT MAGIC: 5 Tricks to Keep People, Leaders and Organizations Engaged" when I was learning more about engagement after leaving corporate life. This book and its philosophy helped me realize why I left my last job. Armed with the new ideas I had learned, I would be better able to help Success Programme's clients, create a clear strategy for companies and help their employees become engaged employees.
Why am I telling you this? Because even when I was at the top of my career in the corporate world, I didn't know the drivers of employee engagement: Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact and Connection, or MAGIC for short, were the most critical factors for an employee to be engaged. I didn't have the vocabulary then to explain why I was unhappy in most cases. I didn't know that there were specific areas of my employee experience that I needed to nurture.
If I had a better understanding of meaning, I would be able to communicate more clearly about the situations that make it difficult for me to find meaning in my work, rather than endure them in silence.
If I had a better understanding of autonomy , I would be able to talk with data about where my manager should give me permission to shape my own experience in ways that reduce stress and bad feelings.
If I had a better understanding of development and growth, I could clarify which development plans for my current and future self would keep me committed to my work.
If I had a better understanding of impact, I could learn to see the impact I have and celebrate it myself.
If I had thought more about belonging, maybe I would have spent more time getting to know my colleagues better and learning from them while networking.
Luckily, none of this is a loss for me. On the contrary, they are wonderful experiences. If I hadn't gone through these processes, maybe I wouldn't be able to create value for hundreds of companies, thousands of employees and leaders today. But not every employee can leave their job and start a company and make a bigger impact on the market, and that's natural. A person who leaves his/her job and does not know exactly why he/she is leaving may move to another company, but he/she takes himself/herself with him/her wherever he/she goes, and if he/she does not understand the issue of engagement, he/she will enter the same vicious circle and his/her engagement will decrease. Or he continues his career as an unhappy employee who cannot find meaning in his work by chasing satisfaction factors throughout his life.
Let's Build a Better Future for Our Workforce
I don't want anyone who enters business life to start their career journey without understanding the concept of employee engagement. We have made this our mission at Success Programme. Because according to a new study by MIT, "Businesses with the best employee experience are twice as likely to be twice as good at innovation, twice as good at customer satisfaction, and 25% better at profitability than others." In order to enrich our country, engagement needs to be well understood.
If you teach young employees the drivers of engagement when they first join and revisit these ideas in each of their subsequent positions, our workforce will be stronger, happier, more productive and more profitable.
So what can we do right now, today? We can share experience and knowledge. We can send this article to a young person in our lives or give the ENGAGEMENT MAGIC book as a gift. If our friends and family are experiencing difficulties at work, we can use the MAGIC model to help them assess where they are struggling.
Supporting your new and existing employees in learning the meaning of "Employee Engagement" will make life much more satisfying and successful for them and for you.