Every time I read the results of research on employee engagement, I get depressed. To think that so many people are feeling a lack of commitment makes me wonder about the impact on people´s health and well-being. After all, we all want to feel we are contributing in ways we find meaningful and given the number of hours we invest in our work, it seems important to have a certain level of connection to our jobs.
I know many organizations and their HR professionals are looking at ways to facilitate higher levels of employee enthusiasm. I want you to be aware of a great resource on this subject. Dr. David Sirota was the lead author on a fantastic new book called The Enthusiastic Employee - How Companies Profit By Giving Workers What They Want. It is co-authored with Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irvin Meltzer. The book is based on decades of research conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence. They provide a vast amount of very useful information on what is required to maintain employee enthusiasm over time. Bottom line, as David stated in my Thought Leader interview with him recently, I am often asked to speak on the topic, how do you motivate employees?
And I think that´s a very silly question. The real issue is not how do you motivate people, but how do you keep management from destroying that motivation? That´s the key question. You don´t need all kinds of gimmicks to motivate people. You have to treat people in a way that their natural enthusiasm can flourish, and how does that happen?
There are specific practices, but it comes back to three basic goals of employees: that is satisfying those three goals of equity, achievement and camaraderie through a culture in which employees are treated as partners. The long-term returns to the business are huge.
In our interview, David provided some very specific suggestions on how to meet those three universal goals. Click here to read a summary of that interview. Click here to listen to an archive of the interview.
It would be interesting to do a study on the increasing rates of obesity and television consumption and see if there is a correlation between people´s degree of engagement in their work and healthy lifestyle habits. Anybody know of one?
