In the most recent report, employees seem to be becoming much more particular about their job responsibilities. Top of employees’ wish lists is being granted work that they find interesting and being able to use their own initiative. In addition, a quarter of employees believe that they would be more productive if they were given tasks that complement their skills.
A third of employees also believe they are overqualified for their current job. Interestingly, senior managers actually see a significant skills gap in their workforce, with only 8 percent believing the reason is that candidates are overqualified. Surely there’s an incentive here for management to start placing and challenging their employees more effectively?
Keep Overqualified Employees Challenged
All employees should have their abilities stretched in order to keep up their energy levels, and for overqualified employees this need is even more critical. Organisations that occasionally hire overqualified employees need to make a concerted effort to find them work that they find meaningful, which means providing challenging tasks whilst accommodating the types of skills and experience that they bring to the position.One way to keep that person engaged could be through an individual project; even if it’s outside of his or her particular department or sphere of expertise. Most HR professionals are familiar with the Google HR programme known as “20 percent time” (assigning 20 percent of employees work time to dedicate to a project of their own interest), but how many actually put this into practice? Atlassian, a software company, have a similar initiative called ShipIt, which they call ‘20 percent time, on steroids’.
Overqualified employees could be the guinea pigs who drive this type of initiative within your organisation – by engaging in these unstructured projects, the person might end up adding some fresh perspective or value to the organisation and their own work as a whole.
Understand What Drives Disengagement
There isn’t necessarily a prescriptive method for engaging employees, and each company culture is going to require unique initiatives in order to do so. It’s therefore first worth taking the time to understand the main factors that contribute to disengagement in your organisation.
Traditional surveys provide a snapshot of the company at a single point in time, once a year. While undeniably useful, this survey format cannot hope to reflect the ebb and flow of employee attitudes and opinions of staff on a day-to-day basis. The more modern HR department will be using pulse surveys instead, which provide the real-time analytics needed to understand workplace sentiment.
Pulse surveys provide anonymous data, however, since overqualified employees are more likely to be disengaged or neutral compared to other staff members (according to CIPD), these people may be the best sources for understanding disengagement as a whole within your organization. Hold review sessions with them in order to also gauge employee sentiment anecdotally.
Conclusion
Every employee wants to feel like their work is worthwhile and that their role fits well into the team dynamic. But knowing how to strategically place, supervise and train overqualified employees to ensure they’re adequately challenged simply takes a little more thought and engagement from upper management.The main challenge comes from empowering these individual so that they overcome the negative impact of perceived overqualification.
