Happiness, Employee Experience, Employee Engagement are concepts which though spoken lightly are very deep and achieving. These means plenty of hard work, and cultural shifts within an organization. One very important bit here is the prevalence of “Feedback” in the organizational DNA. It’s a simple concept but very difficult to be practiced right but once done can reap rich benefits. In the wellbeing world, we refer to the benefit as “Occupational Wellbeing”
Employee Engagement is often equated with humouring people to make them happy at work and nothing can be farther from the truth than that.
Let me refer to an old Job Characteristic theory which talks of the basic building blocks for a person to be ‘satisfied’ and now ‘engaged’ with his / her work or job.
The model identifies 5 factors which influence the contentment with one’s job. These are:
- Skill Variety – extent to which there is opportunity to use multiple skills
- Task Identity – extent to which an individual gets to feel that he / she is doing the “whole” thing
- Task Significance – extent to which one feels the job impacts the organizational objectives
- Autonomy
- Feedback
Now this model also gives a “motivating potential score” (MPS) which can be calculated, using the core dimensions discussed above, as follows:
While all 5 core dimensions have an impact, what you can
make out is that given all dimensions wherever they are, the score on feedback
is a multiplier which means if it is any less than 1 or 100% it will bring the
score down sharply.
So, in mathematical terms, Feedback is the multiplier for Engagement. Dare to overlook it at your risk.
But looking at the issue in a more human manner it also
means that if managers are great at giving feedback the engagement levels would
go soaring high.
In my years of experience dealing with people, I have
found most managers are wanting of the competence to give regular and
constructive feedback.
So want your engagement levels to go up? – make sure your
managers have been trained to give feedback and remember elements of the
culture start from the top.
So how disciplined and good are you at this? Do reflect
upon this.
