Increasing Staff Engagement – When Money Isn’t The Answer

As the economy and organisations emerge from survival to growth what about staff morale and engagement?  Just as leaders can get caught in post recession paralysis, so can employees.  After all the uncertainty and insecurity and with companies maybe asking that bit extra of staff to make it through the recession, what’s next in moving forward?

Well the most superficial response will be bonus’s and pay rises.  Yes of course rewarding your staff is key.  But as Frederick Herzberg said donkey’s years ago, pay is a hygiene factor and not a motivator.  Without it you’ve got serious problems, but there is a point beyond which it doesn’t motivate or engage staff.

In fact Lord Richard Layard wrote a book Happiness – Lessons from a new science.  Research shows that there is a fiscal point above which earning anymore doesn’t make you happier.  If memory serves me right it’s £25K.

So what does increase employee engagement?  Achievement, Recognition, Responsibility, Promotion / Career Progression, Learning and Development, Relationships / Team work, Flexible Working.  These softer, more intrinsic aspects are what  we should ensure are present.  Typically when they aren’t that’s when people start demanding more money.  It’s a sign that they don’t feel valued but are at a loss to put in place the intrinsic factors, so the tangible cash solution is a sticking plaster that patches things up for a while.

As the profits increase staff will, quite rightly, expect a share of that somehow.  Yet in this emergent state your company may not be in a position to offer cash bonus’s.  However if you use the extra cash you have to invest in ensuring the more intangible, intrinsic motivators are present then the payoff’s could be far higher than a pure cash solution.

Fault finders should be fault menders

Perhaps there is something in the water, but just recently several people have had conversations with me about their colleagues and bosses finding faults only. 

Ranging from the general “No matter what I do they always find something wrong with it/missing.”

To the specific “Last week I handled an incident, kept the company legal and product on the shelf, what do I get, 3 people wittering about some administration I haven’t done.. no thanks for working your weekend or we appreciate this and when can you do Y for us…just people with nothing better to do than find faults.” 

Now these people are bright, self starters, they’re talented and committed, just the sort of people you want to keep in an organisation.  They regularly go the extra mile without creating a song and dance.  But now they seemed to be tuned in to people only telling them what they’re doing wrong / missing.  A case of too much stick and not enough carrot. 

In each case we talked about the intentions behind the person finding fault.  Was it well intentioned, did they care about the way it was received, did they take time to understand why?  Or were they having a prima donna moment, feeling all self righteous because they’d been able to point out something that had been missed/not done yet/ was wrong.  In other words were their ego’s running away with them.

As a teenager if I was having one of my moments pointing out everything that was wrong, my mum would just say “fault finders should be fault menders” and then ask me how I was going to put everything right.  I of course would point out that actually none of this was my fault and so why should I have to do anything to put it right.  Eventually I realised that if I didn’t want to help and put things right I should keep my ego to myself.

As a leader what’s your praise to fault finding ratio?  You’re setting the tone, are your staff following suit?

Let’s face it if you whip your donkey hard enough it’s either going to stop or bite you – and you wouldn’t believe the number of people who are surprised when this happens.