Turning Engagement Upside Down
(Human Capital Magazine Interview – Part 1)

With employers failing to get cut-through with traditional notions of what engages employees, Human Capital Online interviewed employee engagement expert Ian Hutchinson, Chief Engagement Officer of LifebyDesign.com.au, who says it’s time for a fresh take on engagement.

HC: In your view what is the problem with existing models of employee engagement?

IH: A lot of organisations have been plugging away, doing their engagement research every year, but many organisations spend 80% of their time on the research and only 20% on the implementation.

Many are getting frustrated – they’re trying to do the right thing but aren’t really getting cut-through. We’re slipping down the global engagement rankings because a lot of organisations are trying to do the same old, same old and using the umbrella approach, the concept that one-size-fits-all. It hasn’t really ever worked. HR has been limited with time and budget, and therefore that’s the only paradigm seen: we’ve done our research, let’s put in some broad brushstroke umbrella solutions where the weak points are, and hope that’s going to keep the tribe relatively satisfied. That’s the top-down approach.

Organisations also tend to shower people with benefits and gifts in a mad hope to try to engage and motivate them, and what that’s done is create this whinge entitlement culture, where employees are becoming conditioned to doing more with less, but what are you going to give me to relieve my pain? By giving them more and more benefits it creates this spoilt whinge entitlement culture – what are you going to give me next Christmas? It actually disenfranchises them; it’s like an only child, the more you do for them, in the hope to show your love, the more you just create a spoilt brat.

HC: You mention the top-down approach – what’s the alternative?

IH: The approach should be bottom-up. That’s the approach where everyone is an individual, and broad brushstroke initiatives don’t always work. Instead of doing organisational engagement plans (OEP), we need to do personal engagement plans (PEP) and get individual employees responsible for understanding what engages and motivates them.

This is psychologically one of the major obstacles and problems of why engagement hasn’t worked: employees know what they don’t want – that’s easy for them to work out – but few know what they do want. If employees don’t know what motivates and engages them, HR and managers have bucklies. Not only that, if employees don’t know what they want, the default driver usually becomes ‘give me more money’, which is the most expensive and ineffective way of trying to engage and motivate people.

What we’ve found is 70% of engagement can be improved by individual employees themselves – they’re just not aware of it yet.

Part 2 of this interview is published here, but for the full PDF copy of this interview email us at info@LifebyDesign.com.au