Any manager needs to be concerned with getting the best from people. But how do you tell if you are actually doing that?
A favourite way is to conduct a staff survey for deciding the extent to which people feel fully engaged with their work.
The trouble is, while staff surveys are popular amongs talent managers, their validity is questionable.
The much respected Gallup organisation regularly polls staff in numerous organisations about their levels of engagement. Best Companies also conducts engagement surveys across business.
But Peter Hutton, who has spent more than 30 years in research and was at one time deputy managing director of pollster MORI, argues they are too ambiguous to truly measure engagement. “They offer the wrong questions in the wrong way”.
So how do you measure whether your team is engaged and enjoying their work? The answer is to avoid “off the shelf” solutions and get close to the “customer” — in this case the people doing the work. If you truly listen, they will soon tell you whether they are finding the work fulfilling and if not why not.
But what manager has time to do this — many find themselves too busy answering emails (up to half their day, according to some studies) and attending meetings.
Spending time with the people you manage, looking and listening and seeking feedback, is too often a minority managerial activity. But there is no substitute for this kind of interchange. Quite simply, nothing beats being around and being available.
Being available sounds obvious yet even top managers can forget this important lesson.
In one company we worked for some years back the MD and majority owner, complained that he did not really know whether his people were being fully productive or not.
We steered him away from an expensive and highly dubious staff survey. Instead we asked him to come in each morning and on his way to the office, stop by people’s desks and say “good morning!”
He was amazed at the response. Not only did people smile at him, which seldom happened before, but they happily explained what they were doing and some of their current frustrations.
From then on the boss’s daily walk to his office became a continuous and increasingly reliable check on people’s level of engagement.
