Alarming results from a survey conducted by consultancy Right Management reveal how unwilling UK managers are to address the issue of engagement within their teams. The figures suggest companies are being hamstrung in trying to give employees that feel-good factor by management personality issues.
Three out of five of the 300 middle managers surveyed from large national and international businesses in the UK and Ireland agreed an engaged workforce improves the company’s performance and just under half had seen engagement suffer in their workplaces during the recession, yet less than 20 per cent said they were doing anything serious about it.
A good many of the respondents said they didn’t know how to go about raising the level of engagement in their staff, suggesting there is a serious lack of training resources available to them.
Even if that were put right, it’s likely to be a case of leading a horse to water, but being unable to make it drink.
The same survey revealed nearly three quarters thought the health and wellbeing of their employees was a big factor in how engaged they were with the company, but over two thirds were either convinced their own teams didn’t have any wellbeing issues or were reluctant to say.
This acknowledgement that engagement has suffered, but a belief that the people around them haven’t been affected hints at a refusal by managers to accept they need to take any action personally.
Right Management senior management consultant Kirsten Sholl pointed out the main factor in reduced feelings of wellbeing is stress. And it’s the stigma attached to stress-related problems at work that may be the root of this reluctance by managers to identify it.
Sholl said: “Anyone who has to deal with problems of stress in their own team needs to be tooled up with the necessary skills. Managers need to be able to recognise the symptoms when they occur and to understand how to have those difficult conversations.”
If managers are reluctant to meet the problems of disengagement head-on, government business department advisor David MacLeod has his work cut out constructing a strategy for nurturing employee engagement in UK plc.
The website the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is developing to provide a detailed guide on how to improve engagement will go some way in pointing managers in the right direction, but it won’t solve the unwillingness in individual managers to admit they have a problem.
MacLeod recommends managers take a lead from examples of best practice internally or from other companies. He asserts intransigent managers will eventually be sidelined by peers who have taken engagement to heart. Let’s hope he’s right, although the research from Right Management suggests the rebels will be in the majority and in any case, the problem may be a bit more deep-seated than just a wariness of change.
