128. How can I increase job satisfaction and employee engagement?

Transcript – Episode 128: How can I increase job satisfaction and employee engagement?

Joe: Believe me when I tell you – you should not care one iota about job satisfaction.

Joe: Hello again folks and welcome to the Boss Better Now podcast sponsored by Boss Hero School where we teach leaders and business owners how to activate employee commitment in today’s everchanging workplace. And this is a question that I get a lot. How do I increase or improve job satisfaction and employee engagement on my team? And it may sound like semantics. It may sound like we’re parsing language here, but these are not the same thing. We have to talk about and define what we mean when we say job satisfaction and what we mean when we say employee engagement. Now, the idea of job satisfaction surveys have been around for a long time and organizations large and small have gone to great lengths to measure job satisfaction. But it’s the wrong thing. If you’re a leader or a business owner, believe me when I tell you, you don’t care about job satisfaction. And it’s for a pretty simple reason. There are way too many employees in workplaces all over the world right now who are completely satisfied to come to work, do the minimum, go through the motions, and collect a paycheck. Just because somebody is satisfied at work doesn’t mean that they’re bought into what you’re doing. Just because somebody is satisfied at work doesn’t mean that they’re giving it all they’ve got in service to your mission or in front of your customers. And so, job satisfaction is not something you want to chase. Let’s be like Elsa and let it go. What you should care about though is employee engagement. Employee engagement and job satisfaction are not the same thing. Employee engagement is the emotional and psychological buy in that someone has in their work. Employee engagement is what we should be chasing. It’s that it’s that uh full-on commitment that people have to caring and trying. That’s the simplest definition I can give you for the concept of employee engagement. It’s the degree to which employees care and try. And there are three types of engagement that we see in the workplace. Gallup has been studying this for years. They’re sort of the granddaddy of them all when it comes to understanding what leads to employee engagement in the workplace and monitoring it across the globe. And when you look at their body of knowledge around this, what they tell you is that engagement really shows up in three buckets. We have employees who are engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged. So engaged employees are those folks who are all-in. They give it all they’ve got. There’s a a space between doing the minimum and maxing out your effort. And that space is referred to as discretionary effort. And only engaged employees part with discretionary effort in the workplace. Not engaged employees are those folks who are kind of sleepwalking through their work. They’re coming to work. They’re doing what you ask, but they’re not on fire to do it. These are folks that that Gallup describes as people who quit but forgot to leave. Uh that third category that actively disengaged, those are the folks who are acting out their unhappiness at work. These are your toxic contributors. Those folks who do harm to morale. Those folks that have maybe been there for a long time and you’ve convinced yourself that they do some good things, but maybe you’re navigating around some other things that aren’t so good. And really the only people who move your organization forward, the only people who are serving your customers and growing your reputation and your revenue are those engaged employees. We know that for folks in those other two buckets, we neither we need to either create the conditions for them to become engaged or move them out of our organization. And so where does engagement come from then? Well, if you ask a hundred experts this question, I would bet you’ll get a hundred different answers. This is part of the reason I wrote my book, Employee. We analyzed more than 200 studies and articles on why people stay long-term with an organization and what leads them to give it all they’ve got in their work. And what we found is that it becomes much more likely that you’re going to activate employee engagement in the workplace if you are winning in three areas of the employee experience. We call them ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. In fact, that’s my one-s sentence answer to your question. How do I increase employee engagement? That happens when employees are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. Think about the best and the worst jobs you’ve ever had. I am willing to bet that you will sort your answers to that question into one category or the other based largely on three questions. How did that job fit into your life? How meaningful did you find the work? And what was your boss like? Now, when we talk about these particular factors, ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss as the recipe for employee engagement, they mean different things. Ideal job is about how this job fits into my life, and it’s what I get in exchange for what I do. So, things like compensation and workload and flexibility are all critical dimensions of that ideal job factor. Meaningful work is about what I spend my time doing and who I’m doing it with. And so, we have to pay attention to things like purpose. Do I believe my work matters? My strengths. Do I get to use my talents and skills and gifts in my job? And belonging. Do I feel like an accepted, celebrated member of the team? We get those things right; we get this idea that that my work is meaningful and that moves people from I have to do it to I want to do it. And then that third factor, that great boss factor is all about the person who oversees my work and the quality of my relationship with that I have with them and the degree to which I feel like they care about me, and they’ve got my back. And so, we’re talking about things like trust and coaching and advocacy, all the things that lead someone to point to another person and say, “Man, I’ve got a great boss.” How do you improve employee engagement? You make sure people are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. And so, if you’re going to work on these particular factors for people on your team or across your organization, where should you start? Well, I will tell you that the first thing to do is start to assess what’s already happening, what’s already there, and maybe where there are some gaps. And you can do this in formal ways and informal ways. Formal ways would be to administer a survey across your organization uh around these ideas, around these concepts to find out are people experiencing belonging? Do people get flexibility? Do they experience trust from their boss? are they getting to use their strengths in their work? But you can also assess in informal ways. You can have one-on-one conversations with your direct reports. If you’ve ever heard of the concept of stay interviews, that’s a big part of what this is. I’m sure you’ve heard of exit interviews, which is where when someone decides they’re leaving the organization, we ask them on their way out, “Is there anything we could do differently or should have done differently that over would have got you to stay?” Which, if you think about it, exit interviews are absurd because that person has already started to leave. They’ve already decided that they’re moving on. They’ve got no investment here anymore. And now is the time that we’re going to ask them for their feedback. A much better strategy is to embrace stay interviews, which is where you ask people what leads them to, you know, stay. It’s a conversation that really is shaped around understanding what is working for them about this job, this work, this place. And so, we’re asking questions like, hey, what energizes you about your work? What’s the part of your job that you enjoy the most? If you could change something about your job to improve it, what would it be? If you were going to leave the organization, what would be the reason why? When we do stay interviews, we pick up on all of the factors that I just described in that framework, that ideal job, that meaningful work, that great boss. And so, stay interviews are something we should be engaging in in an ongoing basis. This is not a once-a-year conversation. The other ways that you can think about informally asking people and connecting with people to find out what’s working for them is to actually use that framework I just described. When I published my book, Employee, I heard story after story of leaders and organizations starting to use this blueprint in this way. I actually had a nurse manager who came up to me recently after an event and said, “You saved two positions in my hospital because of this framework.” And what he described was having two nurses who were thinking about leaving, sitting down with those two nurses, showing them this framework of ideal job, meaningful work, great boss, showing them the dimensions to each one, and saying, “These are the things that most people say they want out of a job. can you tell me what we’re doing well and where we need to improve? And the conversation that unfolded after that actually helped those employees to see that you know what I get most of these things here already. So, you can use this this recipe in that way to assess what you’re doing well and what needs improvement. And part of that assessment is looking at yourself as a leader too. What pieces of that recipe do you naturally pay attention to and pour energy into? You probably don’t need to improve those, but I would be willing to bet there are some things on that scorecard that are not things you naturally pay attention to that could use a bit more of your time and attention. That’s another way for you from an assessment perspective to figure out what to pay attention to improve employee engagement. Once you get clarity on what you should be working on or what you want to improve, then you start to map out a strategy, ways to do it. Sitting down and thinking about, okay, if I need to increase belonging, how am I going to do that? If I need to increase uh people having the chance to use their strengths in their work, how am I going to do that? How am I going to do that across the employee experience for everyone? and how am I going to do that for the individuals that I directly supervise? And then once you start to get clear on what those tactics are to improve in those strategic areas, you start doing that. And I want to encourage you to be visible about it. Because here’s the thing, employee commitment goes up. Employee engagement goes up when employees see that their leaders and the companies that employ them care about the employee experience. Employee commitment goes up when your employees see you trying harder at giving people their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. And that’s the big takeaway here. Remember, people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. And that framework that I just described, ideal job, meaningful work, great boss, is the internal operating system that leads to employee engagement. Get those pieces right and you’ll have more people who buy in more of the time and fewer of the problems that come with people who are just going through the motions or are miserable about being there in the first place. Now, I’d love to hear from you. What are your thoughts? What are your reactions to what you just heard? Share a comment in the box below the YouTube video or feel free to send me an email at bossbetternow@gmail.com. Thanks for being here. See you next time.

Joe: Do you need to take your leadership knowledge and skills to the next level, but don’t have time for overstuffed courses or lengthy training programs? Then you want to check out Boss Hero School. This immersive 3-day leadership development experience with me is like getting an MBA in people leadership in just a couple of days. We’re going to teach you the methods and the mindset to create environments where people join, stay, care, and try. For more information, visit bossheroschool.com.