Mapping Motivation for Engagement

James Sale, Steve Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815367550
• eBook ISBN: 9781351257060
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

Employee engagement is undeniably a crucial focus point for organisations in the twenty-first century, with motivation comprising the often missing, but vital, component of the developmental mix. Mapping Motivation for Engagement advocates a new paradigm for the twenty-first century: away from hierarchies and command-and-control management styles, towards a bottom-up approach in which the needs and motivators of the employees take centre stage.

Co-written with Steve Jones, this is the third in a series of books that are all linked to the author James Sale's Motivational Map diagnostic tool. Each book builds on a different aspect of personal, team and organisational development. This book is a practical guide to the complexities of understanding and dealing with engagement in modern organisational life. Along with clear diagrams, reflective points, activities and a comprehensive index, the book provides free access to the online Motivational Map tool to facilitate a greater understanding of the contents. Drawing on copious amounts of the latest research, as well as models like the Macleod Report for the UK government, this book shows how Mapping Motivation can play a significant and crucial role in making engagement a reality, instead of a dream.

Mapping Motivation for Engagement is a stimulating and thought-provoking read for a wide audience including, but not limited to, trainers and coaches working in management and motivation, experts in human resources, internal learning and development and organisational development as well as change and engagement consultants and specialists.

Chapter 1

Barriers to engagement and productivity

In our work with organisations on implementing engagement programmes, we have used a seven step approach.

Notice that the first step (Figure 1.1) requires that we answer the question: what is employee engagement? However, before we consider what it is and how we ‘get it’ through the seven steps, we need to look at some preliminary barriers before we even start. These barriers are so big, so threatening, so apparently insurmountable, that unless we address them squarely and head-on, we are unlikely to make any further progress. And there are three main ones.

Figure 1.1 Seven steps to employee engagement

Activity 1.1

Write down what you think the three main barriers to employee engagement are. When you have done that compare your answers to ours. Remember, there is no absolute right or wrong here: you may have experience in an organisation or context that entirely validates your view, but if your answers are different to ours, how do ours extend your thinking on this issue?

First, and possibly foremost, there is absolutely no point in undertaking an employee engagement programme unless there is complete buy-in from the board and Senior Management Team (SMT) of the organisation. Complete buy-in. What does this mean? It means that this is not just a Human Resources (HR) or Learning and Development (L&D) initiative; it comes from the top, is promoted by the top, and the top lead and walk the talk. If that doesn’t happen, employees immediately spot the discrepancies – discrepancies between what the bosses are saying and what they are doing – and so will discount the process. Remember that engagement is about the voluntary and extra effort employees want to give the organisation because they believe in it and are truly committed. Nobody can believe in an organisation where bosses operate under one set of rules, and staff under another; it is simply self-defeating to try. Why waste organisational time and money in this way? But there is also an important implication to establish at this early stage: what does or would it mean for the board and SMT to fully embrace employee engagement? It would mean that the organisation was viewing employee engagement as a strategic imperative, not some frilly, optional extra like ‘wouldn’t it be nice if staff were happy?’ Indeed, to be a strategic imperative means that the very existence of the organisation depends on it, and therefore that all employees, including leadership, should act on that sense of urgency. The question, then, becomes: how do we get complete buy-in? Chapters 3 and 4, and the case studies in Chapter 9, are especially relevant here.

Second, and a barrier we frequently encounter, is that of needing resources sufficient to undertake the programme. There are nine core resources to consider: money, time, equipment, people skills, knowledge, right attitude, information, space/environment and agreed co-operation (see Figure 8.11 for more on this). Any of these can be a stumbling block, but usually most can be factored into the process. But the one that comes up time and time again as being insuperable is – yes! – time. ‘We simply haven’t got the time to do this.’ In mapping we call this ‘capacity’; what is happening is that the organisation wants to ‘do’ engagement but they have no ‘capacity’, no slack in the system, to allow them the space to undertake it. Another way of putting this is to say that they are ‘fully maxed’. Of course, this is counter-intuitive: how can we be fully maxed when the whole point of engagement is to enable employees to offer more? If they are ‘maxed’ aren’t they offering all they can already? This is a great question and we will be looking at this in a lot more detail later in this chapter. But for now, suffice to say, every organisation can improve efficiencies, increase focus, avoid double-handling of tasks, and tweak systems and processes; what we are saying, in effect, is there is a lot of work being done in any organisation that is useless, pointless, and simply not productive. The mere act, therefore, of seeking to undertake an employee engagement programme begins that de-cluttering process as a necessary first step towards getting started. The question, then, becomes: how do we create the capacity to run engagement programmes? And a great starting point is, of course, to ask the employees themselves how the capacity can be created, for they more than anyone else know exactly where there are inefficiencies in the system. This has the added benefit of involving them at the start and taking them seriously.

The third barrier, surprisingly, and most intractably, is the issue of the human ego. In fact, one of the reasons why our first barrier may never be overcome – that is, we might not get complete buy-in – is because of the egos of the management and leadership. It is, if you like, the flaw in human nature that has always been there, and management writers have noted it from the beginning. Writing in the 1950s, Professor Brown talked of many leaders in British industry who were ‘petty Hitlers … working off their own mental conflicts on others to the detriment of the psychological health of the community…’¹ and more recently David Bowles² and Professor Cary Cooper devote an entire chapter of their engagement book to ‘Ego at work’. Ego, then, is a form of total selfishness; instead of thinking about the ‘we’, it’s all about the ‘I’, or ‘me-first’. Instead of prioritising the mission and the welfare of the organisation, the ego is always, overtly or covertly, calculating its own self-interest – whether that be in monetary, control, expertise, or recognition terms (these are four major areas where the ego loves to lord it over others). So, the question, here, becomes: how do we obviate the negative impact of ego-driven people³ who will almost certainly seek to derail employee engagement? There is clearly no simple solution, but in Chapters 5 and 6 we consider what it means to be an engaging manager and an effective leader, and two points to mention now are: (1) the importance of values such as honesty and transparency, and (2) the almost equal importance of the recruitment process in not appointing such ego-driven people in the first place!

As you can see, each of these three barriers has generated a further question. Keep these in mind as we move on to discuss the question: what is employee engagement?

Activity 1.2

Based upon what you have read so far, how would you define employee engagement? Make some notes about what it is and what it does.

The MacLeod Report, which is an influential UK government sponsored review of engagement best practice, commented on the fact that they had actually seen over 50 definitions of employee engagement! Furthermore, it noted that there was a danger of – and a call for⁴– the term to be abandoned altogether. Is engagement an attitude, a behaviour or an outcome? In true British spirit, the Report adopted a pragmatic approach. MacLeod says:

We believe it is most helpful to see employee engagement as a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

MacLeod (2009)⁵

Commitment, motivation, success and well-being – these are four critical words, four compass points, if you will, which will help us direct attention and focus onto improving employee engagement (Figure 1.2). And we notice that the essence of this ‘approach’ is win–win: the organisation is successful (and we’ll look more closely at what ‘success’ means), and the employee experiences ‘well-being’. This, then, is about co-operation – not competition – between leaders and the led, and between management and their staff; this is about a new way of working that stresses not the tangibles – cash flow, revenues, profits, equipment, data bases, offices and so on – but the invisibles: commitment – an attitude; motivation – an energy; success – an outcome; and well-being – a state. Wow! What a shift in thinking – and feeling, if it is possible to do this. And, remember, if we do, we really do, achieve this shift – then we get to the tangibles, especially the profits, tai-chi style!

Figure 1.2 The four critical compass points for engagement

But we should not underestimate the difficult of doing this, because the status quo always wants to kick back, and as the great quality guru, Philip Crosby,⁶ observed: ‘Good ideas and solid concepts have a great deal of difficulty in being understood by those who earn their living by doing it some other way’. So, despite all the benefits of undertaking employee engagement, we find there is massive resistance over and above the three reasons we have already given; for the fourth barrier is simply inertial (Figure 1.3) – it’s too difficult, too perilous and, besides, we are quite happy as we are, thank you. See more in Chapter 8 on resistance to change.

Figure 1.3 Four barriers to employee engagement

It should be clear from what we have said so far that however we slice the engagement cake, any part of it – as in a hologram (if we may mix metaphors) – is going to contain one central ingredient: namely, motivation. There is simply no way round this fact. Attitudes and behaviours on their own are not sufficient to create that employee ‘well-being’ that is the sine qua non of engagement. Indeed, the latter item, behaviour, is particularly fraught and problematic, for although it is a necessary feature of engagement, it is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Motivational Maps
• Summary of Motivational Maps What you need to know in a nutshell!
• 1. Barriers to engagement and productivity
• 2. Understanding the Macleod Report, four engagement enablers and Motivational Mapping
• 3. Motivation, communication and relationships
• 4. Motivation and finding the employee voice
• 5. Engaging managers, motivation, skills and recruitment
• 6. Engaging managers, values, 360-motivational feedback, rewards
• 7. Motivational organisational maps and strategic narrative
• 8. Employee engagement, integrity and change
• 9. Three case studies FGH, Inspire Professional Services, Aish Technologies
• Conclusion
• Resources
• Index