Editor’s note: Amy Jones is a director of human resources at research firm MaritzCX, St. Louis. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “How NOT to engage your employees: What we can learn from horrible bosses.”
Employee engagement is a concern for any organization worried about the retention and productivity of its employees. Companies want to know what they can do – what program they can roll out, what software they can implement – to increase engagement and ultimately increase customer satisfaction. Since we know the two are linked, it is vital to engage those employees in order to have success within your company.
But this blog is not about the next big idea. It’s about a few small ones that can be applied every day by the managers of your company. These are lessons in what NOT to do to engage employees, as told to me by people I’ve worked with over the years.
1. Don’t give negative feedback that’s not specific.
Jennifer, a recent college grad in her first professional job, was charged with leading a meeting. After the meeting (on a Friday) her boss said he didn’t think it went well. She asked him what she could’ve done better. Jennifer hadn’t led many meetings before and she desperately wanted to improve. Her boss said he had to think about it, and so she obsessed all weekend about what went wrong and what criticism he would give her. On Monday, downtrodden and sleep deprived, Jennifer went into her boss’s office and asked for clarity. After he’d thought about it all weekend, what constructive advice could he give her? He said he didn’t really know, shrugged it off like it was no big deal and told her they should move on. Imagine how that felt. Not so engaging. If you’re going to deflate someone’s balloon, at least tell them why.
2. Don’t be a zookeeper.
Mike, a manager with over 20 years of experience, told me that when someone comes into your office and puts a petty problem on your desk (), your job as the boss is to not only send them back to work with that monkey, but add another one as well. (Mike liked to call the petty problems “monkeys.” I always have the image of the children’s game with the plastic monkeys with interlocking arms that go in a barrel.) He explained it like this: As a boss there are plenty of big problems you should be working on but the whining, gossiping and bellyaching must stop with you. If your people feel that your office is an emotional dumping ground, they will behave accordingly. You are not being sympathetic! You are enabling bratty behavior in the workplace from adults, who – last I checked – are paid to be there. You are also demotivating the employees who don’t dump their emotional garbage on you but who see that it’s an accepted practice.
3. Don’t let your trust issues incapacitate you, your team and your organization.
Jackie – a project manager who’d been with her company over five years at the time of this example – once worked for a boss who didn’t trust anyone with information. Not the staff, not her peers on the management team, nor the administrative assistant. This manager knew everything she needed to get her job done, yet she couldn’t get it done because there was no one she thought she could rely on to move things forward. Was she surrounded by poor performers on the verge of being fired? Did they all have loose lips and reputations for not being trustworthy? Not at all. So, why would an overloaded manager not share information and allow her team to do something else besides tread water? Jackie couldn’t tell me. Maybe the woman operated under the assumption that trust must be earned, instead of assuming that everyone is qualified to be in the roles they are in, and with that comes a certain responsibility or need to know certain things. Maybe she didn’t trust herself, and that stopped her from trusting her team, which stopped the company from trusting her entire group. What happened in that case? Engagement was so low that the team ended up scattering to the wind, all moving on to different opportunities.
Managers have real power to affect employee engagement. Think of all the scenarios that occur in a single day at a company that have the potential to increase or decrease the discretionary effort of its employees. What is the effect of those events compounded over a week? A year? How much faster could you go if all your managers were great engagers? Food for thought.