Employees need communication, growth, recognition and trust

What makes employees feel engaged at work? Answers range from the complex to the simple, but Kruze believes engagement can be distilled into four categories: Communication, Growth, Recognition, and Trust ((Kruse, pg. 23)). Employees typically favor one category over the other three, although some have the advantage to equally value two or more. The category an employee favors is the most important factor to the employee’s feeling of engagement in the workplace and, while all four should be present, this factor makes the greatest difference. For example, an employee who favors growth may continue to feel engaged when given diverse, challenging tasks, even though the employee’s communication with his manager is sub-par. Let’s dig into each of the drivers.

Communication refers to the two-way communication pattern between an employee and his manager. To a lesser extent, communication applies to the employee’s relationship with the entire team, but the key relationship is with the manager because no relationship is charged with such importance as that. The manager has the authority to affect an employee’s career, to fire the employee or recommend them to greater responsibility. It’s common to have one-way communication, but this type won’t lead to employee engagement because the employee needs to be a participant rather than simply a receiver of the manager’s communication.

Growth refers to an employee’s perception that they are advancing in their skills and career. Those employees who favor growth need to keep learning new things at their work and feel that they have been making progress. Such an employee will not be satisfied by glowing reviews or two-way communication from his manager; he wants to see results. Well conducted performance reviews can be useful because the manager will assist the employee to establish what growth looks like and can help the employee meet his growth goals.

Recognition refers to the way an employee’s manager shows appreciation for his work. To the employee who favors recognition over growth, the creation of goals can feel like endless work. The manager needs to pause to recognize the efforts of the employee and say thank you before moving to the next goal. There may be some similarities between communication and recognition, but the key difference is that recognition is an active effort by the manager to show gratitude for the employee’s labor, where communication emphasizes active listening and collaboration.

Trust refers to the integrity of the manager, and to a lesser extent the manager’s confidence in the employee. A manager who promises but doesn’t deliver loses trust with his employees, and to the employee that favors trust above others, no action can have a greater negative impact on their sense of engagement. An employee will struggle to follow a manager he cannot trust, and without the commitment to follow it becomes impossible to feel engaged.

If the statistics are correct and more than half the U.S. workforce struggles to feel engaged, managers must change the way they lead. There is no replacement for employee engagement - a company whose employees are engaged has such an advantage in the face of adversity and competition that no CEO can afford to operate a company with low engagement. For this reason, it’s imperative that managers in a company, from the CEO to the lowest leadership position, pay attention to these four key drivers and overlook none of them. More than training, managers must develop a habit of assessing their employee’s key engagement drivers and focusing their efforts to meet those drivers on an individual basis. A seminar on communication may help a quarter of the workforce to feel more engaged, but for the other three quarters it will be insufficient. And, if you consider that humans are unlikely to fit neatly into any one of these four categories, especially those from another culture, a tailored approach becomes even more important.

I read this book early in the class because it was so short, and it has been immensely helpful to assess the engagement drivers that my own management are weak at addressing. Growth is my strongest driver, and my worst moments at work are often connected with a sense of being stuck and restricted from further development. Even when other areas are lacking, if I feel that I am growing I can put up with a lot. In the weeks after, I’ve noticed that the other three are still too important to overlook entirely. While I can agree with Kruze that one driver stands out over the others, at least in my case, I’m convinced that engagement will suffer if even one of these areas is overlooked. This may be because of the close connection each have with the others. For example, recognition is the best response to perceived growth, and when I receive appreciation it helps keep me motivated to keep growing. My application, therefore, is to use these four drivers in the way I communicate with my manager during our one-on-ones, and to use them as measurements of the way I interact with my colleagues.

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