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Today’s Dilbert cartoon is the perfect commentary on employee engagement - and a useful “heads up” for employers about how engagement efforts may be perceived in an atmosphere of cost-cutting. Just food for thought. Happy Thanksgiving!

I stumbled across a great list of “Morale Mantras” today. It’s from David Lee, who writes the Mindful Manager blog for Maine Business. If every leader kept this list posted by their phone, there would be a lot fewer unhappy employees in the world! Thanks David.

Morale Mantras:
“Everything matters.”
“It’s the little things.”
“Don’t expect employees to care if they don’t feel you care about them.” “Whenever there is conflict, change, or morale issue, seek first to understand.”
“You don’t know what employees think until you ask.”
“When in doubt, ask. Don’t assume you know.”
“Don’t try to make employees feel like they matter; make sure they have the opportunity to matter.”
“Stay wired into the voice of your internal customers…your employees.”
“Make sure employees know that asking for feedback doesn’t mean you will act on every request or suggestion. But also make sure you let them know why you didn’t act.”
“An employee’s maturity level is strongly influenced by their manager’s behavior and the organization’s climate.”
“Having low expectations or being indulgent doesn’t create high morale, it creates an entitled, ‘what have you done for me lately’ workforce.”
“You get what you settle for.”
“How you interview, hire, and orient employees, tells them a lot about your organization and sets the tone for their stay with you.”
“You are a business, not a rehab center.”
“You are a manager, not a therapist.”
“Uncertainty breeds fear. Remove the unnecessary uncertainty caused by poor communication.”
“The more employees know about what’s going on, the less they fear what they don’t know about.”
“When employees have a strong ‘why’ they can deal with almost any ‘what’.”

Almost 33,000 Detroit workers recently participated in a survey about what distinguishes southeast Michigan’s top workplaces. Pay? Benefits? How their manager treats them? No – instead, workers said the key factors were how engaged their employers are with their workers, the direction the employer is heading, and how decisions are carried out.

We hear a lot about employee engagement, but this survey seems to suggest there’s a workplace version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” For example, in general employees at small companies were more positive than those at large ones. Could be that at small companies, employers are more likely to engage with their employees directly?

Recessions are typically followed by recoveries, which engender a higher-than-normal rate of employees quitting and moving to new jobs – a phenomenon researchers at Deloitte have called a “resume tsunami.”

With a variety of signs pointing, if somewhat tentatively, toward an economic recovery, it’s not too soon for companies to begin thinking about how they’ll keep their top performers.

What caught my eye in a recent article on this topic was the phrase “social contract“: “The employee expects to be paid fairly, get merit raises, receive job training and have job security. In turn, the employer expects hard work, two weeks’ notice before leaving, overtime work when necessary and loyalty to the company.”

I’m guessing many employers aren’t aware of the extent to which this contract has been invalidated in their employees’ eyes by the events of the past couple of years. Think about it: if you don’t feel you’re paid fairly, you didn’t get a merit raise, you haven’t received training because the budget’s been cut, and you don’t feel secure because you’ve seen three rounds of layoffs, is hard work and loyalty the result? Not likely.

Smart employers are thinking now about what to do – how to reach out to the employees they most want to keep and what to do to demonstrate their commitment to retaining them.

A new survey* finds – surprise, surprise – that women lawyers in New Jersey are more likely to quite their jobs if their employer does not offer flexible working arrangements, and are moving to firms that do offer flexibility.

The study offers recommended best practices, including offering flexible work arrangements to everyone (there’s a stigma attached to taking advantage of such arrangements if they’re only offered to women) and providing the technological support (cell phones, blackberries, etc.) needed to make them work.

To me, the survey was interesting, if not particularly surprising – but the main implication for employers is that what you DO is more important than what you SAY.

Our equation at OgilvyImpact is Know + Feel = Do. Our emphasis is on helping businesses get their employees to do what’s needed to advance the business agenda and strategy, and part of that is figuring out what they need to know and feel to want to take that action.

Sometimes, though, we need to turn that equation around. What do you as an employer need to DO to make it possible for your employees to do what you need them to? What do you need to know and feel in order to take that action?

Heads of New Jersey law firms now know that they will lose good people if they don’t evolve their behaviors. What they’ll feel and do remains to be seen.

*The study was conducted by Rutgers University Center for Women and Work and the New Jersey State Employment and Training Commission Council on Gender Parity in Labor and Education.

According to the study The Road to an Engaged Workforce, the four areas that most affect employee engagement are reduced role conflict, appropriate training, personal autonomy, and personal power.

Interestingly, as Paul Hebert, managing director at influency consultancy i2i notes, these are all controlled by managers, NOT by employees.

Hebert suggests that employers could save money and increase engagement by focusing not on convincing frontline employees that they’re engaged, but on motivating managers to engage them and rewarding them for doing so. His suggestions include rewarding managers for seeking input, for changing work processes to maximize employee autonomy and power, for prioritizing training, and for communicating openly and frequently with their teams.

It’s a truism in employee communications that employees prefer to receive most information from their direct manager. Why wouldn’t engagement follow the same path?

A new study on employee engagement provides insight into how generations regard work as well as their commitment to it.

First off, the study does a good job defining the often squishy concept of employee engagement (”a positive, enthusiastic, and affective connection with work that motivates an employee to invest in getting the job done, not just “well” but “with excellence” because the work energizes the person”) and explaining why it’s important (because engaged employees use less health care, take fewer sick days, are more productive, have longer tenure, and create stronger customer relationships).

Second, the study provides some useful findings that smart companies may be able to use to improve their levels of engagement.

Some of the findings – that health insurance for family members of full-time employees, life insurance, and contributions to employees’ defined contribution plans result in higher levels of engagement – are predictable. Others – that being female, having no elder care responsibilities, and being in better physical health – result in higher levels of engagement – are out of an employer’s control.

Other findings are less intuitive, and offer employers opportunities to take some concrete steps. The study found, for example, that a key driver of engagement for Millenials was access to flexibility. Younger Gen X’ers valued satisfaction with training and development. For older boomers, in contrast, supervisor support was key.

Thanks, MetLife Mature Market Institute and Boston College’s Sloan Center on Aging & Work.

My last company had an expensive looking strategy map that reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of self actualization.  According to the map, which was really just an elaborate triangle, if the company achieved a certain earnings per share and several other factors, the company had accomplished its goals and could consider itself self actualized.

The strategy was rolled out in a large, all employee meeting, and we listened to the presentation, intent on going back to our desks with a new ambition to help the company meet its goals.  This was a company that many employees described as the best place they’d ever worked.  I think most people truly wanted to contribute to the company’s success and were happy to know their executives had developed a map to help them get there.  Only that didn’t happen.

It wasn’t that the strategy was good or bad - it was the way it was communicated (or in this case, not communicated).  Nobody ever explained how the tasks I performed each day contributed to the strategy, and that if I found a better way to perform those tasks the company would ultimately benefit.  In fact, one manager I posed that question to was very honest in replying, “I honestly don’t know; just do your job the best you can.”  Okay, whatever that means.

The problem with the strategy communication was that it assumed we were able to connect the dots and left too much to interpretation, without any way to confirm whether our interpretation was correct.  What we needed was a guide to help us understand how the strategy applied to our department, our role, and our everyday tasks.  We needed someone to tell us to start with the most basic questions – like what would happen to the department and company if my role ceased to exist – to help us answer the big questions – like how do I help my company achieve its goals. 

Most employees do not have the dedication or inclination to figure out how they connect with the strategy, and unless someone tells them, they will never know.  And even engaged employees, who may have the best intentions, often don’t have the time or corporate knowledge to come up with the answers.  Giving employees the tools to discover the answers serves dual purposes: it gives the company the opportunity to communicate its priorities and gives employees the opportunity to feel a sense of ownership in the company’s success.