The Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle, a metaphor for mystery, misdirection and disaster in the work place, can actually have many different shapes and sizes.
The 'Bermuda Triangle' of Employee Engagement
This week we will talk about the EEBT ‘Perfect Storm’, where employee engagement gets lost without a trace.
The Perfect Storm has an employee who is clueless about what talents, motivators & goals they have, and has a manager who has to time, interest or patience to find out what they are. In this scenario, the manager not only doesn’t know what the employee’s white pebble is, they don’t even know what the employee thinks it is (green pebble). Each of the deltas (white-green, green-brown, brown-white) are all at their largest, the area of the triangle is at its maximum, and employee engagement is at the greatest risk. It looks like this:
The Employee Engagement 'Perfect Storm'
How Did It Come to This?
How is it possible that any employee-manager relationship could experience a Perfect Storm? It seems unlikely that a manager would be so out of touch with their employee, AND an employee so out of touch with themselves.
In many business settings, this is actually the norm. Most minimum wage jobs have this dynamic, where employees are just ‘doing it for the money’, and managers don’t see any reason to invest their time in low-paid, usually high-turnover, employees. As a customer, I am sure you have experienced what it is like to be a patron of such organizations.
This dynamic exists far beyond minimum wage roles, as I am sure many readers will attest. This lack of introspection on the part of managers and employees alike is ingrained in us culturally, by our fast-paced work environments, and general lack of effective manager training and employee career counselling. For example, think about how much of your school career you spent studying topics that have no relevance to your life today (Shakespeare & calculus are likely candidates), and how much time was devoted to evaluating your talents, motivators and how they might align with your career options?
Sources of Engagement
Fulfilling jobs and workplaces are as varied as the people that comprise them, but there is a common thread that exists in all of them. For an employee to be fully engaged in their work they need:
- A Feeling of Security: If an employee is constantly worried about losing their job, having their ideas stolen, being ridiculed or physically threatened, you can safely assume that their engagement will be near zero. If they feel hopeful about the future & secure in their job, they can focus the majority of their energy on performing their assigned role, personal growth, and growth of the company.
- A Sense of Purpose: An earlier attempt to catalog sources of employee satisfaction resulted in over 50 different sources. How each of these map to an employee’s sense of purpose, from those who want to contribute to world peace, to those who just want a shinier car, is as varied and complex as each individual. This complexity is the main reason why it must be established between a manager and employee, and tied to the purpose of the job, and then to the company. When it is aligned, chances for engagement is significantly improved.
- To Satisfy a Desire for Mastery: When you perform work that aligns with your innate talents and motivators, you can’t help but strengthen your mastery of the skills associated and even reach a state of ‘flow’. The more opportunity you have to do this as part executing your role, the more likely you are to be engaged by it. As you improve this mastery, you become more valuable to the organization, which has a supporting impact on purpose and security as well.
Why is the Perfect Storm so Disengaging?
“The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation. “
— C. Northcote Parkinson
The distance from the green (mossy) pebble to brown: Both the manager and employee haven’t invested any time helping each other understand the employee’s innate talents, motivators and goals. In this case, even if this were to happen, the employee would likely have a hard time articulating what they are, because of the white-green delta. The very absence of this discussion almost ensures that the employee won’t be working on activities that promote mastery, will not have an idea of how their own motivators align to the purpose of the role (and its purpose to the company), and it is hard to see how they would feel secure in it. With a large employee-perception & manager-perception delta, the potential sources of engagement will only be found by pure chance.
The distance from the green (mossy) pebble to white: For the employee with little self-awareness, spending time on things that allow them to build mastery will be elusive. More likely, they will continue to be assigned work they are shown to be able to execute on successfully, but are not necessarily aligned with their innate talents and motivators. Without introspection on what brings them satisfaction in their work, this employee will not be able to find a meaningful way to link their own motivation to the objectives of the role, and the role’s contribution to the company. A feeling of security comes when an employee feels they are an indispensable link to achieving the goals of the organization; if they aren’t even sure they are good at what they do, this is unlikely.
The distance from the brown pebble to white: The manager is not aware of the innate talents & motivators of the employee. Even without a discussion with the employee (which, in this case, could potentially diminish green-brown, but increase brown-white), some experienced managers have the emotional intelligence (EI) to get a fairly accurate gauge on a person’s talents and motivators. In the Perfect Storm, this EI is either not present or is being impeded by the employee-manager relationship. This manager is at a loss as to why they sometimes get results from the employee, and others just disappointment. Sometimes their employee is keen to take on a task, just to lose motivation as the task progresses. This leads to frustration that can hurt the manager-employee relationship, and make things even worse. The employee feels that the manager ‘just doesn’t understand them’. The manager cannot find appropriate tasks that will align with the employee’s talents, and won’t feel comfortable offering the risky stretch objectives that might lead to mastery of a skill. When performance is discussed, the manager can provide little feedback that will make the employee feel secure about their future in the organization. Because the manager can’t help the employee stay in their ‘zone’, sustained engagement is not possible.
How can you diminish the EEBT?
There are a lot of ways to approach the challenge of reducing the area of the EEBT. As you can see in the Perfect Storm, the manager and the employee both have a role in improving the situation. The good news is that a willing employee can improve the situation independently, as can a manager, but best results will come with both involved.
For the employee, they can use assessment tools to better understand themselves, like the Strong Interest Inventory, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or our favourite, the Clifton Strengthsfinder. Another useful approach is to write down occasions where they experienced a state of flow –being “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”– and trying to identify what were the common elements in those experiences.
The manager can suggest that the employee use techniques above and then discuss the results. Or, independently (and where possible), a manager can dig into the employee’s past roles and discuss with past supervisors where they tended to express their talents and motivations most; some of these past supervisors may have been in a better position to observe behaviours that the current manager cannot. Asking peers about their perceptions of the employee can be a great resource for either the employee or manager.
Just the act of initiating a discussion on this topic can increase the level of engagement, as a manager expressing an interest in these topics shows the employee that the manager wants to invest in them, and when initiated by the employee, shows a manager the employee wants to excel in their role.
Beyond the Perfect Storm
There are other scenarios that still allow a lot of room to get lost in this Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle, which will be the topic of future posts. These include:
- The Misdirected Self-Aware EEBT
- The Self-Deceptive EEBT
- The Co-Deceptive EEBT
We will explore these with the intent to get to the ‘Ideal’ state where all three pebbles converge.
Luckily, there are ways to reduce the size of these knowledge gaps, and the area of the triangle, and in the ‘Perfect Storm’ there is clearly a lot of room for improvement!
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