“For employees to have a genuine commitment to their organization, the organization has to have a genuine commitment to its employees.”
Have you worked for an organization that says the right words, but doesn’t show any evidence of actually believing them?
A common example is the company that proclaims that “our people are our strength” while using layoffs as the first tool to fix a poor balance sheet.
One starts to wonder if the senior executive has ever heard the story of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’? It illustrates how, if you keep saying the same thing without showing any proof, people are going to stop listening to you.
Being genuine saves you a lot of effort you would otherwise spend pretending to be something you are not. This goes for organizations just as it does for individuals. This is something leadership should keep in mind when trying to address employee engagement; if you commitment to your employees isn’t genuine, improving employee commitment is going to be very difficult. Being subjected to years of marketing and corporate rhetoric has turned the typical western worker into a finely tuned deception detector.
If you are at the top of an organization that is trying to improve employee engagement, or in charge of communications in such an organization, the first step is to reflect on how the corporate leadership, and the corporate culture, values its commitment to the employees.
Here are some simple –but tough– questions to test an organization’s commitment to their employees:
- When an employee doesn’t fit in a new role, is their old role offered to them without penalty?
- When the corporation sees looming change in skill-sets required, does it seek opportunities to retrain existing employees, or remove them in favour of outsourcing or new talent?
- As employees’ careers progress, does your company evaluate if these employees are moving closer to their ideal role?
If the answers to these questions are no, or you have trouble knowing how your company would answer them, its going to be hard to convince employees that you have a genuine commitment to them. The company ‘s actions speak much louder than its words.
The view from the top is a great disadvantage when it comes to seeing how employees see their organization. It is best to collect views and test them with employees at all levels:
“How would you say the company treats its employees?”
Then ask how your leadership is really willing to commit to their employees to help the organization meet their goals? Does the leadership have a reputation of cutting its way to success, or is there a track record of making sure that people who remain committed to the business have a future with it? Tailor your messages accordingly. This ground work will help prepare the engagement strategy for the ‘eye-roll test’; if the planned messaging doesn’t align with the employee’s perception (or a baby-step away from it) and how top managers feel about that commitment, you aren’t going to get results, you are going to get eye-rolls.
There is a temptation to try and say the right things anyway, even if they aren’t true, but I am convinced that this will lead to a lot more long term damage than just coming clean, and thereby keeping the commitment of those employees that are willing to take an honest deal.
Take Cisco for instance. They have a much-debated policy of ‘always cutting their bottom X% of employees every year’, but –while I see this approach fraught with peril– they are being very genuine with their employee base: if you don’t maintain a performance level based on the metrics we set for you, we will find someone else who can. Those that choose to join the company know this, and their commitment to the company is based on this genuine relationship, not some blanket commitment to all employees. If CEO John Chambers’ messaging were to significantly change, it would most certainly be met with eye-rolls from their employees.
On the other hand, if you are the sort of leader that feels that having to get rid of employees is a sign of personal failure, you can start having a genuine conversation about being committed to your employee base. You can make it policy for employees trying new roles of their own accord to be offered their old roles if it doesn’t work out. You can educate employees how skills requirements are evolving, and enable them to acquire these new skills if they want to remain relevant to the organization. Good intelligence can be collected on the roles in the organization and what kinds of talents and motivators fit best with those roles, to move each employee closer with each new role to the goal of them giving their best every day.
There is no one right path to an engaged & committed employee base, but there is one universal wrong way: to be disingenuous.
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