The New Rules of Employee Engagement. It's the furtive glances as you approach, the crowd at the water cooler suddenly dispersing. Whispers and snickers during meetings. The staring at the floor as you pass in the hallway, the forced smiles.
Follow Life at Google on: More about us. About us; Contact us; Press; Related information. Investor relations; Blog; Equal opportunity. At Google, we don’t just accept difference—we.Is it all in your imagination? You might love your employees, or consider some of them friends- -but you also wouldn't be doing your job if you didn't stop to wonder what they really think of you. Especially when you read the statistics: Just 3. American workers are engaged at work, according to Gallup, costing the nation $4. But that doesn't change an essential truth: Motivating your work force may be the toughest and most important challenge you face as an entrepreneur, especially in the age of social media, when a few disgruntled employees can destroy your reputation. You just know those unhappy campers are out there, sowing seeds of discontent throughout your organization and beyond. So how can you find out whether their gripes are legitimate or just bellyaching? What is employee engagement? Definition of employee engagement - the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work. And once you find out, what can you do about them? Maybe the question is, what should you not do about it? Employee engagement has become such a hot topic that great swarms of consultants and authors are undoubtedly banging on your door as we speak, armed with enough action plans and Power. Point presentations to make your head swim. But it doesn't have to be that complicated. Instead, consult our jargon- free guide to creating a great place to work. Rule 1: Don't Sweat Anonymous Reviews. At first glance, social media software startup Lithium Technologies looks like an awesome employer. Located in downtown San Francisco, it has a game room with foosball, Ping- Pong, and a dozen guitars for playing Guitar Hero; a hammock for lounging; and free catered lunches three times a week from a choice of 1. Occasionally, some of its 4. But if you were job hunting a few years ago and read the anonymous posts from current and former employees on the career site Glassdoor, you probably wouldn't have bothered to apply. It's a bad place to work. Of the six reviews posted during Lyle Fong's tenure, four were scathing, earning the company an overall rating of 2. Then Rob Tarkoff, a seasoned industry veteran, took over in August 2. You had to feel for the guy, heading up a company selling social media expertise as it was struggling on a prominent social media site (one that nearly half of all job hunters consult, according to an independent survey by research firm Software Advice). Under Tarkoff, Lithium began asking employees to post reviews on Glassdoor and encouraging new hires to do the same as part of their onboarding process, according to Jennifer Trzepacz, Lithium's senior vice president of human resources. If your employees are already disgruntled, throwing too many perks at them may only create a culture of entitlement. Not a good idea in general, says Tim Erblich, CEO of the Ethisphere Institute, a global business ethics group. No company is perfect, so when people see reviews so glowing they border on the obscene, that completely backfires. It's important to be authentic. It also began paying Glassdoor for services to help improve its image on the site. That's something Glassdoor advertises with the pitch: . Then it signed up for another paid program to promote its job listings in sponsored search results throughout the site. Glassdoor declined to comment on current prices.)Both the internal and external efforts paid off for Lithium. Suddenly, it became a fantastic place to work, . The company's rating soared from 2. October, 6. 1 percent of reviewers said they would recommend it to a friend. Lithium received Glassdoor's 2. Best Places to Work Employees' Choice award. Many owners resent a business that allows people to anonymously say nasty things about you, and then offers paid services to help you clean up your now- sullied reputation (see . Glassdoor spokesperson Samantha Zupan says that employers can respond to negative reviews without paying for enhanced profiles, and can flag reviews they consider inappropriate. There are other ways to handle negative reviews- -and Lithium did many of them. It responded to reviewer complaints about a lack of communication by instituting weekly staff meetings and by sharing more financial information. It began an annual survey of employees, set up a digital network for posting suggestions, and started hosting quarterly employee roundtables with Tarkoff. Even these efforts were not enough to stop the bad reviews: . But in the age of Yelp, job hunters are savvy at recognizing that bad reviews often say more about the reviewer than the reviewed. And people know instinctively what a study by Workplace Dynamics found last year: Glassdoor reviews represent only a tiny slice of employees- -on average, 1. It will only make people wonder what you're trying to hide. Rule 2: Discover Your Company's Purpose. In 2. 00. 1, when Andrew Limouris started employment agency Medix Staffing Solutions, he wanted it to be less like his father's bakery and its grueling 1. For Dad, the business was just a way to support his family. Limouris wanted Medix, which helps clients find contract employees, to be a place where employees could share their joys and sorrows- -like the births of his three children, his mother's death- -and truly have one another's backs. But Limouris is now 4. Millennials working their first job after college. In the past five years, as the age gap began to grow, turnover became high. They wanted to dress casually; he wanted professional attire. They wanted to work remotely; he wanted them at the office. They wanted to move to downtown Chicago; he wanted to stay in the suburb of Lombard, so he could get home to attend his children's soccer games. Limouris loosened up about the dress codes and, in a few cases, telecommuting, and even agreed to move the company's headquarters to downtown Chicago. But turnover remained high. Next, he brought in consultants, one of whom asked him: Are people rallying around your company's goals? The answer, clearly, was no- -partly because those goals had not been articulated. So Limouris and his senior management team spent an entire day asking a simple question: ? What is our core purpose? The company came up with a rallying cry, . If employees hate their jobs, perks like that won't keep them around, and those perks can even create problems in the short term. The 2. 00. 9 book argues that while it's important to pay employees well, most carrot- and- stick motivators don't work in the long term, because people get so fixated on the reward that they lose interest in the activity itself. What we really want in our jobs, Pink writes, is autonomy, the chance to get better at what we do, and a purpose that connects us to something larger. That is especially true of the Millennial generation, which will make up three- quarters of the nation's work force in just over a decade. Studies show that recent MBAs will work for a significantly lower salary if they truly believe in what they are doing. At Medix, discovering the company's core purpose had a dramatic effect. The new mantra and related team- building exercises, like group- assembling a bicycle, yielded striking results: Turnover dropped, productivity increased, and employee surveys showed engagement levels rose. Finally, Medix was truly becoming more like the type of place where his mom would have loved to work. Rule 3: Survey, But Keep It Short and Follow Up. When Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt, and Luke Bucklin founded the Nerdery in 2. When Bucklin, the company president, died in a plane crash in 2. Nerdery honored his memory by giving everyone on staff the title of . Turnover increased, and departing employees complained about compensation and benefits in exit interviews. Alarmed, the Nerdery's human resources department, in 2. Modern Survey, to find out what was wrong. Employee surveys by big consulting firms like Gallup and Towers Watson have been a staple of large corporations for decades, of course- -by some estimates, it's a $1 billion business- -but only recently have smaller, growing companies like the Nerdery begun to use them too. The trouble is, critics say, these surveys are highly unscientific at best and fraudulent at worst. Leading the naysayers was the late Robert Gerst, a Canadian statistician who kicked up a storm in 2. Journal for Quality and Participation that concluded, . Gallup says it describes people who are ? In short, follow the example of the Nerdery: Survey your employees if you need to get a handle on how they feel, but don't spend a lot of money, make it short, and ask the right questions. The Nerdery hired Modern Survey to administer a simple five- question poll to get an overview of morale and then drill down deeper to unearth specific complaints. But two big areas of dissatisfaction emerged, about compensation and benefits and lack of training. So the Nerdery responded, authorizing each department head to give raises of up to 1. The company also ramped up dental and short- term disability benefits, and replaced vacation and sick days with . It also created a cross- training program to help employees develop secondary and even tertiary skills across a variety of tech platforms. That helped the company too, by keeping employees busy when there was less demand for their primary skills. True to its ethos of transparency, the Nerdery kept employees informed about the survey results and the actions it took in response. This is crucial, says Don Mac. Pherson, co- founder and president of Modern Survey, because taking surveys without sufficient follow- up makes employees more cynical and less inspired. For example, one tech company used his services but then . We came back two years later and the results were even worse. If you're having health issues, you have to deal with it. Otherwise, the consequence could be the failure of your organization. But today the Wallingford, Connecticut, company, which makes bouquets of fresh fruit, has 1.
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