Engagement Overview

Engagement is a term that is often used but not well understood. According to Gallup, only 30% of people are positively engaged in their work, while the rest are either neutrally or actively disengaged. It is important for leaders to define what engagement means to them and not make assumptions. Creating a clear definition and coaching employees to meet those expectations can improve engagement. This involves actively listening, being attentive, and avoiding distractions. By involving employees in the process, they become co-authors of their own change. Once the definition is established, leaders can coach employees to exhibit the desired attributes. One of the terms that is overused all the time is the term or the word engagement. And there are a lot of studies on engagement. One of the great organizations is the Gallup organization and they do some great definition of engagement. When you think about engagement, about being present, being attentive, really positively vested in work, here's the tough news. The Gallup organization reports that roughly only 30% of people are positively engaged. The rest, 70%, 7 out of every 10 employees, are neutrally or actively disengaged. The actively disengaged has gone as high as 29% to 21% of people are negatively engaged in the workplace, meaning they have negative tendencies. And then the other percentage is people are neutrally engaged. Here is our strong advice when coaching to Use our technique. Define it. Define and coach. Define what engagement means to you. Don't assume engagement. Leaders do this all the time. Oh, this person isn't engaged. Well, no, actually we found out later the person was engaged. They get passed over for a promotion. They've lost a little bit of their motivation. But they're engaged in the workplace. They're still positive. And so we misjudge or misinterpret what The formula is as follows. Engagement is fill in the blank by doing what and then list out the attributes and actions. Let me give you an example off the top of my head. Engagement in the workplace is positive interactions, always thoughtfully listening to one another by demonstrating. Here come the attributes and actions. Active listening, complete attentiveness, without interruption, without distraction, such as looking at your phone while someone is talking. And you can create a pretty robust definition. Once you create a definition, you can do this, by the way, by yourself or with your employees, you create that definition and then you coach to it. Then you create the expectations. Here's the cool thing you can do with the definition. As corny as it sounds, you can then say, if everybody agrees this is our definition, what's our safe phrase to address one another, to help one another when someone's not exhibiting these traits? What's the safe phrase that we can all agree that we use, we agree we will not take defensively? What you're essentially doing is co-authoring conflict. So somebody who's coached volleyball for 30, 31 years, it was one of my techniques. And we would define what is a great teammate. And if someone's not exhibiting those attributes, what's our safe phrase? The safe phrase we always chose was pick it up. When a teammate looked at you on the court and said, pick it up, essentially what would happen is you would realize you're not exhibiting those attributes, but you couldn't get defensive because you agreed not to get defensive. So create a really robust definition. Engagement is by doing what? I love to involve employees because then essentially they co-author what they have to be expected to do. They essentially co-author their own change. Once you have that definition, and let me just use a, for the rest of the section of engagement with the audio lessons, we'll focus on listening attentively without distraction. And then when you have those attributes, you can then start to coach to them.