How to stop “fighting employee burnout” and move to “engagement management”
Employee engagement and its opposite - burnout - have been in the center of attention of managers and HR specialists for the last few years. This suggests that employee behavior and performance are becoming less and less predictable for managers.
There are a number of reasons that cause difficulties in the interaction between managers and employees.
To name the main ones:
The rapid growth of the remote workforce, triggered by the pandemic. Employees have become literally “invisible” to managers. To assess their productivity and psychological state now requires not only additional manager's time, but also special tools;
A sharp reduction in the qualitative supply of qualified specialists on the labor market. In some cases, this leads to absurd bargaining at the recruiting stage. Thus, Alyona Vladimirskaya, a well-known specialist in the field of recruitment, reports cases when job seekers expect payment for the very fact of passing the interview. At the same time, the level of salary is increasingly no longer a factor that ensures employee loyalty. Against this backdrop, companies are seeking to find a way to the heart of their employees, to bind them to themselves not with money, but with care.
Digitalization, which strengthened the first two trends, at the same time gave employers completely new tools to analyze employee behavior based on their digital footprint, pulse surveys, predictive technologies and AI. Engagement, loyalty, satisfaction from vague HR categories turned into measurable indicators that are easy to process, analyze and interpret thanks to customizable tools for regular operational feedback.
Today, dozens of solutions compete on the market of software for assessing the psychological state of employees: from simple questionnaires to complex systems for diagnosing employee behavior based on the analysis of corporate communications. And although there are still debates about the ethics and privacy limits of collecting and analyzing this or that data, we can say that the problem of measuring the level of engagement has been solved.
But engagement management poses many questions for the manager:
Is it possible to increase employee engagement or is it necessary to hire initially engaged employees?
Whether increasing engagement requires individual work with employees or systemic changes in the company's internal processes;
If engagement depends on a number of factors, then which of them are the most important and which of them are the easiest to influence?
Whether the engagement management levers are the same for all employees.
There are no unambiguous answers to these questions, as the state of engagement/burnout is related to both personality and work environment characteristics. But what is important is that engagement is a projection of these two factors, the result of their correspondence (coincidence). A situation of total mismatch is guaranteed to lead to burnout and employee leaving the company. Corporate culture, work processes, job duties favorable for some employees may turn out to be unacceptable for others. At the same time, one cannot deny the existence of toxic working conditions and managers, as well as employees prone to burnout.
Thus, individual reactions of employees to certain working conditions depend on their value attitudes, leading motivation factors, and position within the network of social interactions. All three aspects are interrelated, but they manifest themselves in different ways. The most significant are the dominant motivation factors, which are formed as early as adolescence. It is they that influence our value attitudes. The compatibility of our values with those that prevail in the collective determines the degree and quality of our socialization in the working environment.
Based on the above, the diagnosis of individual factors of employee motivation will make it possible to:
Predict how comfortable an employee will feel in a certain organization, team, or in a certain position;
Recommend the most effective ways of interaction with him/her in terms of organizing his/her work, supporting communication with other employees and departments, career planning, professional growth and development;
Warn the immediate manager about “blind spots” of perception, peculiarities of individual interpretation of work situations, “zones of intolerance” and risk factors.
However, each company has a certain limit of flexibility within which it can take into account the individual characteristics of the employee. If an employee's needs go far beyond these limits, the most reasonable thing to do is to refrain from accepting him or her into the organization. Otherwise, on the one hand, it will become a source of his personal discomfort, and on the other hand, it will create a high risk of local destructive processes around such a “foreign” employee - conflicts, failed projects, violated procedures. The higher the position of such an employee in the organizational hierarchy, the higher the risk of negative consequences.
As a basis for the methodology of determining motives we have chosen the theory of self-determination of Edward Dicey and Richard Ryan, which is now generally recognized, the most elaborated and has many experimental confirmations.
The theory of self-determination states that children are born with innate psychological needs:
The need for autonomy - the ability to make decisions independently (hence the name of the theory);
The need for competence - a sense of sufficient knowledge and resources to achieve goals;
The need for connection with other people - receiving a positive assessment of one's activity from others.
People with strong intrinsic motivation find pleasure in work as such, the development of their abilities and knowledge and benefits, which runs differently for everyone; intrinsic motivation factors can be supplemented, distorted and destroyed.
This is how factors of external motivation arise, which in extreme cases can completely replace the internal ones. In this case, an employee is motivated solely by external indicators of success: status, money, power. Labor for such an employee becomes an unpleasant condition for receiving benefits, and he or she may perform duties formally or avoid them at every opportunity.
Different combinations of external and internal factors of motivation, different strength of their manifestation create a unique motivational pattern of personality, on which depend the performance of the employee in the company, as well as the choice of instruments of influence to increase his involvement and productivity.
Based on the theory of self-determination, methodologists of our company have defined a list of motives, which together create a scale of internal, external and mixed motives.
The first three “motivators” refer to “intrinsic”, they are conditioned by a person's needs for choice and competence:
Autonomy - the need for choice, decision making. Every person has an innate need to realize that they have choices.
Professional development - a need based on the desire for development, improvement. In professional activity it is learning new skills, the desire to become an expert in one's field. It is the need to feel progress in one's development.
Self-acceptance. The need to feel “in your place”, to be confident in your abilities when solving work tasks. It is the desire to feel in control of what happens.
The three “motivators” refer to both internal and external. The need for belonging, community with other people makes them internal. External - the need for informal status, evaluation from the outside, the desire to meet the expectations of others.
Respect of colleagues. The need to recognize colleagues, in their fair assessment of merits, achievements and successes. This is the need to feel belonging to the collective.
Recognition of management. The need for a fair and constructive evaluation of merit on the part of the supervisor. This is the need to make sense of one's work; it is satisfied by the supervisor's feedback. Complements the previous “motivator”.
Job meaningfulness (mission). This is the need to understand the company's goals, the meaning of work, and the significance of the work performed for society. It also complements the previous two “motivators”. The sense of belonging, contribution to the common cause here extends to society as a whole.
The last four refer to “external”, they are related to good working conditions, including financial rewards.
Vertical career. The desire to solve managerial tasks, to lead other employees. This is the need to gain power and status.
Financial reward. The need for high salary and financial reward, the desire to have a job with a good set of benefits and allowances and additional bonuses.
Working conditions. The need for good working conditions and comfortable environment. Comfortable workplace, the ability to concentrate on work, not to be distracted by extraneous stimuli.
Work/life balance. The need for work not to displace the needs of the family and personal interests, to be comfortable - without overwork, irregular working hours, constant business trips.
Two questionnaires were created to diagnose an employee's “motivational well-being”:
for individual ranking of the employee's motivation factors;
for measuring the level of satisfaction by motivation factors.
It is obvious that measuring employee satisfaction by a single questionnaire without taking into account individual preferences based on leading motivation factors is impractical. For example, an employee may give a low rating to the working conditions in the company, but this has no effect on his or her level of engagement, since working conditions are not significant in his or her motivation structure.
The leading factors of employee motivation are stable, their change, if any, is insignificant and only in the long term, but the level of satisfaction is mobile, it can be managed by changing the working environment.
Thus, having determined the motivational formula of each employee, the company is able to:
measure employee satisfaction according to each employee's individual motivation factors;
develop corrective actions that can improve employee satisfaction;
plan to replace employees whose motivational formula is in conflict with the company's corporate culture, or the company sees no way to meet the employee's needs.
Work on increasing satisfaction by one or another motivation factor can be personalized, addressed to each employee individually, or directed at a group of employees with a similar motivational structure. In the second case, corrective actions will be more systematic, which may affect key business processes of the organization.
The combination of individual and group measures determines additional efficiency in increasing the level of engagement in the company.
The choice of these or those tools depends on the degree of clustering of leading motivation factors. If employees with similar leading motivation factors are found in the same division, in the same positions or in a significant (relative to the total number of the company's personnel) number, it is logical to apply systemic improvement tools.
For example, in the division engaged in new product development, there is low involvement and high turnover of qualified personnel. The research revealed a significant group of employees whose leading motivators “autonomy” and “professional development” are in a state of deprivation (remain unsatisfied). It is quite likely that the reason for this dissatisfaction is in the established rules of setting and controlling the performance of tasks, as well as in the improper organization of career path of specialists. In this case, measures aimed at changing work processes may be helpful, such as:
Measuring the emphasis of team work from procedures to results.
Giving employees more freedom in choosing how to achieve results and scheduling work time.
Discussing with employees their targets and ways to improve performance.
Introducing individual planning and summarizing procedures, highlighting individual development and growth parameters and tracking progress against them.
Introducing long-term personal development plans that include learning new professional areas and applying new knowledge in practice.
Creating opportunities for diversity in work tasks, wider use of rotation within the company, not only vertical but also horizontal.
Consider the opposite situation. Most of the team agrees that the significant motivators (“autonomy” and “professional development”) are satisfied, but there are several employees with low satisfaction for the same factors. In this case, individual work should be done to identify the reasons:
Perhaps the employee is stuck in an executive job and expects “horizontal” or “vertical” growth.
Perhaps such an employee has lost the sense of growth and progress. Though from the point of view of his/her immediate supervisor, development is taking place at a satisfactory pace.
Perhaps the employee, due to internal limitations, does not see ways to improve his or her productivity.
Such a situation requires the manager to identify the reasons for low satisfaction and, together with the employee, determine ways to resolve the hidden conflict.
Obviously, it is impossible to influence the level of employee engagement directly. However, we can manage those parameters that, in turn, influence the level of engagement. Diagnosis and satisfaction of the leading factors of employee motivation is the most important and effective tool that determines the actions of managers in the short and long term. Thanks to this approach, a company can move from “patching holes” (after sudden dismissals of valuable specialists) to a proactive engagement management strategy. The approach allows to anticipate negative phenomena (not only dismissals, but also the risks of conflicts and decreased productivity), prevent them from hiring the “right” (from the company's point of view) employees, and adjust the work with those employees whose motivation is shaken.
