Promoting Engagement in Remote and Hybrid Work Settings

From kitchen table of Michael Legut, PhD. 

 

    When I think about the employee issues related to remote or hybrid work, the topic of engagement comes into play. I’m sure that these different work place options have caused many leaders to be concerned about work performance, disengagement and counter productive work behaviors. One thing to understand is that engagement is about relationships. Relationships between the employee, the manager, and the job. When this relationship breaks down, disengagement can become a significant issue for your business. This article will provide a perspective on how to enhance employee engagement when the work place is not always in-office. 

    Gallup recently estimated that disengagement costs companies over $550 billion in lost productivity. That may seem like a big number but when you think about the disruptions disengagement creates, such as mistakes, HR issues, firing, hiring - $550 billion could be a reasonable number. In addition, the shift to hybrid or remote work place options may cause employees and leaders to feel more disengaged and this could become a costly problem. So I’ll begin this article by exploring behaviors that can enhance work engagement. The picture above represents my perspective. That is, engagement can be boiled down into three key behaviors in the work relationship. These are Trust, Commitment and Accountability. Let’s look briefly at each behavior.

    First, trust is the foundation of any good relationship. To promote employee engagement you must have trust. Trust is a mind-set. It is about creating a work environment where mutually supportive actions lead to deeper personal connections, and a desire to produce the best possible work outcome. We might look at trust as something like, the manager has the employee’s back and the employee has the manager’s back, and both strive to achieve the best work outcome. Vulnerability, mutual flexibility and confidence in others help to demonstrate trust. The bottom line is that trust requires open and honest communication where useful feedback and information is shared on a regular basis. 

   Along with trust, you also need commitment. Commitment is about investing in efforts to overcome obstacles that inhibit trust. To build any good relationship you need to consistently make an effort to build trust. Commitment is about how the employee and the manager invest in the work and in the people doing that work. Do they truly care about the work they are doing, and do they care about each other. A commitment to caring means that the team members consistently behave in a manner that builds trust, and they work together to resolve conflicts and find solutions to achieve the best work outcome. 

    I hope you are beginning to see that employee engagement is not just about doing the job but how people interact when they do the job. This seems a bit complex but we all know that relationships are complex and this is where accountability comes into play. When you want trust and commitment, you also need accountability to make the relationship sustainable. 

    Accountability is about taking ownership for your commitments and how the work gets done. This includes understanding the work, through job training and feedback, and providing recognition and rewards when work performance achieves the desired outcomes. Accountability means taking ownership for knowing what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you are doing it.

    While employee engagement can be improved with actions that show Trust, Commitment and Accountability, there are many situations that may cause disengagement. Emotional exhaustion, toxic behaviors, work loads and post-pandemic changes can cause an employee or manager to become disengaged. In fact, the stress and emotional exhaustion created by Covid related life changes tend to trigger more disengagement. One way to understand work issues that inhibit engagement is to look at employee engagement as activity that requires personal energy, the physical and emotional energy to do the work. 

    Personal energy is like a battery that powers various levels of engagement. When you are emotionally exhausted, your personal energy is lower, and you tend to become more disengaged from a work task as a result. Sometimes a good cup of coffee can help that temporarily, but other life situations can drain your personal energy. To get a better picture of this, let’s look at how various levels of engagement and personal energy interact to impact employee productivity. For simplicity sake, let’s label the outcomes created by various levels of personal energy and engagement into four categories. Productivity, Counter Productivity, Toxic Behaviors, and Pandemic Burnout. 

    When engagement and personal energy for the work is low, you will likely see counter productive work behaviors such as mistakes, work absences, or missed deadlines. The person’s mind-set here might sound like “it’s just a job”, “I don’t really care”, “I really don’t want to be here.” In this situation, the job, the manager or the employee may not fit the work required, and there is little evidence of a relationship other than the weekly paycheck. The work tasks get done but there will likely issues with quality and productivity due to the lack of commitment, accountability and trust. 

    However, employee engagement can change when there is a good job fit and a positive relationship between the manager, employee and the work. When the relationship is good, the person may actually gain personal energy from their work and their manager. When a person is excited about the work they do, you tend to see strong productivity. You also see a good amount of Trust, Commitment and Accountability within the manager, employee and job relationship. 

    On the downside however, if engagement is low and personal energy is high, the person may show “fight or flight” responses. Here you have people who quit (i.e. flight) or mentally quit but are still working at the company. Those who “quit” but are still working, tend to demonstrate more disruptive and toxic work behaviors (i.e. fight). These behaviors may be subtle or blatant, such as yelling at or criticizing employees in front of other workers, or spreading negative gossip about coworkers or managers. The work relationship is disengaged and significant issues such as sabotage, violence and other problematic HR issues may occur. 

    Finally, sometimes personal energy is impacted by life situations. We know that during the Covid crisis, productivity was as good if not better than pre-Covid time. Even though an employee’s engagement may have been high during the pandemic, issues related to health concerns, family care, and increased work loads, created changes that added to stress levels and drained personal energy. These life stressors tend to create, what I call pandemic burn-out. In this situation, people may be highly engaged in the work but life stressors deplete their personal energy. As personal energy for work activity decreases, they may experience physical illness, a loss of focus and they can become more disengaged as a result. 

     So as I sum up this article, my guidance to you, is to take time to understand what is going on in lives of your co-workers and look for ways to build more engagement with your team. Show you’re your employees and co-workers that you care about who they are, what they do. Be committed and accountable to build trust and provide helpful constructive feedback to each other. 

    As always my hope is that this article will help leaders consider actions to enhance engagement within their teams, understand how cope with post-pandemic work issues, and to help build effective hybrid work teams. I can be reached at www.leaderimage.com or on my LinkedIn page.