Work satisfaction, now called “engagement”, is what keeps us all going in the workplace, or at least is what prevents us from taking too much time off sick, or feeling utterly depressed in the place where we spend most of our time (besides bed maybe).
I’m not here talking about that swathe of employees who deliberately and neatly manage to take up their yearly amount of sick leave each year as if it is part of their work entitlement. In fact, if you like what you do and get satisfaction from it, it is almost a privilege as most of us feel more than a little alienated from our employers, from the organisation we work for and sometimes even from the government of the day as expressed in our local election-cum-expensive opinion polls every year!
So how do you turn alienated employees into happy ones? How does the government get the people to feel engaged in what its doing? Professor of psychology at the University of London, Adrian Furnham, gives us all some tips about how to make it happen, tips that are so common sense, basic and routine but we still manage to not do them, miss them or ignore them completely. Here are just a selection of them.
Firstly, everyone has to know what is expected of them and most importantly these expectations have to be managed.
What applies to staff in an organisation applies to the population too.
Every employee, every interest group has its own expectation of promotion and of change, of what their organisation expects of them. This cannot just be left to one’s whims, it needs to be totally managed. Weak PR, press releases or internal memos cannot do this on their own. You have to get out there and manage it yourself, be you the CEO or the PM or his Cabinet of Ministers. One chief executive of a leading savings bank in the UK with 500 staff not only attends the final interview for all his staff’s recruitment but sets aside time to talk to them, time to listen to them, time to engage with them.
Contrary to this, a recent report in the UK Sunday Times said that “50 per cent of British employees had never even had a conversation with their chief executive – a quarter do not know his or her name, while 50 per cent claim their chief executive does not know who they are.”
Secondly, give people the tools for the job.
Too many employees suffer because they don’t have the tools to fulfil the expectations employers have of them. This is not only true in the private sector but is a problem too for all those government employees who are hard-working and are currently inundated with extra work, partly brought about by European Union membership, but also not helped by the current mania to centralise everything. A disproportionate amount of time is being spent on requests for information, not least some of the ridiculous PQs that are actually coming from both sides of the House that only serve to keep employees away from delivering a proper service! It’s a bit similar to the frustration many are feeling when the normal pay packet simply cannot keep up with today’s normal expectation of mobiles, cars, ADSL and a host of other things that have to be paid for, and are not at all cheap.
Thirdly, look for ambitions and energetic people but steer them.
The most brilliant, creative people still need someone to guide their thoughts and ambitions. And most important of all, do not, as management or as government thinks, have a monopoly on the truth or on good ideas. This is part of the reason the government is not being listened to as much as it should be, or feels it should be. Some better ideas are coming from the middle classes, from letter pages to newspapers, from the people, the actual staff of this country(!), but the government, like most management, is assuming that it knows better, or more specifically, adopts a this-is-hurting-but-is-good-for-you approach.
Give people opportunities to shine where they have the talent to do so.
It’s not only that people love to feel acknowledged and need to show off their talents a bit! This country desperately needs to be more meritocratic too. People need to feel they can get on, not only on the strength of contacts but on what they can achieve, have achieved or will achieve. These are some of the many intangibles people wanted EU membership to bring us.
It’s not only that people are not seeing them coming, they don’t feel part of the vision of the government of the day.
The government, like management, must be visionary. It’s not only about E850 million and “smart cities.” It’s about a vision that enough of us can find a bit on to which we can latch (whether our gripe is the rent laws or the lack of meritocracy or our mad system of schooling our kids and destroying their childhoods) which could turn a politically disillusioned workforce and middle class back into feeling engaged with the whole political scenario, in which we all ultimately work, again.