Five things managers do that move engagement.
Engagement strategies are written at the top of organisations. Engagement itself is mostly experienced in a team, through one manager, on an ordinary Tuesday.
On this page
Make the work clear, hold regular one-to-ones about the person, recognise specifically, stretch people, and close the loop on what they raise. Each can start this week.
What the research agrees on
Different studies, using different methods, keep arriving at the line manager.
- Gallup estimated in 2015 that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.
- In the UK, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s 2009 report to government, Engaging for Success, named “engaging managers” as one of four enablers of engagement, alongside a strong strategic narrative, employee voice and organisational integrity.
- Google’s Project Oxygen, which studied what its own best managers did, produced a list of behaviours that includes being a good coach, communicating by listening and sharing information, and supporting career development while discussing performance.
None of these tells a manager what to do on Monday. The good news is that what managers do day to day is learnable. The five practices below are our attempt to do that. They are not a model or a survey result; they are the habits that, in our experience of reading engagement results team by team, most often separate the teams that are thriving from the ones that are not. Each is small enough to start this week.
Make the work clear
People need to know what is expected of them, what good looks like and what matters most right now. It sounds basic, and it is often missing: priorities shift, and nobody tells the people doing the work. Goal-setting research has long found that specific, challenging goals, with feedback on progress, outperform a vague instruction to do your best.
- Check that each person could tell you their top three priorities this month. Ask them.
- When priorities change, say so, and say what drops off the list.
Hold regular one-to-ones that are about the person
A short, regular conversation where their items come first is the place most of the other practices happen. It is also, in our experience, the first thing to be cancelled when a manager is busy, and people notice.
- Weekly or fortnightly, 30 minutes, moved rather than cancelled.
- Their agenda first; yours second. See How to run a good one-to-one.
Notice, and say specifically what went well
Generic praise (“great job, team”) costs nothing and is worth about that. Specific recognition says what the person did and what difference it made, soon after it happened. It tells them what to repeat and that someone was paying attention.
- Name the behaviour and its impact: “The way you rewrote the customer letter cut the follow-up calls.”
- Keep it separate from developmental feedback; see The trouble with the feedback sandwich.
Grow people one stretch at a time
In our experience, people rarely ask for a development programme. They want to be doing something a little harder than last year, with help. A manager who finds the right stretch for each person, and backs them while they try it, does the part of development that no course catalogue can.
- Agree one stretch per person, with a safety net. See A development conversation that lands.
Explain the why, ask, and close the loop
In our experience people cope with a lot of change when they understand the reason for it and believe their view was heard. The practice has three parts: share the context behind decisions, ask for views before deciding where you can, and tell people afterwards what happened to what they raised, including when the answer is no.
- End team meetings with “What did we decide, and who needs to know why?”
- Keep a short list of things the team raised, with what happened to each.
How to tell whether it is working
Before any survey, watch for the everyday signs: people raise problems earlier, they bring ideas without being asked, one-to-ones run over because there is something to talk about, and the people you would least like to lose are still there.
Then look at your engagement data team by team rather than as one organisation-wide number, because averages hide the teams where the difference is being made, and the ones where it is not. Asking people how important each area is to them, as well as how they experience it, shows where effort will count; the engagement priority grid shows how. When the results arrive, from survey results to action keeps the follow-through to one page.
What it asks of organisations
These practices take time, and managers are usually short of it. An organisation that wants them has to protect the time for one-to-ones, tell managers about decisions early enough for them to explain the why, and judge managers partly on how their people experience them. Otherwise the five practices become five more things a busy manager is told to do.
Sources: Randall Beck and Jim Harter, “Managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement”, Gallup Business Journal, 21 April 2015 (from Gallup’s State of the American Manager); David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement, report to government, 2009; Google re:Work, Project Oxygen manager behaviours (list updated 2018); Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, American Psychologist, 2002. The five practices are great{with}talent’s, from our engagement and management-development work. Several of the drivers we measure in WinningFormula sit largely with the line manager: the relationship with the manager, communications, personal growth, and reward and recognition.
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