Build Resilience to Gain Engaged Employees
The Resilience
Developer
Hello & Welcome!
It’s no secret
that workplaces are dealing with what Gallup calls a ‘worldwide
employee engagement crisis,' with four of every six employees on the payroll
just collecting a check or worse, actively sabotaging the organization. To
combat this, the conventional wisdom was to create a company culture around
employee satisfaction by offering perks and benefits like child care, gym
memberships, robust retirement plans, health insurance and holiday
bonuses.
It turns out,
those things didn’t produce engaged employees. Worse, in some ways, they
encouraged the disengaged to stay on the payroll by adding what some workplace
experts refer to as golden handcuffs.
As
a Business Breakthrough Coach, I have developed more than 100 systems to solve
many frustrations that entrepreneurs may have. Over the years, I have learned
coping mechanisms that enable me to not only develop inherent skills and tools to
discover and build a vision for businesses but also be in command of my
professional abilities and transform lives for them to thrive successfully.
The next
evolution of chasing employee satisfaction in the hopes of increasing the ranks
of the engaged was to offer flex-time and telecommuting. This strategy served
only to give more opportunity to the disengaged to slack off
because it reduced oversight, created silos and hampered cross-collaboration.
Instead, the only real way to increase engagement is to build a culture not
around perks and happiness, but around resilience.
Handling what comes.
Resilience is
the ability to take complete control of your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and
actions, especially under pressure. Resilience is the skill to handle anything
your life, and your job, throws your way. Resilience operates from a foundation
of love and abundance, not fear and scarcity. Resilience turns negative stress
into rocket fuel. Having it is the difference between being detached from your
work or being engaged.
To date, the
practice of management has been to treat the symptoms of defeatism and
disengagement by applying Band-Aids to bullet holes. Trying to make your
employees happier isn’t going to move the engagement needle. Happiness is
fleeting for most people. Instead, we should be treating the root causes of
disengagement by providing our employees with the mental and emotional tools to
control their thoughts, feelings, attitudes and emotions,
AKA resilience.
First, understand how your employees’ brains work.
In the last
decade or so, through cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, we have learned
that the brain takes in approximately 11 million bits of information per second
about what you see, what you feel, what you hear, etc. However, only a tiny
fraction of those bits (about 126) go to the conscious mind to influence
action. The key question is, how do people pick the 126 bits that get sent to
the conscious mind?
Studies
show that what we think, what we feel, our opinions, and our attitudes become
the filter that chooses the 126 bits. We discard 99.99 percent of the
information our brain detects and pick only the information that confirms our
feelings, opinions and attitudes.
For
example, if you think today is going to be an awesome day, your brain will go
to work and find the exact 126 bits of information per second that prove your
genius self to be correct. However, if you think today is going to be an awful
day, your brain will go to work and find the exact 126 bits of information that
prove your genius self to be correct. In psychology, it’s called confirmation
bias.
Therefore,
science tells us that a person who believes they can do something can do it and
the person who believes that it’s impossible cannot. This defeatism and
disengagement become a downward spiral that can spread throughout
your organization, if you let it.
Clarify work expectations.
Miscommunication
is a leading contributor to disengagement. Gallup data reveals that only 13
percent of employees strongly agree that leadership communicates effectively.
No wonder workers are disengaged!
Leaders
must first clarify their own thoughts and expectations about a task or project
before they can expect their employees to. Strive to be more direct when giving
assignments because the odds here indicate that you too have a communications
issue that’s contributing to disengagement.
Promote positive coworker relationships.
Take a top-down
approach to facilitating better co-worker relationships. Starting with the CEO
and executive level. A full 62 percent of executives and managers alike
are disengaged. No wonder the rest of the employees are! Become a good
model for what workplace engagement, clarity of thought, enthusiasm, thriving
mindset and communication should look like in leadership. Then, retrain
the other levels of your staff.
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