How to Set Your Staff on Fire: Investing in Employee Relationship Management for Business Innovation

In the 1990s, I had the privilege of being involved in the space program. According to U.S. moon program folklore, much of which had to do with the esprit de corps at NASA, President Kennedy once visited a NASA site and encountered a janitor. Kennedy asked the janitor, "And what's your job?" The reply was, "Mr. President, I'm helping to put a man on the moon."

Whether true or not, the story illustrates a team spirit where every employee is turned on by his or her role--they are on fire about what they are doing, personally and collectively.

The culture in the moon program may seem like one of those larger than life situations, not something that you could expect to create in your organization, but it is possible. If current trends persist, employee engagement will sharply increase in as little as five years from now, and storybook teams will become a widespread norm rather than a pipe dream. This positive turn of events is most definitely in your future.

An increasing number of people experience a work culture in which they feel disconnected from the huge corporate entity that employs them. The entity is so large and diverse that it seems to have no purpose other than to grind out the next set of quarterly profits. And "grinding" best describes how it tends to treat its people. Not that it deliberately humiliates staff; rather, it doesn't seem to notice that its people are actual human beings. They are a resource--human resources--in the same way that the pile of lumber in the warehouse is a resource. They are a component used in the production of this quarter's profits.

In this environment, even highly self-motivated employees complain they struggle to sustain their own flame of enthusiasm. Many feel that they are being asked to mold their behavior such that they can perform a certain function in a certain way that works well for large corporations, and there is little or no opportunity for them to add their own special talents, creativity, and spark. Neither do they feel that they are being called upon to work on things that they personally care about. They increasingly feel that they are on a production line, and all management cares about is that the production line produces 7% more this period than it did last period. As a result, many employees feel that they are simply going through the motions. Putting in time. "It's a job." In this setting, no wonder employee engagement is waning.

It's not that workers are being oppressed by a sinister cadre of evil, mean-spirited management: management is also feeling that there is less and less call--or opportunity--for them to be themselves at work. Why? There is a difference between management and leadership: they overlap, but they are not identical.

Management's task has become much more difficult in this age of mega-mergers and acquisitions. It's all well and good if you have a single organization with a single-minded focus, but managers in today's mega-organizations are faced with accommodating diverse and even conflicting objectives. In this setting, the task of management has as much to do with striking balances as it does with keeping the focus on accomplishing goals. This makes it harder to lead.

In a situation where there is a single, well-understood goal, management can concentrate on reinforcing with employees how their individual activities contribute to the overall goal. In a situation where there must be a balance between conflicting goals, it's much harder to inspire employee engagement. Imagine if the janitor's answer to President Kennedy had been, "Mr. President, I'm helping to strike a balance between, on one hand, fostering our ability to sustain astronauts in space on exploratory missions to objectives such as the moon and eventually Mars, and, on the other hand, making sure that within NASA's allotted budget, and there is also a robust unmanned program that involves sending robotic probes to planets about which we have less knowledge, such as Jupiter, Neptune and the asteroid belt, not to mention fostering our remote sensing capabilities to study stars and detect the presence of other solar systems beyond our own." Not only would it be harder for NASA management to communicate this to the janitor, it would be harder for the janitor to feel that he was on fire about such a role.

Faced with the situation described above, it's too risky for management to show leadership. They can't risk taking risks because they must increase performance every quarter--every week in some organizations. Or do anything that may not succeed by the end of the week. Fewer executives would expect to survive if they set a goal, told the staff that they were the people best equipped to invent and implement the solution, and then hang in with the process through a few initial stumbles and failures until they finally get it right. Rather than reinventing the business on an ongoing basis in response to changing conditions, management tends to focus on doing what was done before or--when the 7% is not being achieved--reach for an off-the-shelf template for improvement that some consultant has sold them.

Not that I have anything against templates: they are a great starting point. What tends to happen though is that they are imposed--cookie-cutter style--and staff feels that they are once again being asked to adopt characteristics and behaviors that someone else has mandated rather than finding the solution themselves.

This situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. So why am I optimistic? And what is the solution? How can employee engagement be restored? How can your organization be transformed so the whole staff--including the janitor--feels that they are personally and collectively on fire?

To answer this, I hearken back to my days in high school. Please understand that I am not a natural athlete: my physique is dumpy. Nonetheless, I have a love of football, and through sheer determination (certainly not because of any natural physical talent), I made the high school football team. Based on my talents, the coaches astutely assigned me the role of keeping the bench warm, and I didn't see a whole lot of action. But I love to compete, I love to be part of something, and I love to be outside on fall days enjoying the bite of the autumn breeze and the smell of the grass on the playing field. As well, I enjoy the activities of the game: throwing the ball, catching the ball, running, and tackling. All these things are fun.

And fun is the very thing that we have allowed to go missing in our work lives. By fun, I do not mean party time. I mean the enjoyment of doing the work. I'm sure we've all met individuals who are wildly enthusiastic about the work they are doing, the type of person who says things like, "I can't believe I'm actually getting paid to do this!" Not everyone is like this, nor can everyone be like this, as some people are more self-motivated than others and some people are more energetic than others. But virtually everyone feels that they want to do a good job, to contribute, and to be good at what they do, and they want to enjoy doing it. This inclination is innate. It is a resource--a human resource--that managers can tap into. Fun is the ignition point for fire.

We can tap into this innate desire if we encourage managers to be leaders by setting a goal and then tasking staff with coming up with the way to achieve it. We could help our managers develop their skill at identifying what each person does best and then helping that person to make that the cornerstone of their contribution. We could help managers reinforce the fun that people experience when they perform their work. In this circumstance, might it actually be possible that employees would feel that they are actually being asked to contribute, and that bringing their own talent and creativity actually matters?

Corporations still tend to demand 7% more this week than last, and have zero tolerance for failure, so is it wildly idealistic to imagine that managers will be able to act in a way that encourages staff to own the task and invent the solution?

Market forces will make it virtually inevitable that we shift our style in this way. Check it out in your organization: battle fatigue is beginning to set in everywhere. People are feeling that they just can't keep on operating the way we are currently operating. What are the odds that eventually corporations will find that they simply aren't achieving their 7%--not even with the help of their seven-point improvement plans? When the 7% is no longer possible, it will be necessary to try something else. Not every corporation will realize this at the same time. By tapping their true human resources, some organizations will establish a decided competitive advantage over others, and when some corporations are making 10% using a certain style while others are struggling to make 2%, guess what will happen next?

We know that the scenario described above is in your intermediate future because we're in the measurement business. You might even want to start thinking about it and discussing it now, before your competition reaches the same conclusions.

You're going to want to measure the amount of fun your people are having (i.e., how engaged they are, what gives them a sense of engagement): What is the temperature of the fire you have created, and what fuel tends to turn up the heat?

Ask employees about the organization's goals and how their goals and responsibilities link to this corporate mission. This would be like Kennedy asking the janitor how his activities help put a man on the moon. If the janitor could actually describe how his activities are contributing to this goal, Kennedy would have known that not only was the janitor enthusiastic, but beyond this, he was truly engaged.

The old school going-through-the-motions style of employee satisfaction survey will tend to reinforce disengagement and cynicism, but asking staff about things that matter to them rather than the corporation will signal that you actually do get it, you remembered that they are real live human beings, and you are interested in what they have to contribute.

By rekindling what your employees love to do and are great at doing--the fun--you can set your staff on fire.