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What-How-Why-When

This practice for employee engagement was experienced for over a half-century by a once Fortune 100 company in the Hospitality industry. It became an integral part of the culture of the organization.  People were involved in daily operations with their hearts and minds.  In research to revive the experience and re-create it the following questions were asked:  What to do?  How to do it?  Why it worked to move people toward self-engagement--better understanding?  When people become self-engaged--what it looks and feels like?

A.  Simply put, what are the actions which, when practiced, can lead the journey to self-engagement for everyone?  Studies show almost one third of people already are energized by the experience.  What did they do to learn this?  How do we help the other two-thirds move towards self-engagement? 

In the graphic below, for the half that are "not engaged" this does not mean they are disengaged.  They contribute daily by following directions (doing as told), being dependable, and putting forth effort.  Most do well on reviews and are considered assets by the group.  Their feedback is focused on supervisors and colleagues out of habit and they do not think for themselves to get feedback from the activity itself.  While they may be involved they seldom are engaged by having their hearts and minds in their efforts.  Because of this they seldom engage customers to experience being energized by the re-engagement from customers.  Most often they are involved but do not consistently experience having their heart and mind in group efforts.

Findings were that to help people move towards full engagement the group must first focus on the activity (identify what success will look and feel like as in the graphic in D below).  Then a group leader can "guide" the following actions with their entire group.
  • Thank: Builds recognition and leads appreciation.
  • Invite: Demonstrates intentions, which leads to commitments.
  • Ask critical questions: Creates attention and leads to long-term focus.
  • Get feedback from activities: Keeps associates engaged at a high level.
  • Share assessments: Develops opinions that foster dialogue.
The following graphic demonstrates how continuing to practice the recipe (steps) will build momentum and experiences involving not only the beneficiaries of the groups' efforts (usually customers in an enterprise) but also colleagues and supervisors as well.  A journey rather than a destination.  Keep in mind the steps, as with any recipe, can begin anywhere (preferably on the frontlines) and can be informal to begin (experiment) with. 

A leader can simply say "let's ask our customers to let us know how we are doing!"  The actions can begin verbally but with practice should become mostly non-verbal.  Keep it simple (have fun) and if you get of track just pick it back up when you get a chance.  The practice is a process to make assessments (share opinions/dialogue) about and not a program requiring measurements. 

B.  So how does following the 5-step process move people towards full engagement?  By helping members of frontline groups participate in re-asking the critical questions for "How are we doing?" both individually and collectively.  This is the missing-link in daily operations for most groups today.  The opportunity for everyone in daily operations to participate in asking the critical questions and build a dialogue through feedback from their own activities.



C. Once the steps of the recipe are identified then understanding why, when practiced, these actions move people toward self-engagement (involved with heart and mind) ?   Even experiencing the practice does not explain why it works.  The epiphany for this comes from the guru of involvement Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where he points out that it takes the feedback from the activity itself to let us know, individually and collectively, how we are doing!   

D.  When do people become self-engaged?  It happens in the "cycle of engagement" depicted in the graphic below as an engaged associate, within the framework of a critical activity, engages customers and, in turn is re-engaged by those customers!  This becomes a win-win-win for associates, customers, and the enterprise (not least of whom would be the supervisor) who have all put retention, performance, and commitments on auto-pilot.