Engagement - Learn to Love Your Job | Part 3: Re-Engagement
Employee engagement can be essential to an organization’s success or failure. It faces many challenges amid the new normal of remote-ready, hybrid, and on-site work environments. In this limited series The Spotlight has considered engagement from various perspectives. In Part 1, we looked at what happens when employee enthusiasm wanes. Part 2 offered techniques to keep employees engaged and fulfilled. This month Part 3 concludes the series with a focus on assessment strategies, tools for employees to renew engagement, and an observation on work as part of a well-balanced life.
Engagement refers to the level of enthusiasm an employee feels about their job. Over a lifetime people spend approximately 90,000 hours at work. That is just more than one-third of our lives. The purpose of work is to make a living, yet it is also to remain intellectually engaged and become a contributing member to society. It is realistic to anticipate that no one will remain fully engaged for so much time. As in life, engagement can wax and wane over time. How to maximize the waxing and minimize the waning?
One could start with discipline and focus. Many of you may remember the film The Karate Kid where Mr. Miyaga had Daniel clean cars (“wax on, wax off”). The nominal idea was to create muscle memory and sharpen his reflexes. Daniel is later able to block punches and kicks with the movements he learned from this and other chores. The same can be true in engagement. If we learn to spot the signs of becoming less engaged we are more able to build strategies to recognize this and help mitigate it.
Almost 80% of American workers say engagement is important in company culture, with 83% of millennials considering work-life balance to be the most important factor in evaluating jobs. While employees cannot create culture, they can adapt to it and modify it. Once you have established yourself, feel free to make recommendations to your supervisor, manager, or leadership about low-hanging fruit to improve the office or work. Are there better ways to build the mousetrap? Could you create a wellness activity? Are there games that can be played within the work environment? At a staff meeting during the pandemic, our team introduced wellness bingo that was simply a bingo card with wellness activities on it. The idea was to encourage the team’s natural competitiveness to come out and improve their healthy habits. Each week, one team member would bring up something on the bingo card that was tried as new. In terms of team building, this worked surprisingly well and the weekly sharing created team bonds. Play is important and there is no reason why this cannot be part of office culture.
Engagement is also about connectivity or stickiness as it is known in business terminology. While many employees prefer to work alone, most will find that teaming with others creates unanticipated benefits. Some examples include having two or three staff members team up to create a guide on the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) data sharing plans or partner for a conference talk. Sometimes it is just having a small group work together to decipher a new funding mechanism for faculty that has not been handled previously. Benefits here include not having to figure out the unknown alone, sharing ideas, and building a sense of teamwork.
Remaining connected to the mothership i.e., your institution and office, has been challenging during the pandemic. Are there ways to build a brand that brings employees together? At the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) we did this through branding – providing a product that all staff receive. In our case it was a jacket with the department logo. This doubled as a uniform, but also served as a reminder of the staff’s home department, connection to UCLA, and visible recognition of their work. While an upfront cost, the jackets have over time created branding and a connection that could not otherwise have been crafted.
Continued education has become a greater key strategy for engagement over the past decade. Employees want to see tangible growth opportunities, either through regular seminars, online trainings, classes, study groups, or even professional certifications. These tools provide essential resources to allow staff to continue to refine their education. Benchmarking significant growth along the way, such as reminding employees how much they have learned, is vital. This may often be complicated for managers due to bandwidth issues but should be a required component in any employee’s personal growth plan.
Professional certification may not be for all, but in many places has proven a case study-worthy endeavor in enhancing engagement. There is a goal with a prize – certification – at the terminus. If structured properly, certification can allow staff a defined pathway. Asking staff on a team to contribute to the curricular efforts also provides a means of ensuring interactivity and engagement.
A manager often must be a creative thinker identifying education, puzzles, and challenges for staff to keep them engaged. The critical facet for the manager is to take time weekly to reflect on each employee and where they are in their journey. Is Joe Bruin engaged? Is Joe quiet and a model of emo, or is Joe actively sharing thoughts and ideas? Have you done anything for Joe this month? Is only the squeaky wheel being oiled? Based on the goals outlined in his last evaluation, how is Joe progressing? Engagement is a constantly active process.
We asked SRAI President Gloria Greene her thoughts on how she keeps employees engaged. She noted three important pillars:
- Empowerment. “I give my staff more autonomy and decision-making power. Employees are more engaged and motivated when they feel they have a say in the direction of their work and can take ownership of their projects.”
- Building relationships. “I take time with my staff by regularly checking in on their personal lives and interests, understanding that it's more about work-life balance. I care about the person, not just their performance on the job. Doing this helped build trust and made my staff feel valued as individuals.”
- Providing growth opportunities. “I provide them the opportunities to learn and grow in their careers. This included offering training and development opportunities, as well as challenging assignments. My staff is more engaged when they feel they are learning and growing in their respective fields, which helps them feel more connected to our organization.”
Gloria feels “engagement is not just about providing perks or incentives; it’s also about creating a positive work culture and investing in my staff's well-being and growth.”
We asked the same question of Theresa Couch, Research Administration Manager at Michigan State University. Theresa explained, “One way I try to do this is with continuing education. Our office supports one conference per year for each team member. Additionally, I am looking into purchasing blocks of the LevelUp modules for us to participate in as a team – for example, each week we complete a chapter and then discuss in a team meeting.” She added, “I also try to keep the side projects going for everyone. I created a subject matter expert list and each team member has at least one area that they are responsible for keeping up to date in. For example, we have someone assigned to the DMS Plan policy, another person is in charge of other support (differs by sponsor), and so on. This way everyone has a little area of expertise that the rest of the team can rely on if needed. My team also serves on committees, helps with the newsletter, is a point person for a specific unit or department, handles a certain type of proposal (e.g., state funding, which can be very confusing).”
Overall, the best advice is to just ask yourself what you expect from your job as part of your life. If one-third of your life is going to be allocated to work, what will inspire you to maximize utility, value, satisfaction, and – yes – engagement, during this time?
In conclusion, we return to another saying from Mr. Miyaga, this one summarizing engagement for all employees and serving as a lesson in life itself. “Lesson not just karate only. Lesson for whole life. Whole life have a balance, everything be better.” Or, put in more aspirational terms “Man who catch fly with chopstick, accomplish anything.”
Thanks to Sabrina Cerezo, Assistant Director for Grants, Stonybrook Research, for her intellectual contributions to this series.
Authored by Mark Lucas, Chief Administrative Officer, Departments of Neurobiology and Computational Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California Los Angeles
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