The Engagement Trilogy

Tired of all the looong Covid-related articles? Relax, this text is shorter, and Covid-proof! Just a few tips about human nature and engagement, and what works well even if you experience a health crisis, or economic turmoil, or political instability, or…

The combination of three well known factors is what we are aiming to highlight in this short message. The booster effect of combining these three key company activities – when well applied – is significant:

1. a nimble Performance management,
2. an agile Talent development, and
3. a coherent Rewards system

By connecting the benefits of only three activities, you can form a powerful support to employee Engagement, everywhere and anytime. Let’s look at what could be done.

Performance: driving action

Most performance management systems are too mechanistic, too heavy and too slow. We have been literally bombarded with proof that behaviour drives goal achievement, not the opposite. When will we embrace human nature in our performance management (not just “measurement”) systems? To drive action, feedback is much more effective than control, frequent checkpoints much better than yearly rituals and ad-hoc premiums more effective than yearly bonuses.

In 2020, we should have learned enough about human nature at work to understand why we need to set this straight in 2021.

Talent: driving progress

Skilled Talent is difficult to find, and difficult to keep in today’s highly competitive economies. People move more easily and have instant access to alternative job opportunities. However many companies are still in defensive mode, talking about “retention” which I call “the Pampers approach”: not good enough!

Engaging a pro-active, authentic conversation with Talent can make a big difference, and drive growth well beyond the current job situation. Staff who want stability can of course stay on a “linear” track, but if a talented employee wants to look for other opportunities, we should create such an opportunity somewhere else in the company, or make a plan towards the next challenge together with her. This necessitates courage and creativity from Leaders, but when they really engage with Talent… it might just be worth it!

Patronizing, creating career ladders/paths, pre-defining formatted solutions should be avoided, what is needed is Talent fluidity, high adaptive capacity to enable Talent to thrive.

In 2021, we should treat all employees as adults, listen to their ideas and ambitions and give them a honest, constructive feedback on how to thrive in our companies.

Rewards: driving engagement and “dynamic stability”

The old rewards systems, based on yearly deadlines, long waiting times, one size fits all and money is king, are unfit to the Y and Z generations. The more modern way of rewarding staff is to create a varied catalogue on monetary and non-monetary benefits, for the employee to choose from within a given framework. These should include continuous learning offers, ESG project participation and free-time activities.

The “rewards and activities à la carte” approach enables each employee to create the best combination for her specific situation, and to adapt the package as the situation changes. The employer should stop thinking it all out for the employees: beyond the basic package, let them choose!

In 2021, Employees are well enough informed to choose which benefits suit them best.

The synergies of this “trilogy”

In the past, by combining performance and rewards, businesses have through MBO fostered a “pay for what you get” approach which worked for my generation. We also had some nice spoon-feeding of bonuses, compulsory trainings and various benefits, and the dreaded annual review meeting.

Today, by offering behaviour-based feedback, engaging frequent conversations with Talent, and offering a more customized bundle of benefits, much more can be achieved in 2021. I really think these three (Performance, Talent, Rewards) are not that difficult to get right, if you observe your culture and strategy carefully and invest seriously in the right expertise to take care of the optimization and calibration of each.

There are of course other factors to work on, but in my recent experience if you start here, you stand a solid chance to sustain high levels of output for quite some time.

Feel free to comment, question or contest. 2021 will be a year of active listening and continuous improvement and feedback is a precious gift, so thanks in advance!