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10 Employee Engagement-Destroying Perceptions You Cannot Afford
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If you want to improve employee engagement, boost employee morale, and maximize employee productivity, you cannot simply do the “right things.”
It’s not enough to model best practices demonstrated by employers such as Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and other denizens of the various Best Places to Work lists. You need to identify and eliminate the “wrong things.”
By “wrong,” I mean the organizational and managerial practices that squelch employee engagement and crush employee morale. If you’re doing these, you can guarantee that your workforce is running on only a couple of cylinders. If you are doing these, you can also guarantee that your employees are only mildly interested in producing the best quality product or service.
In fact, it is arguably more important to eliminate the negative than it is to implement the positive. At the very least, it is imperative to quickly identify and eliminate the engagement-damaging and morale-damaging practices before focusing on implementing positive best practices.
The reason you need to identify and eliminate “employee engagement destroyers” first is because of how the human brain is hard-wired.
The human brain is hard-wired to notice and remember negative things more effectively than positive. That’s because the brain is hard-wired for survival, and is basically designed for a bygone “caveman/cavewoman” era. When you consider this, it makes sense that the brain registers and remembers objects and events associated with negative emotions more effectively than those associated with positive emotions.
In a “law of the jungle/survival of the fittest” context, the negative things can harm you — even kill you. The positive ones are nice, but they are not of life or death importance. As I say in seminars when describing this “caveman/cavewoman context”:
The ability to remember that a particular patterned snake is poisonous is a life or death issue. Remembering that a particularly patterned bird has an enjoyable song is a quality of life issue. While quality of life is important, it is not as important at a primal level as your survival. Thus, our brains notice and remember what’s wrong, bad, and dangerous more effectively than what’s right, positive, and pleasurable.”
Most managers — or parents — have experienced this phenomenon in a very personal, and frustrating, way. You can do 20 nice, appropriate, thoughtful things for an individual, or a team, and one insensitive, thoughtless act, and it’s the latter that is noticed and remembered…for eternity.
Thus, when it comes to employee engagement, employee morale, and employee productivity, employers must recognize what they do that might be damaging employee engagement, morale, and productivity. Likewise, managers must know how to do the same at an individual level. Otherwise, the negatives will overshadow all the good practices you implement.
The following ten employee perceptions are deal breakers when it comes to improving employee engagement and morale. In other words, if your employees feel this way about you as a manager, or your organization as an employer, you must find out how you are creating these perceptions…and eliminate those actions.
As you reflect on each perception, ask yourself:
Don’t just think about this and wonder how applicable this is to your workplace — do something with it.
Here are three things you can do in the next few weeks to benefit from this short article.