Page 349 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

336B RE-ENGAGE

: ENGAGING ONE EMPLOYEE AT A TIME . . . IN ALL TIMES

We have focused our attention in this chapter so far on the macro
issue of creating a great workplace—the 50,000-foot perspective and
the strategic responsibility that senior leaders and HR executives must
take. But we cannot overemphasize the importance of engaging and
re-engaging one employee at a time, a responsibility that falls not just
to direct managers but to senior leaders, HR professionals, and em-
ployees themselves. Each employee is motivated more by one or two
of the six drivers than others, so matching the right drivers to indi-
viduals, teams, units, divisions, and whole, sometimes global, organi-
zations can be a complicated challenge. We hope that the many ideas
and suggestions we have presented throughout the book will spur new
and more effective actions and that you will implement the ones that
fit your business objectives and the differing needs of individual em-
ployees. All employees are alike in one sense: they are interested in
getting their needs met at work—needs that are encompassed by the
six Universal Engagement Drivers, one or two of which, to each em-
ployee, are more important than the others.
It is up to managers and supervisors to find out each employee’s
primary and secondary intrinsic needs and figure out a way to simul-
taneously satisfy the person’s needs and the organization’s. This is no
mean feat, and if an organization’s senior leaders are serious about
becoming a better place to work, they must understand that it will
require them to free up managers to manage!
The great American novelist Thomas Wolfe once wrote: “If a man
has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If a man has a talent
and uses part of it, he has partly failed. But if a man has a talent
and somehow manages to use the whole of it, he has won a triumph
few men ever know.” (It should go without saying that we believe the
quotation, written in the 1930s, applies equally to women.) When we
consider the unused and wasted talent in the world today, especially
in light of the economic, social, and political challenges we face, it is
truly scandalous that we cannot figure out how to harness more of the
talents of the people who work in our organizations.