MANAGING BOOKS: IDEAS: EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

What keeps us coming to work: a sane and trusted leader

HARVEY SCHACHTER

Special to The Globe and Mail; harvey@harveyschachter.com

February 27, 2008

ENERGIZING ORGANIZATIONS

By Michael Koscec

iUniverse, 285 pages, $23.95

In his first few weeks at Ontario Hydro in 1979, Michael Koscec saw one employee drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a meeting, several other employees forced off work by stress, and alcoholism become an insidious problem with his staff.

Those and other experiences - including his own health woes at another employer while working with an erratic and dictatorial boss - led to his developing a consulting practice focused on the link between workplace stress and ill health, and helping firms increase employee engagement.

"According to a large psychiatric hospital, the workplace is the source of 30 per cent of people seeking treatment for depression. When treatment is completed and the individuals are deemed healthy enough to return to work, they return to the same environment that created the illness in the first place," he writes in Energizing Organizations. "This situation is no different than treating a person for a breathing problem created by toxic fumes in a poorly ventilated paint shop, and then returning the individual to the same paint shop to continue to work."

He believes leadership is the ability of managers at all levels of the organization to create working conditions that will allow their employees to function at peak performance - a working environment where all employees can thrive and be fully engaged. Too often, of course, employees are not engaged. They are in emotional or physical stress, fearful, bored or preoccupied with other things.

His own surveys show that even in the best companies tracked in his database, 7 per cent of employees are actively disengaged and 42 per cent disengaged. (Actively disengaged employees are disinterested in their work and organization, and actively try to undermine fellow employees and the company by spreading malicious rumours, gossiping, complaining and through poor performance. Disengaged employees show up to work every day, but do just enough to get by.)

By contrast, 14 per cent are actively engaged in the organization and 37 per cent engaged. (Both groups are emotionally committed to their work and organization, the difference being whether it is all of the time or most of the time.)

Those figures are disturbing enough, but in the poorest companies in his database, 27 per cent of staff are actively disengaged and 53 per cent disengaged. Leaders may be preaching important goals, but four in five workers might as well not be there - they show up only for the paycheque.

Mr. Koscec stresses that we should not expect to have everyone fully engaged. There is nothing wrong with a workplace having employees who just want to show up, do their work and go home. There seems to be a natural level of 30 to 40 per cent disengagement that companies have trouble reducing any further.

When he asked employees about their department's practices, the following statements correlated the best of them with engagement:

• Information is shared openly by my colleagues in my department.
• I have easy access to the resources, people, and information I need to do my job.
• Workload is distributed equally throughout our department.
• Everyone pulls his or her own weight equally.
• When faced with a crisis, employees in my department will pull together to find solutions.
• My co-workers work well together.
• There is little or no gossip in our department.
• We celebrate our successes.

"A quick scan of those statements shows a unifying theme. All employees are united by a shared set of values that are based on fairness and justice. They are working together as adults. They respect and trust each other. They look after each other and support each other. And they celebrate together. In other words, they are working together as a community," he writes.

He presents a four-dimensional model of effective leadership. The first two dimensions are functional, and the last two about values.

Job performance

The leader gives people the latitude to do their job, ensures they have the right skills, provides clear performance expectations and reviews job performance at least once a year.

Communication/feedback

The leader listens with an open mind, recognizes staff for good performance, and provides regular information and feedback.

Ethics/personal traits

The leader is trustworthy, leads by example, and acts decisively to get things done.

Justice/fairness

The leader treats the employee with respect, resolves conflicts fairly, treats everyone equally, and takes appropriate action with under-performers. His research, he stresses, shows that the values dimension plays a greater role in employee engagement than the functional behaviours. "In other words, a leader's personal characteristics of integrity, trust, and fairness play a greater role in employee engagement than do the functional behaviours."

Mr. Koscec's book opens with two gripping stories: how he took over a unit in the embattled property acquisition department at Ontario Hydro, and through perseverance and caring about employees, brought light into darkness; and, then, how he encountered the darkness himself in an unnamed energy company where his demonic boss so unnerved him that he ended up in severe depression and with failing eyesight from the stress.

From there, he moves into a more academic look at employee engagement, sharing his research and models for improvement.

It's a stark contrast in writing styles, but together offers readers both the emotional reason to act on employee engagement and the logic of how to approach it.