Come to work, leave brain at home.

If you are a small business owner or a previous sole proprietor taking on your first set of employees -  this may sound like more rhetoric to add to your already over worked plate. but what employee engagement is really about - is making sure that when your employees come to work, thy don't leave their brains at home!

I read an interesting article in March about the UK PM giving his support to a task force taking a look at employee engagement in the UK. I literally did a double take - not just because the of topic the committee was looking at (with all the threats of strikes and unions up in arms, i would think the PM would be more interested in looking into "surviving the next 2 years!!"); but also because of the fact that the state of the psychological contract in the public service is in tatters and given the decisions of the present government, one would assume that how employees are feeling in terms of engagement and commitment was a non issue with them!

David MaCleod continues his work on employee engagement from 2009 (along with Nita Clarke), whose finding were that engaged employees (Defined in the report as An engaged employee is aware of the business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organization) is a must have to succeed in the business world.

The best employment pitch I ever heard was from the HR Director at PWC - Nigeria office. When asked what PWC was in the business off he answered "we sell heads". Basically, we sell what knowledge and wisdom our people have stored in their heads. The problem is that we tend to hire people for specific jobs and tasks and that is, employee engagement practices are simple a bunch of things YOU do to get your employees to think more about what and HOW they do their job so as to help the business make its goals or targets or bottom lines. It could be you make and sell cup cakes and you have grown so much that you are able to hire someone exclusively to build the package boxes and pack the cakes. An engaged employee will do more than that......... they will let you know that the boxes look a  bit bland and might offer suggestions to improve their look; they may have been trained in calligraphy (yes, yes i know a looooong shot - no-one is trained in calligraphy these days :-)!) and offer to write your cards for you; they might choose to call your customers and ask how they found the cakes and come back and tell you what they found out. Basically - an engaged employee would go beyond their job description and actually do more than earn their pay - THEY WILL HELP YOU!. And if you really think about it, isn't that exactly why you hired them in the first place?

P.S
Have been down with a virus and that has taken some getting over! I have been tardy about this and I need to forge ahead. I made it a goal to publish 2 blogs per week (yup, I do have a bit to say) for starters. Lets see how that goes with me Performance Managing myself ;-)! I bet I will be a great boss of me!!!