DIAMOND RINGS NOT NEEDED

The gurus have spoken.

These days, employee engagement is down.  Way down.  Gallup says only 30 percent of workersare motivated; Bain, that engagement is lowest in the customer-contact tiers of the company.

Of course, blame is everywhere.  At leaders, for wearing rose-tinted glasses (McKinsey’s organizational health index).  At the lack of emotional bonding between employees and work.  And at the lack of “walking the talk” among senior executives.

No one agrees on the solution.  “Engagement cascades from the top,” trumpets one org health scientist.  Middle managers should have the tools and wherewithal to shape engagement, insists another.  Teams are the answer, claims yet another expert.

Why not do two simple things:  Ask – and listen well?  We’ve found employees are more than willing to share opinions and ideas … 

If. They. Know. They’ll. Be. Listened. To. 

Believe it or not, many care … and actively want to improve wherever they “live” for 40+ hours a week.  One of our recent information sessions, for example, gathered 75+ percent response, great insights, and lots of volunteers for a discretionary, extra-hours-after-work program.

But a caveat:  When you ask, then it’s incumbent to tell.  Share the findings, whether at a high or expansive level.  Have groups of workers examine the data and draw some conclusions … and remedies.  Or assign the task to frontline supervisors and teams.  You’ll find that kind of participation reaps not only engagement but also is much less expensive than the traditional diamond solutions.

THE PRICE IS SO NOT RIGHT

There’s something in each of us that likes to play a game or two.

Call it competitiveness, achievement, even self-expression.  The notion of winning at something can lure us into arcades as well as casinos, seduce us with smartphone apps or a family Scrabble feud.

When it comes to work, though, gamification – the millennial word for infusing game mechanics in the Web – smacks of management control, and of automatons doing a higher-up’s bidding.

Hey, we’re being honest – and we know that the world just might be agin’ us:  August corporations use these kinds of software programs for various goals, from teaching about sustainability to exercising more effectively.  Many large salesforces thrill to using specialized game mechanics, such as badges, points, virtual gifts, and leaderboards, that help prompt higher performance.   Or so they say.  Gartner even predicted that this year more than 70 percent of global businesses would adopt at least one gamified app.

But is there truly safety in numbers?  For some routine jobs and tasks, such as onboarding and customer service, the games we play could well spark improvement.  Learning, too, deserves all the gamification we can absorb.  Yet the things that make us collaborate with our colleagues, enhance our interpersonal skills, and increase our productivity are not found in the Web-ified non-human prompts from our employers.  We want to figure out, ourselves, our own sources of motivation and good behaviors; understanding “me” from an online Chutes and Ladders-type exercise makes us want to, yes, game the system.

Besides, how would it make you feel to hear that Hezbollah uses gamification to market its philosophies to adolescents?