With the current pandemic and large numbers of staff working remotely, it has been proven that employee engagement is not entirely dependent on having a great manager. It is also reliant on employees’ personal outlooks and mindsets. In fact, new research reveals that employees’ mindsets (like resilience, optimism, etc.) actually matter more.
If you want high employee engagement, whilst you still need to have great managers; you also need leaders who can build resilience to their team through coaching, praising, valuing and listening to them. This research combined with the pandemic has exposed the limitations of the manager-centric view of employee engagement.
With scores of employees working from home, managers are limited in the interactions they can have with their team. And yet, even with these limitations, some staff are thriving. How is that possible?
This is due to the fact that some employees have positive outlooks and this is driving their productivity and engagement. We all know that when employees trust their manager, they’re more engaged. But an employee’s resilience is even more vital.
A recent survey showed that 22% of employees were motivated to work because they trusted their manager. But 25% show that high resilience (surviving in troubled times) was their inspiration to work. The survey also revealed that fewer than a quarter of people currently have high resilience.
But most striking is that employees with high resilience are 310% more likely to love their jobs than employees with low resilience.
What’s really protecting the mental health and motivation of your staff right now? Is it all about how many conversations they have with their manager? Or how often their manager praises their accomplishments?
No. The employees who are thriving during this crisis are the ones with the highest levels of resilience, optimism, perseverance, and more. And those are just a few of the 18 outlooks that have been shown to increase career satisfaction, inspiration and employee engagement dramatically.
Executives and HR leaders should spend more time and effort developing their employees’ resilience, optimism, striving, assertiveness, and more. These outlooks are not exclusively innate or hereditary; they can absolutely be developed and increased. That’s why the armed forces teach resilience to soldiers.
Think about your own team. These are people that you probably treat pretty similarly. They likely get roughly the same amount of attention from you, and similar quantities of praise, coaching, etc. Now, be honest: Aren’t some of them handling this current situation better than others? Don’t you have some employees that are actually thriving right now? While others might be just surviving, and still others are struggling mightily?
What explains the differences in how your employees are coping? Are you performing amazing leadership with some employees while actively harming the others? Or is it more likely that the difference is within the employees themselves? Doesn’t it make more sense that your resilient and optimistic employees are handling this pandemic better simply because they’re more resilient and optimistic? And not because of something you are (or are not) doing?
I’m not suggesting that traditional measures of employee engagement are not important. But if you really want to give your people the tools to be as engaged and inspired as possible, this current crisis has shown that equipping people with more resilience, optimism, proactivity, perseverance, etc. is vital.
And if your current efforts are not measuring those factors, you’re missing a critical piece of employee engagement.
