Barriers to employee engagement

Newspapers and management books propagate employee engagement and its good effects on employees. Employee engagement seems simple to implement on the surface. To engage an employee, the management has to be transparent about its projects and plans and include its associates in a participative decision making process. However, there are a lot of psychological and fear barriers to employee engagement. Let us take a look at a few factors from the point of view of an entrepreneur or a manager.

Friendship groups amongst colleagues are very much in vogue today. And these friendship groups are very prevalent in industries such as IT, ITES, and media. Every month, these friendship groups across different companies and their competitors, meet to discuss the latest happenings in their respective work lives. High profile projects, star performers, opportunities to travel abroad, and other juicy events are discussed during such meetings at restaurants or in a cozy home. 

Though these meetings are seen as healthy amongst employees, managers view it from a very different angle. Managers’ fear that sensitive information about clients, flaws in their systems, loopholes, and best practices of their company get leaked outside their companies during such heart-to-heart sessions. This fear prevents a small business owner or manager to openly discuss the strategies of their enterprise with all their associates.

I have seen a few entrepreneurs openly lament that a few employees of their companies started their own business after learning the tricks of the trade in a few months. Such fears of losing an employee to competition or to another industry prevent employee engagement.

So, enterprising employees are never included in important discussions such as tender quoting or pricing, project evaluation and design, training programs, and promotions. Thus the company loses out on the experience and engagement of a senior associate.

How do we avoid this dilemma or locked horn situation? One factor that has to be taken into account is that a lot of employees are ignorant of the ill effects of the information sharing they innocently engage in. Non-disclosure agreements that employees sign is a good first step. But many employees forget the agreement the moment they finish putting the sign.

So, a more humane method can be followed. A human resource person or a trusted senior can conduct mini meetings to discuss criticality of non-disclosure with practical examples. And tell the employees they value them as much as they value the company’s confidentiality.

There are a lot of fun activities that can be conducted without the company investing money. In one of my workplaces, all the associates had to dress in shades of orange for “Orange Day.” And the best dressed male and female were selected by a simple survey and announced via e-mail. Or all employees can be asked to dress up in attire akin to different Indian traditions or states. Such simple, colorful, participative, jubilant, and zero investment activities can engage employees to a very large extent. Just a bit of commonsense has to come into play.

Entrepreneurs have to be broad-minded and understand that they play a larger role in the industry and society. And hence look beyond their own vested interests.

Three cheers to confidential and penny-wise employee engagement activities!!!

–

Anitha is an engineer with a masters in human resource management. She has conducted and been a part of syncronous and asynchronous training in technical and soft skills subjects. Her interests include reading, cooking, singing, and listening to music.