Hotel Interactive, Inc., September 17, 2010, Friday

Hotel Interactive, Inc.

September 17, 2010, Friday

Hotel Interactive, Inc.

Engage Your Employees; Connecting to their jobs and co-workers will help businesses get results.

After more than a year of worries over layoffs and downsizings, hotel employees may need some encouragement from their managers.

“People are scared out there,” said Samuel Bacharach, professor and Director of the Bacharach Leadership Institute at Cornell University. “People in your organizations are worried. They’re worried about the organization’s future, but they’re also worried about their future. In that world, our challenge is to engage them.

Think of that contradiction,” he continued. “The problem we’re faced with in a world of uncertainty is people are afraid to act on the one hand, but on the other hand they understand that they need to act. Engagement to my mind is a mechanism or process that will help us overcome this contradiction. It’s a way of getting people to act in spite of hesitation.”

In a world of uncertainty, Bacharach said, engagement will result in employee retention, commitment, problem solving, innovation and satisfaction.

“Engagement makes stumblers, dreamers, muddlers and bureaucrats into proactive players,” said Bacharach.

Bacharach shared his insights this week during the webinar “Employee Engagement During Challenging Times.” He is the author of books including Get Them On Your Side and Keep Them On Your Side and has worked with hotel companies such as Starwood and InterContinental Hotels.

“We’ve got all these wonderful terms, but how do we make these terms into a concrete reality?” he asked. “How do you make engagement policy and training part in parcel of your organization?”

The good news is that everyone can be trained to engage people. Managers can develop skills to mobilize employees and then sustain momentum.

“The key to employee engagement is training your leaders at all levels of the organization,” he said. “It is not a state of mind that is going to come from a spiritual reawakening. It’s based on leadership and supervisory training. If you’re going to wait for your leaders to get a charisma injection, you’re going to be waiting for Godot.”

The first step is understanding what “engagement” means. Engagement is a mindset, he said. It’s the notion that employees are connected to their jobs and their co-workers.

Employees who are engaged are both present — they feel they are respected and making an impact — and enterprising. These are employees willing to take action and challenge themselves. They reflect on situations rather than make knee-jerk reactions, they innovate and take risks, persist in a job without burning out and are self-critical without relying on an evaluation system.

“We want people to challenge themselves, not that we simply challenge them,” he said. “You can’t all the time check that someone is challenging himself. We want them to challenge themselves.”

At the same time, managers have to make sure employees don’t “go wild with total self-expression,” he said. Managers put the appropriate constraints on employees while still allowing them to be proactive. Employee engagement results in stretching the envelope without tearing it.

Bacharach warned of areas of potential disengagement. Office politics can throw up obstacles, as can interpersonal relationships with other people. Employees also need to feel they have a good sense of how to do their job, as well as where their career is heading. Most people will not be working at the same job for the next 30 years, and “people want to be in situations where the organization is investing in their resume.”

One area that isn’t the challenge that it used to be is working across geographic regions. That’s because smart leaders are using Twitter, Skype and Flickr to communicate and share ideas. Bacharach called these social media sites underused as mechanisms for engagement.

Bacharach offered four rules for supportive leadership:

First, engage employees in dialogue. Leaders should listen with curiosity, pace the conversation to take in what you hear, reflect with accuracy, question for exploration and provide feedback for development.

Second, partner with them to set goals. Goals should be measurable, operational and attainable, and managers should help prioritize them, and develop deadlines as well as an action plan.

Third, be an ally in taking on obstacles. Identify external blocks such as resources, environment, resistors; identify internal blocks such as worries, fears, self-doubt; align goals of those you lead with the organization’s agenda; and help overcome blocks by using the techniques of listening, questioning and feedback.

Finally, leaders should encourage skill development. Encourage employees to learn new skills and give them a chance to practice them. Then sustain support until new skills have been internalized.