4 practices to increase employee engagement through cultural change

Have you ever felt like slacking off instead of going to work? Your entire being is unwilling to get out of bed, even if it’s just to put on your slippers and sit in front of your laptop in your home office? Or, worse yet, drag yourself out of bed to attend some unproductive meetings?

For a period of time that was me. In today’s society, about 80% of workers across the globe are not engaged at work. They daydream about the day when they will be free to do what they love. In many cases, they even love what they do but not how they have to do it. Why does work have to seem so dreadful? Unfortunately, that’s what many workers today are pondering, which is leading to a movement being coined the “Great Resignation.”

Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation has most workers considering leaving their jobs. The number of workers who are switching their jobs has nearly doubled, and many companies can expect to have 41% of their workforce consider leaving within a year.

But the decline in productivity and increase in disengagement of workers can be stopped. It needs to stop, and you can do something about it.

In the pre-pandemic era, company culture was a given. Employees were expected to observe and mimic their leaders to follow the unspoken rules. The pandemic, however, revealed that most organizations lacked a corporate culture and operational agility to respond to permanent change. Today’s global, complex, and disruptive business environment demands companies to make their organizations more adaptive and agile. It’s imperative that organizations upskill their personnel and set their culture intentionally. The companies that develop this culture right will have an incredible, competitive advantage.

Leading change is everybody’s job; nobody can do it alone.

A systemic and collaborative approach is needed: the we culture mentality.

The We Culture is an invitation to co-create a culture in which we all can voice loudly what we like and who we are to fully engage ourselves in the flow of work and ultimately benefit from unlocking each others’ strengths. Simultaneously, our companies can produce better products and services, more cost-effective and customer-oriented, in a work environment that is employee-friendly, productive, and fulfilling. Whether in-person, remote or in the metaverse, people should enjoy life and work in a delicate balance where we all benefit and are willing to sustain over time.

Through this newsletter, I will be sharing tips, best practices and “me” vs “we” examples that I have included in my new book “We Culture, 12 Skills for Growing Teams in the Future of Work” which will be published on May 16 by Quality Press.

The 12 behavioral skills are the fundamentals of the CARE model that will help you create a culture of conscious teamwork to increase employee engagement, agility, quality, and innovation as follows:

1. Connect with your employees and teammates to drive innovation.
2. Pay attention intentionally to be more focused and drive better quality.
3. Respect the different needs and characteristics of the team members to drive engagement.
4. Empower team members so that they act in a self-organized way to drive agility.

The research in this book is based on what I have read, experienced, and aspired to in nearly a 20-year career. I have been lucky to learn firsthand from the companies where I worked as an employee, a leader, and an external consultant. I also visited and learned from organizations like Google and Zappos, interviewed many business leaders who operate in different countries and had access to hundreds of W. Edwards Deming’s manuscripts from the Library of Congress.

If there are any topics or ideas you would like to be included in this newsletter, please feel free to share your concern, question or best practice.

I also invite you to visit my website, www.theweculture.com, where you can find the We Culture book, download the We Culture app and explore other tools, self-assessments, and online training available. Take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent how you work, and enjoy it!

(This column was adapted from Luciana Paulise’s book “We Culture”, 2022).