Employee Engagement — The Untapped Powerhouse of your Organization
Mitochondria are tiny organelles that live within our cells. Tiny in appearance, but massive insignificance. They are in charge of producing the majority of the cell’s energy via a chemical process. What would life be like if they didn’t exist? There wouldn’t be any, scientifically speaking, because, without mitochondria, higher animals like us might not exist because our cells would be incapable of producing oxygenated energy.
So, who are organizations’ Mitochondria?
While knowing that answer may not require rocket science, knowing how to keep employees engaged and inspired necessitates an above-average ability to gauge the pulse of these mitochondria, unique insights based on what the pulse communicates, and then the agility to respond and act. HR leaders, the emerging and timeless heroes, are the stakeholders uniquely positioned to have all of these “superpowers.”
Employee Engagement: Mitochondrial Ninjas in Organizations:
It is estimated that “non-physical intangible assets” now account for 80% of a company’s market value. When these assets — the people — are put to use, they become the engine of any organization.
The idea of an employee engagement intervention is that it is a top-down initiative, commanded, controlled, and hierarchically distributed among the top leadership alone. The flaw in such an approach is its mechanistic viewpoint. As a result, people perceive the change as something ‘done to them,’ and it is thus resisted.
Most organizations obsess over culture change at the expense of recognizing what, in theory, engages people and creates real value with customers. Employee engagement is frequently personified as a parent-child relationship, and people, like a petulant or mischievous toddler, do not want to play and disengage.
The Millennial Ninjas are here to stay
Of course, things are more complicated than that. We now have millennials accounting for 70% of the workforce. They want more collaborative work environments that give them more autonomy and responsibility. They want to do meaningful work that contributes to a larger cause.
This necessitates a rethinking and reorganization of our working methods to account for how we engage in more adult-to-adult conversations and relationships at work, as well as different organizational cultures and structures that align with how people truly are, rather than what they do.
We need a paradigm shift that recognizes the importance of mitochondrial ninjas and prioritizes them. The outcomes of such a shift can be beneficial to the organization’s bottom line. And it is possible. All it takes is bravery and transformational leadership.
So, how can we transform employee engagement from a mirage to a constant?
Enablers of engagement have been studied for decades and are well known, but sustainable engagement remains a mirage. While volumes of research indicate the drivers of engagement, they fail to account for the fact that the playing field has shifted.
Employee engagement cannot be limited to an “annual event” precipitated by a survey and followed by action planning for the remainder of the year. Today’s organizations’ mitochondria are far more dynamic; they require constant stimulation, and what stimulates or engages them is also dynamic.
As a result, the critical success factors for employee engagement that existed in the past are no longer relevant.
Engagement and inspiration are almost like a real-time, never-ending agenda. Annual surveys are insufficient; continuous pulse checking — LISTENING to the VOICE of the employee at all times — is required. A one-time root cause analysis will not suffice; ongoing ANALYSIS is required. Continuous response and ACTIONS are required because one-time action planning is ineffective.
At Anoma Tech, We employ the most talented top-tier resources in the USA and also across the globe primarily in Egypt, Canada, LATAM, UAE & India.
We have supported not only the existing code base but also built the core frameworks from scratch. Anoma Tech Inc. provides services in a wide variety of technologies which also include Mobile product development, Web Development, Quality assurance, and DevOps tech stacks for all scales of companies.