Engaging employees to do their best

Research shows that most people join organisations, but they leave managers. Managers play the single most important role in ensuring that employees stay involved at the workplace. Whilst financial incentives are critical, working under a right manager can make all the difference in employee engagement and performance improvement. Whilst everyone would like to change the culture of their workplace, the truth is that this change happens in pockets and the major influencer of this change is the manager or supervisor in that area.

Gallup recently published an interesting article on employee engagement which forces one to rethink management principles. In the article employee engagement is referred to as "the ability to capture the heads, hearts, and souls of your employees to instill an intrinsic desire and passion for excellence". Sounds great doesn't it? The engagement model seems quite simple:

• Do you know what is expected of you at work? Do you have the right materials/equipment to do your work right?
• Do you have the opportunity to do your best every day?
• Were your efforts at work recognised or praised in the last 7 days?
• Do your opinions count towards change (small and major) at work?
• Does your supervisor seem to care about you as a person?
• Have you given an opportunity to develop and grow in the last 6 months?

These basic questions are all controlled by your immediate supervisor or manager. Even if not spelled out in words, your boss displays the organisational values, purpose and mission through their actions. Your boss gives you sufficient freedom to innovate. Your boss sells your ideas (crediting you of course!) in forums where you cannot do so yourself. Your boss looks after your well-being in terms of your development. While executive management can try and regulate and control organisational culture, the impact at lower level is felt far greater by the average employee who has to engage directly with their manager/supervisor. Its is through this person that you feel engaged, energised and focussed on doing the best you can.

Within the elections environment, with the associated pressures, it can become easy to bully subordinates into following an instruction-based approach, where you "do as you are told and don't ask any questions". There are many experiences that can be recounted where the politics of the situation demands prudence of such a nature that employees should not be allowed to make decisions. This is the view of a manager who wishes to control the entire workplace, who acts out of insecurity rather than out of confidence in the collective value of his/her staff. This manager is focussed more on personal glory than lifting all employees to their best levels. Unfortunately this approach is all too common. Based on bad role models, it is an easy management style to adopt when things get tough. And it is precisely this autocratic management style that will hamper the development of the elections profession and institutions. Valuable experience and competence will be lost to the elections world due to poor managers.

When last did you receive a compliment from your manager or supervisor? Was it in the last 7 days? Did your receive positive feedback on how well you are doing? Have you received constructively feedback on your weak points? We are not talking here of lofty and grand visions and missions. These ideals are important (see my first blog article) to inspire and attract employees. But here we are talking about simple one-to-one engagements where managers can make a real difference. This the the coal-face where performance improvement finds real value.

And if you can achieve this with permanent staff in central and provincial offices, how can this be done with temporary staff working in polling stations? How are they inspired, motivated, engaged to deliver on the ideals of electoral democracies? How do you instill the core values and purpose in a presiding officer or precinct commissioner to do their best in a polling station miles away from your control and scrutiny? I'd like to hear your opinions. Add your comments by clicking the "comments" link below this article (unfortunately) on the website.