Increasing employee engagement and rethinking sales

I have been reading about employee engagement — what motivates employees to go above and beyond their regular duties. A great booklet is “180 Ways To Build Employee Engagement: How to Maximize Your Team’s Commitment, Effort, and Loyalty,”by Brian Gareau and Al Lucia

In No. 165, the authors suggest asking employees, on an anonymous basis, to fill in the blanks on these sentences: Accepting employment with this organization was a _____decision because_____; I would describe the match between my personal values and the organization’s values as _____; and when I speak to my friends about this organization, I say it is ______.

The idea is to determine the depth of employee commitment and loyalty. 

Also, check out the July/August issue of the Harvard Business Review and Daniel Pink’s article, “A Radical Prescription For Sales.” He argues that the work/reward system of telling the employees to do X and get Y is fading fast.

Why? To quote Pink, today “the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the saleswoman herself, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.”

The impact on compensation will be fewer commissions for individual effort and more commissions based on achievement of corporate measures rather than individual ones, coupled with the bulk of compensation consisting of a high base salary. The world changes.

Comments

[Ben Simonton]

180 Ways? As an exectutive, I have created a fully engaged workforce more than once.

I experienced managerial heaven if there is such a thing from having a highly motivated, highly committed workforce, fully engaged workforce with sky high morale and innovation literally loving to come to work and at least 300% more productive than when I took over.

There is only one way to accomplish this and it is to give employees what they want - to be respected and valued, and allowed to be proud of what they do. It is easy to do so. Just listen to what their concerns (complaints, suggestions, and questions) and respond to those to their satisfaction or better.

There are a few important guidelines to this, but I have stated the essence. If you are wedded to the top-down command and control approach, you have no chance of creating engagement since by its very nature top-down tends to demotivate and disengage employees. I would venture the guess that the 180 ways are all attempts to put lipstick on the top-down pig.