Saturday, May 09, 2015

You need to get your story straight.

At HRTech last year Yves Morieux described the marked decline in employee engagement, the boom in active disengagement (employees who are deliberately working against their organisation's objectives), and the resulting slide in productivity.

This is happening because people are storytellers. Bear with me. People strive to construct a coherent narrative to their lives - to make sense of their lives (this is just one of the reasons that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is wrong). When, for example, a relationship falls apart people will construct a story about the 'why', which helps them to cast themselves in the role they would like to play, and which they can share with others. If you think back you will realise you have done this yourself (Duck, Grave-Dressing phase).

Look at your activity, look at the activity of others: it's remarkable how much of it consists of constructing and sharing stories about events and fitting these into a personal narrative. This narrative presents you to yourself and to others as you wish to be seen. It provides meaning.

This is what people do on Facebook. This is why Snapchat is so popular - it's about sharing your story, and having that story validated by others ('friends').

And this is where things are going wrong for organisations: work has become a necessary evil, and to an increasing extent fails to feature in the employee story (unless you work somewhere like Google). In a bygone era, when people were trapped in the workplace (i.e. when they did not have access to Facebook or Instagram) it was possible to force the 9-5 day into the individual narrative. Now, though, people have a choice. And they are opting out. 'Presenteeism' is rife.

Organisations just aren't getting it: it's about the 'why', stupid. I find myself in conversations about 'roles' and 'progression' and 'roadmaps' - this is all gone. It's an oversimplification, but millennials want experiences, not jobs. More importantly they want experiences which they can make part of their story - which they can share with friends.

This is why the 'why' is important. (Simon Sinek also makes this point). Our jobs should form a meaningful part of our lives. There is a technical term for this relationship: 'pride'. Employee engagement is a measure of pride - and pride determines the extent to which people feel their activity is part of their personal story. It can be seen in the degree to which people share their activity on their timeline (whatever form that takes). For example, my own personal narrative is about the exploration and discovery of learning, performance and technology. I am proud of the advances my team have made. I'm engaged and share enthusiastically. How about you? Does your company do, each day, things that you proudly share? Note that this may be different to 'does your team do things each day that you proudly share?'

Who is responsible for the 'why'? Everybody, I guess. Put simply, companies who want engagement will need to get better at doing and communicating the sorts of things that make their employees proud. For leaders this is a core responsibility; to communicate the 'why' in a way which makes people proud of what they do, which makes them want to integrate work into their personal narrative, to build engagement. At which point it stops being work.

1 comment:

  1. As a footnote to this post, I was struck by the response of a colleague who when asked why they weren't interested in a post which - organisationally - represented 'progression' remarked simply that it wasn't something that would look good in their profile. As someone working in digital, it wasn't a role which would add interesting milestones to their career timeline. As I understand it, if 'digital' becomes part of the 'why' - the personal narrative - then opportunities are weighed in this light: whether or not you would want them to feature on your timeline (which replaces the cv).

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