Employees are the ones whose innovative ideas will lift us out of this down economy. That means letting today’s workforce turn into a pack of corporate zombies is a costly mistake. Employers face a daunting task: focusing their limited resources toward re-engaging key talent in ways that will drive performance and value. Until then, employers will continue to create corporate zombies by failing to hear, involve and empower their workers. Let corporate zombies use their braaaains!

While the economy is slowly recovering, Hewitt Associates recently concluded that employee engagement and morale in the workplace are not. Based on analyses of more than 900 organizations worldwide, the global HR consultancy has found that almost half of organizations saw a significant drop in employee engagement levels at the end of the second quarter of 2010 — the largest decline Hewitt has observed since it began conducting employee engagement research 15 years ago.

“As [these employees] work, they mostly respond rather than get ahead of situations. Their creativity level drops, and they spend less time reflecting. They laugh less. They look more and more like other people in the office,” Dave Logan, management consultant and best-selling author of books such as Tribal Leadership and The Three Laws of Performance, writes at BNET. “They begin to parrot what the top leaders say, but with less enthusiasm than the leaders. After all, a key to moving up is to not outshine the boss. That sparkle in their eyes dims. They become corporate zombies.”

Employers today face a daunting task: focusing their limited resources toward re-engaging key talent in ways that will improve performance and value.

“Organizations are struggling to improve employee engagement, but they need to stay focused,” according to Ted Marusarz, leader of Global Engagement and Culture at Hewitt. “The extra effort companies put forth now will make a difference in how successful they are at boosting employee morale and retaining top talent as the economy stabilizes and employee opportunities open up.”

IBM recently surveyed more than 700 chief human resource officers in 61 countries around the world, from companies large to small, to find out how businesses can build, allocate and deploy their workforces to capitalize on opportunities wherever and whenever they arise.

“[W]hile businesses have traditionally managed their workforces with an eye toward operational efficiency, they have not necessarily done so with the creativity, flexibility and speed to capitalize on the growth opportunities that spring from an ever-more dynamic global marketplace,” IBM’s findings, published in the 2010 Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study, conclude. “Nurturing these capabilities will require organizations to focus on cultivating creative leaders, mobilizing their workforces for speed and flexibility, and capitalizing on collective intelligence — things they admittedly have not done well in the past.”

Indeed, it has been demonstrated time and again that employees are a rich source of information about how to do a job and how to do it better.

In the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) 2010 Job Satisfaction Survey Report, one of the top contributors to employee satisfaction is having the opportunity to harness employees’ skills and abilities.

“Employees frequently have skills and abilities beyond the position that they have been hired for,” the SHRM report explains. “Organizations need to take steps to discover the skill sets of their employees and utilize them.”

By engaging and empowering their employees in the following ways, employers can reap enormous benefits in efficiency and work quality:

• Hear them. Employees want to be heard by their employers as well as their colleagues. Trust between workers helps build camaraderie. And employers should be going out of their way to get feedback and ideas from their employees, both good and bad. Communication is perhaps one of the strongest signs of employee empowerment — from constant, honest communication regarding the strategic plan and financial requirements and performance, down to daily decision making.
• Involve them. Most employees want to be enthused by what they do, feel connected to their work and relate to what they produce. To that end, employees not only need to feel that their job has worth and purpose, but also “need to understand what the organization is trying to do and clearly see their role in this objective,” Workforce Management says. For a work environment to encourage employee achievement, there must be a true connection between employees’ work and their values, giving workers the opportunity to take pride in what they do.
• Empower them. Most employees today react favorably to empowerment, or being enabled to think, behave and control their work and decision making in autonomous ways. Empowerment is not an implementation, and it is only partly a strategy; rather, it is a philosophy. It is the state of feeling empowered to take control of one’s own future. For an organization to practice and foster a culture in which empowerment can thrive, company management must communicate honestly with employees. “When you give your team members the ability to take advantage of opportunities and address issues on their own, you send a powerful message: You trust them. They, in turn, will return that trust in spades…” Workforce Management explains.

Simply put, it is important that employers today create an open environment where employees can communicate freely and provide suggestions and ideas for improving the workplace and the business.

“Participative managers continually announce their interest in employees’ ideas. Participative managers, once they have defined task boundaries, give employees freedom to operate and make changes on their own commensurate with their knowledge and experience. Indeed, there may be no single motivational tactic more powerful than freeing competent people to do their jobs as they see fit,” a Harvard Business Review (HBR) briefing stated in 2006.

The principles of the HBR report — hearing, involving and empowering workers — are no less critical today.

“The opportunity cost of failing to keep employees engaged — the cost of creating corporate zombies in a down economy — is considerable, precisely because employees are the only ones who can innovate us out of this mess,” corporate communication expert Dom Crincoli recently wrote at his blog. “Keeping employees motivated and engaged makes all the difference in the world — especially now.”

Resources

Image: ©iStockphoto.com/ianmcdonnell

Hewitt Analysis Shows Steady Decline in Global Employee Engagement Levels
Hewitt Associates, July 29, 2010

Is Your Company Turning You Into a Corporate Zombie?
by Dave Logan
BNET, Oct. 6, 2010

2010 IBM Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study
IBM, October 2010

2010 Job Satisfaction Survey Report
Society for Human Resource Management, June 27, 2010

Why Corporate Success Depends on ‘Invincible’ Employees
by Jenny Schade
Workforce Management, May 2010

Stop Demotivating Your Employees!
Harvard Management Update, January 2006 (Vol. 11, No. 1)

The Cost of Creating Corporate Zombies in a Down Economy
by Dom Crincoli
Two-Way Comm’s Blog, Nov. 5, 2009