🌿🧭🌳 OD31: Engagement as a choice ∙ Meetings and mails patterns during the pandemic ∙ OD goodies
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Engagement as a choice
First pick of the week is under the umbrella of the August monthly theme:
”Engaging the distributed organization”
“Did you see those Gallup numbers? How do we get our people engaged? Build us a program.” – Leaders Everywhere
Here are some key ideas from a recent piece from the On the Mark team:
Engagement is a choice one makes about how they will behave at work; a choice heavily influenced by ones work environment. Kurt Lewin, in the mid-20th century, famously proposed that behavior is a function of a person and their environment. Therefore, when considering employee engagement, a leader must consider the environment he or she is directly responsible for creating.
Empowering environments promote engagement.
How is this type of environment created?
There are four organizational characteristics that leaders must understand and develop:
Business Direction – A clear vision and strategic direction so people fully understand where the organization is headed.
Teamwork – A sense of participation, openness, and collaborative problem solving that draws people into shared activity.
Certainty – Goals, lines of authority, jobs, their associated work, and decision rights are clearly understood.
Relatedness – People feel supported and have a relationship with their superiors, peers, and subordinates.
The best a leader can do is create an environment that promotes self-empowered attitudes and behavior. I can’t directly empower you. You can’t empower me. Empowerment as delegation is a widely shared misunderstanding. You cannot give me a sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. However, with the right environment, people can find their way into these deeply experienced beliefs.
A common problem with many so-called engagement initiatives is a lack of connection to the business needs. It turns out, engagement and business results don’t need to be separate initiatives. Leaders can make a choice to build engagement while improving the business.
Leaders who desire to create employee engagement must make a choice. That choice is to continue the top-down deployment of decisions and action requirements or involve the broader organization in the whole process of solving business needs. In the latter choice, the leader is not only modeling engagement but also inviting the organization to engage.
What do you think? Is engagement a choice?
Join the conversation by clicking on the comment button at the end of the newsletter.
Meetings and mails patterns
during the pandemic
Are topics like communicating and collaborating inside the distributed organization relevant to your work?
Here’s a fresh HBS study that you might find interesting - the first large-scale analysis of how digital communication patterns have changed in organizations in the early stages of the pandemic in 16 cities.
Key findings from using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, compared to pre-pandemic levels:
Some guesses made by the authors of the study to explain the numbers:
(…) despite the potential drawbacks of large meetings or emails with many recipients, these forms of communication practices may help synchronize how information is shared (e.g., by holding a team meeting instead of several one-on-ones)
Moreover, expanding the number of email recipients and meeting attendees increases the likelihood that important information is received by all relevant individuals in an organization. This is an especially important function in a time when organizational challenges likely cut across the business and are relevant to a greater set of people.
Being more inclusive when everyone is dispersed could also help employees maintain their identification with the organization (Wiesenfeld et al., 1999).
Though speculative, it is possible that employees also find it harder to stay engaged in long virtual meetings compared to in-person meetings (Wasson, 2004).
Another possibility is that the function of meetings has changed in the post-lockdown period. The lockdown introduced a host of new problems requiring unplanned, emergent coordination, much of which could be addressed through impromptu interaction if everyone were in the same office.
With everyone working at home, however, short meetings could serve to quickly communicate new plans, share work that has been accomplished, increase accountability, calibrate priorities, provide social support, and achieve other purposes that are often handled informally in office settings.
Our findings provide strong evidence that employees adjusted their internal communications in response to COVID-19 lockdowns, even prior to formal policy changes. Indeed, the fact that patterns of email and meeting activity began to change, on average, about a week prior to formal lockdown issuances, suggest that organizations can rapidly adjust their communication patterns in anticipation of formal policy requirements, or in response to local environmental conditions.
OD Goodies
If you like this stuff and you’re curious about some extra #orgdev.
PWC: the Global CFO Pulse shares that companies are embracing new ways of working, with 52% reporting that they plan to make remote work a permanent option for roles that allow, and 52% saying they plan to improve the remote working experience.
Naomi Stanford: 5 myths of org design - 1. Design is about the org chart 2. Leaders are in the best position to decide the design of an org 3. Org design is an intermittent process 4. Redesigning an org will solve its problems 5. There’s a right way to do org design.
Modern Workplace Learning: A thorough analysis of the value of the ways of learning at work.
Medium: Luis Cascante proposes a new approach to team kickoffs.
Thanks for reading
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I think "engagement as a choice" misses two key issues that lead to failure in improving engagement:
1. It assumes that only "leaders" can change the environment, amplifying lack of agency and "learned helplessness" in everyone else, which in turn leads to low engagement. Shaping the environment is a collaborative effort to which different people in different roles contribute in different ways. More here: https://medium.com/org-hacking/working-on-work-e5c6fd18cf71
2. It builds on Lewin's equation B=f(Env,P) and completely ignores one element of the equation. It assumes that only the environment can be changed, but the person is fixed. That's treating people like machines, assuming that their attitudes and mindsets are unchangeable. A holistic approach to engagement aims to change both the environment and the person. More here: https://medium.com/org-hacking/self-engagement-murphy-ac7b56c42c00