Introduction

We don't see things as they are we see things as we are.

Ana s Nin

The ability to engage employees , to make them want to work with our business, is going to be one of the great organisational battles of the coming 10 years. This book is about that. But before we get started and get you all depressed about how business has done a pretty poor job in the area of engagement in recent years , let's explain something.

Engagement isn't simply a ˜nice' thing to do. It isn't soft, touchy- feely stuff at all. There is a considerable body of evidence that points all too clearly to the fact that engaged employees are more productive and far more likely to help your business become a success. Too often in the past the job of engaging employees has been delegated to the human resource professionals because ˜that is the type of thing they do - the soft stuff.'

Well we have news for the rest of the organisation. Employee engagement is a hard-nosed proposition that not only shows results but can be measured in costs of recruitment and employee output. Employee engagement is also something that can't succeed by being managed by HR alone. Certainly HR has the skills and tools to assist but it is the line managers who need to know how to engage their people. The central premiss of this book is that employees are increasingly putting themselves (their lifestyle) well ahead of their work. That ˜ work-life balance' thing is really ˜life-work balance' as far as your employees are concerned . To engage employees we have to get a whole lot better at knowing what the people who work for us expect and need from a job.

There is no doubt at all that engaged employees create great companies. As Judith Leary-Joyce showed in Becoming an Employer of Choice , ^[1] great companies outperform the rest. Indeed an investigation by the Sunday Times ^[2] showed that, ˜over the past five years, best companies would have earned an investor a compounded annual return of 12.1 per cent, compared with a 5.8 decline in FTSE All Share index as a whole.'

Figure 1: Performance Of Companies In Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For List Against Ftse All Share Average

That's what engaged employees can do for you. Need more evidence? Management consultants Towers Perrin's annual talent report ^[3] showed that, based on their research, ˜fully two thirds of highly engaged employees have no plans to leave their current jobs, versus just a third of the moderately engaged - and a mere 12 per cent of the disengaged.' They add, ˜thus moving employees from a state of moderate to high engagement makes them almost twice as likely to want to stay with the company and invest discretionary effort.'

The trick, of course, is to make this happen. To play their part HR professionals need to support the line in order to create genuine engagement with their employees. We must understand from the outset though, that this is a two-way proposition. Just dangling what a manager's notion of a great opportunity or a great reward is will not be sufficient. To engage an employee managers have to engage with who they are. You have to treat people as what they themselves see themselves as - individuals with unique needs of their own. If we engage with them, then possibly they will engage with us. My premiss is that we can do that, but before we begin, we need to know just how far we have to go to make it happen.

So we begin by examining the cold, hard reality of where we are now. Here is a fact, and what this book is all about. People are leaving organisations - large, medium and small (although large corporations are perhaps more vulnerable in the short term ) because the place where they work doesn't meet their expectations. In fact employers in the UK, Europe and the US are facing ahuge credibility crisis that they have - at best - only half admitted to.

The real truth is simple: work-life balance isn't working. People - your employees - have come up with a different way of looking at it. It's called life-work balance. Life first, work later. And this is what is going to drive the new social contract between employer and employee. This is called the ˜I-want-to-be- myself -at-work' syndrome. It is a huge movement (it is taking root right now in your business) and if we don't understand that it underpins the entire rules of engagement process we are going to be highly unsuccessful in hiring and holding people.

˜About one out of every six knowledge workers is actively looking for a job,' warns Mathew Levin, the vice-president of Global Human Capital Solutions at the Hudson Highland Group , a global HR consulting firm. He adds, ˜Rest assured, that most of these are the top ten per cent of your talent.' Mr Levin is completely on the money. Except for one thing. I think it is more like one in three looking for a job. And it is always the smart guys who go first. Because everyone knows where they live - in your place of work. And everyone knows that you have had downturns, and redundancies, and no bonuses and no promotions for two years. And they know that your best and brightest are the softest target in town.

Everywhere you look there is evidence that this life-work equation is being picked up and used by more and more people - people whom we call our employees. But they don't identify themselves that way. They are ˜them' first and ˜yours' a long way second. And if you can't engage them they won't stay.

˜The new generation is more self aware,' explains Norman Walker, until recently the global head of HR for pharmaceutical giant Novartis, and adds, ˜they ask more questions and expect more answers.'

He's right too. These employees have their lifestyle way out in front of their workstyle and as the economy ramps up they are going to be off to do what they want to do. I mean, just how many of your employees have been marking time these last years waiting for things to get better before they quit?

This lifestyle over workstyle issue is picked up extremely well by author Herminia Ibarra in her recent book Working Identity , ^[4] ˜Working identity is defined by what we do, the professional activities that engage us . . . the formative events in our lives and the story that links who we have been and who we will become.'

And it's not just the writers of books who have seen this emerging trend. Everywhere I went researching this book I saw people on the move. Headlines are already appearing in newspapers and magazines that reflect a dawning reality that we are going to have a tough battle and that the rules of engagement have been redrawn.

Here's a headline from the UK's Guardian newspaper, ˜Solvent thirty somethings turn backs on rat race: almost a million young adults expected to use property boom and technological know-how to build meaningful lives on own terms.' ^[5]

They were commenting on a study by the Future Laboratory for the Standard Life Bank that discovered that ˜90 per cent of thirtysomethings feel stifled by the rigours and conventions of corporate life.' The report goes on to say, ˜Unlike many of their predecessors they have the means, the mindset and the technological savvy to do something about it.'

Wow! A million of the brightest don't want to work for us. Does that scare you? It should.

˜Feeling Unbalanced?' That's a headline in a leading UK women's magazine. ^[6] It goes on to say, ˜If work is taking over your life, it's time to fight back.' The author, Anna Tims, says that, ˜There has been a shift in the mood of the nation, especially among women. Our most precious commodity is no longer money but time.'

She's right too. All around us people are saying, ˜enough.'

While researching this book I interviewed scores of young employees (mostly in discussion groups in key European cities). Everywhere I went (Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, Zurich) there was one theme, ˜I want a meaningful job and I want time to do my own stuff as well.' And these were the best and brightest, the ones who make a nation's wealth. If we don't understand and meet their needs they won't be playing round at our house - at least not for very long.

Another study in the UK, by the leadership charity Common Purpose, reports that almost 60 per cent of those polled felt ˜unfulfilled by their careers.' Common Purpose's advice is, ˜Employers risk losing out if they do not try to address the growing angst of their brightest thirtysomething talents.' The charity's chief executive Julia Middleton says, ˜Let your people grow and not necessarily in your own sandpit.'

And there's another clear, straightforward observation. Mainstream business is not doing much about this state of affairs.

I was sitting in a caf in Geneva with a 35-year-old manager whom I have known for some years. Highly ambitious and, when she lived in London, happy to work six-day, 60- hour weeks. Not any more. Recently married and working in Geneva she says she is going to ask her boss if she can work four days a week. If she can't she has a job offer from a competitor that says she can.

This is reality. And it is being played out everywhere there are bright people who want more to their lives than a boring commute and meetings, meetings, meetings.

The next day I was in Zurich in the office of a major insurance firm. The head of business strategy was in a stew. His secretary had just gone to New Zealand and Australia for ˜six to nine months.' And before she left she asked him if she could have her job back, if she came back at all. Later, I met a consultant just back from a social entrepreneurship seminar at the University of St Gallen. ˜One of the big issues of discussion was that everyone wants to work part time and be free to pursue other interests,' he reported .

This is reality too. There is nothing to hold these people. Because even if they like the job they have, even if it does engage them, there are other priorities in the lifestyle that they are playing out. Within this context we have to find ways to engage them, for a while at least. And - as I said earlier - this happens across the board, size or industry don't seem to matter that much. Engage them or lose them seems to be the mantra to apply to today's worker.

Table 1:

People Want To	Organizations Want To
Enjoy life and work, achieve success and excel at what they do	Engage the people they serve and enable, encourage and reward outstanding performance
Do work they care about on their own terms; create and deliver financial and human value	Provide enriching products and services; create and deliver financial and human value to all the stakeholders with whom they interact
Create and express a unique professional identity as ˜themselves'	Create and build a distinctive corporate brand
Find the right organization and the role that suits them best	Find the best people and match them to the right roles
Use their skills, stretch themselves and develop new abilities in their personal and professional lives	Use the skills of their people, improve effectiveness and drive value growth
Make a valued and recognized contribution to organizations who understand their lifestyle/workstyle needs	Enable and reward contribution to corporate purpose 7

^[1] (2004) London: CIPD.

^[2] Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For list, 2003.

^[3] TOWERS PERRIN (2003) Working Today: Understanding What Drives Employee Engagement.

^[4] (2003) Working Identity, Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career: Harvard Business School Press.

^[5] The Guardian 26 June 2004

^[6] Woman & Home August 2004