How Employee Accountability Drives Engagement

How Employee Accountability Drives EngagementHow Employee Accountability Drives EngagementHow Employee Accountability Drives Engagement Wakeman, author of The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 2013)For years, companies have invested time, money and energy into engaging employees based on the premise that engagement drives results. But many organizations report that despite their best efforts, employee engagement just hasnt delivered as expected.Employees are scoring higher than ever in the engagement category, yet the company suffers from lackluster results.There are two major reasons why.1)Employee engagement is typically measured by conducting a survey that doesnt take into consideration the credibility of each employee answering the questions.2)Every employee opinion is treated equally.While employee engagement is critical in the current competitive recruiting environment, it turns out that engagement alone isnt enough. In fact, engagement without employee account ability is chaos.Organizations that cultivate a culture of personal accountability are the ones that are truly winning. When engagement and accountability meet, breakthrough employee performance occurs.Separating Victims from PerformersIt is likely you have certain employees that are less accountable than others I refer to these employees as victims.From our research we learned that often by default, employers end up surveying the victims.On the other end of the employee spectrum, many highly-accountable people take responsibility to bring up and work through issues as they arise. Highly accountable employees feel as though their concerns are already being addressed, so they sometimes dont bring issues up in surveys or refrain from taking surveys altogether.Victims, on the other hand, cant wait for the opportunity to tell you about all the things that need to occur for them to give the gift of their work.It is highly likely that victims are regularly looking outside themselves for solutions to their issues and love to use anonymous surveys to share the various ways they are unhappy.Consequently, the action planning that result from traditional employee engagement surveys tends to favor the victims.Improved Survey ResultsAction plans based on surveying all employees, without weighting responses for employee accountability differences, end up working on things likePay for parkingPizza partiesJean daysOnce questions are included to differentiate responses based on employee accountability, action-planning lists start to look like this insteadBetter equipment to avoid errorsDifferent hours to accommodate customersGreater ability to have input into decisionsThe results from engagement surveys that favored mora accountable employees focused on projects that drove revenue or reduced cost a winning focus that benefits the company and the employeeSurveys that Emphasize AccountabilityIf you want your engagement survey to work for your business, dont treat every opinion the same.Once you have the answers to the questions on the engagement survey, you must sort the results and weigh the answers of your highly accountable, high-performing employees higher than the responses of yourpoor-performing employees who have victim mindsets.If you must conduct an engagement survey, try one that factors in a certain level of employee accountability. Dont just take the word of the vast majority many of whom work to collect a paycheck, not to add value.Author Bio Cy Wakeman is the owner Bulletproof Talent the company that delivers the Reality Check engagement survey. She is also the author of Reality-Based Leadership and the new book THE REALITY-BASED RULES OF THE WORKPLACE Know What Boosts Your Value, Kills Your Chances, and Will Make You Happier (Jossey-Bass, 2013).