Employee Engagement: What Do Employees Want? Q&A With Bestselling Author And Journalist, George Anders

George Anders, George Anders, New York Times bestselling author and contributing writer at Forbes

Taking employee engagement seriously is a recent phenomenon. For those of us who remember using fax machines (yes, that even includes this writer), employee engagement was a nice-to-have, like a company picnics or holiday parties. However, now hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on finding ways to engage employees as engagement rates drop.

Why the sudden change? One word: Machines. According to George Anders, New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and contributing writer at Forbes, “Many predictable tasks are getting automated. We’re not looking for payroll clerks or production workers. We’re looking for people with ideas, imagination, creativity and an ability to work well in ambiguity.” As the skills needed in the workforce become more advanced, companies have to figure out what employees want.

Anders will be speaking to this topic on May 12^th, in San Francisco, CA at The Big Turn On, as part of a panel discussion among senior marketing and communications leaders on actionable employee engagement strategy and tactics. I sat down with Anders to discuss his insight into employee engagement and what he’s learned from covering the topic for almost 20 years.

Q: What are some of the best workplace stories that you’ve covered over the years?

A: My absolute favorite was about Anthony Parks. He was the sixth employee of a briefly famous technology company called Webvan. When he left the company, he made a huge gesture to his community by taking all of his stock and giving it to everyone he had known in his life. This included family, old girlfriends, former bosses, neighbors, and more.

It was fascinating seeing someone who had risen from a difficult upbringing rise to a position where he could give back on that scale. When I did the piece, it ended up getting just a tremendous reaction. Oprah Winfrey even had him on her show.

Q: As you’ve covered the business world, what do you see changing the most about the employer and the employee relationship?

A: Our definition of work is quite different than it was before. Many predictable tasks are getting automated. We’re not looking for payroll clerks or production workers. We’re looking for people with ideas, imagination, creativity and an ability to work well in ambiguity. That’s the best hope of people to stay ahead of the machines.

However, the hiring process is still five to twenty years behind the actual demands of the labor market going forward. We’re still too oriented toward paper credentials, we work too hard assessing resume elements, hard skills, and other easily measurable things. That’s only a part the importance of employees. We don’t work hard enough on assessing the human dimension, whether that’s resilience, adaptability, drive, energy, motivation, and ability to work with others.

The rise of LinkedIn and social networking means that we can be much more attuned to peer references and people’s ability to connect with others. We’re increasingly letting go of just the traditional job application process, where a hundred people send in their resumes and someone sorts it out, and moving toward a referral-driven world. For example, where we hire people not just for their skills, but also those who can connect with our organization.

Q: You mentioned Linkedin and social networking as being a part of sparking that change. Is there anything else that has sparked this movement?

A: You could argue that there’s been a generational switch with Millennials. We’re now looking at a new entrant to the labor force. This generation is looking for experiences, adventure and discovery. They want a job that’s compatible with who they want to be — as opposed to just being satisfied with good pay and job security.

Progressive employers have realized that the quality of the work experience is probably every bit as powerful in connecting with the right candidates. I see that as a very positive force. It’s very much worker-driven and employers are reacting either very quickly and effectively or slowly and ineffectively.

Q: What are some of the growing pains that you see businesses going through as this transition is happening?

There’s an inability to make the most of people who’ve changed their careers a couple times. What’s sad is that a lot of people who have gone on to do great things in the world did not know at age twenty-one or twenty-five what they wanted to do. I’m always sorry to see employers go, “We don’t like to hire people who’ve switched around a couple times.” Sometimes the people who switch around are the ones who are most eager to get to the frontier.

Q: What brands or companies do you see that well, or doing employee engagement well?

Certainly when you look at the surveys, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn all score very high on employee engagement. They’re growing fast, they’re prosperous and they have resources there to make things more comfortable. If you look outside the tech sector, there’s still a lot to be said for the Procter & Gambles, other big consumer goods companies. They do provide a lot of training. You may not want to spend your whole career at a place that big, but you can learn a lot in your first three to five years.

Q: How are companies that get engagement doing it well and what are some of the benefits that they’re seeing from that?

There’s a temptation sometimes to spray a little engagement on the edge, via initiatives like a nice company picnic or a company marathon. That’s not bad, but I think the core has to happen at the actual work place. Some of that involves face time with employees. For example, when employees feel their boss understands what they do on the job, and wants to help them do it better, that’s a big step forward. So is providing employees with good tools.

If you want to disengage the employee, there’s no faster way than to give people bad tools. We think about that in the physical world. You think that the carpenter wants a screwdriver that was broken or a saw that cracked? But we get pretty cavalier about the tools we give to a lot of white-collar employees. Can you get a conference room if you need it? How’s tech support? Does your version-control system on big projects make any sense at all? I would think a more powerful way to improve engagement is give people the tools they need to get their job done and then don’t micromanage them to death. Don’t assume that free pizza and a Ping-Pong table will fix all your problems.

Employee Engagement: What Do Employees Want? Q&A With Bestselling Author And Journalist, George Anders