How to create wonderful staff engagement – an unstoppable army

Two of the biggest challenges Chief Executives ask me about are:

  1. Why aren’t my staff engaged…. more productive?
  2. When they clearly have far greater ability, why do they keep on asking the same basic (boring) questions over and over? Why are they not thinking for themselves?

Conventional wisdom on staff engagement really does not help. Yet a couple of years ago Dan Pink described some enlightening research on what really motivates staff.

How to build staff engagement

In summary, he says that money, above the industry norm, actually demotivates. He goes on to explain that 3 things have a powerful positive impact on build staff engagement:

  • Autonomy- being allowed to think things through for yourself
  • Mastery – having the chance to really shine at something
  • Purpose- knowing that what you do adds real value to the world

To be honest, we each know that that is the case because we have experienced it for ourselves and, at least, on the odd occasion with our own staff.

In November 2011, Philip Elmer De-Witt told an amazing story about 2 motivated employees  who created Apple’s graphing calculator application. These 2 guys worked around the clock for months to develop the application they had started for Apple- despite the fact that, due to budget cuts, they had been let go!

I wondered then how Apple had engendered such a culture of staff engagement.

Recently some quotes from Apple employees that Adam Lashinsky uncovered, threw light onto it:

People are incredibly passionate about the great stuff they are working on.”
What they do at Apple in their true religion.”
people are so passionate about Apple, they are aligned with the mission of the company.”
Or from Steve Jobs himself: “I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t say it’s the most fulfilling experience of their lives. People love it.”

Apple is inspiring the same level of commitment from their staff that we see in the marines or even back in the time of the Roman centurions.  Apple has created a way for its people to work in a way that:

  • is autonomous
  • drives them to achieve mastery
  • because of the company’s powerful and inspiring vision, gives them a real purpose

Now that is impressive, and starts to show why they really are doing so incredibly well.

Interestingly, Mr Lashinsky claims that, because working at Apple is so intense, so secretive, it is not fun. Actually I suspect working in Apple, for the right type of people, is the most fun you can imagine. (Apart from when they were hit by a tyrade from Steve Jobs, of course!)  In fact, I recently spoke to a young guy from an Apple Store- the level of fun radiated from his eyes as he talked about his job.

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