6: Barriers to Engagement Culture
While the benefits to having an engagement culture are clear, there is still a great deal of reluctance within many organizations to make the changes necessary to initiating and sustaining engagement. This chapter is intended to explore some of the barriers to cultural change and suggest methods to overcome resistance.
What Are Some Barriers to Employee Engagement?
The author lists five possible barriers to engagement:
- Misunderstanding - Engagement is often misunderstood, assumed to be nothing more than morale, and is pursued in a very superficial manner. Minor or temporary efforts aim to make workers "happy" without making any sustainable or significant changes.
- Cynicism - There is significant cynicism in the present environment, particularly because there have been many fads and fashions that produce no real change. Engagement is often dismissed as another seasonal and trendy idea that has no substance.
- Bureaucracy - Policy and procedure is often a significant barrier to engagement because it is based on the management-by-control paradigm that dehumanizes workers and reduces them to drudges who are required to follow orders unthinkingly. It is poisonous to engagement.
- Autocracy - Managers who are obsessed with preserving personal power, particularly those who make decisions on gut feel and turn a deaf ear to facts that contradict their prejudices, are also a significant barrier to engagement.
- Work-Life Balance - Where there is unreasonable demand upon the workforce, there is little incentive for workers to do even more. That is, people who are pushed to capacity have no more energy to give.
Overcoming Barriers to Engagement
The author suggests that education is necessary to overcome the barriers to engagement. Managers don't understand what it is - so explain it. They don't see the benefits - so sell them using case studies that show financial results.
For the bureaucracy and autocracy, however, he falls short, saying only that you should "find a workaround" and "fight a guerilla ware if need be [to] undermine the bureaucracy" and "Refuse to let it get you down" and "don't let them get away with it."
(EN: this is cheerleading rather than helpful advice, so I'm dropping the rest as it gets no better.)
Sustaining a Culture of Engagement
"Culture" is an anthropological/sociological term that describes common beliefs and practices among a group which are often unspoken rules of social interaction. What is considered right or wrong in human interactions is largely arbitrary and many social customs defy logic - but members of a given society expect one another to behave in certain ways.
In the best of instances, cultural practices are based on some degree of reason. People do things a certain way because they believe it will achieve a better outcome if all persons did the same. To draw an analogy, it really doesn't matter whether you drive on the left or the right side of the street - so long as everyone does the same thing it will avoid disaster.
Culture is most evident in the major events in life - birth, courtship, marriage, death, and the like each is a major even that has certain protocols and practices in a culture. But culture also influences everyday life: how people greet one another, table manners, and so on. It also impacts service encounters - how we expect a waiter, clerk, dentist, or other professional to interact with us as customers is part of culture.
Corporate culture is a term that describes the beliefs and practices that exist within a specific organization. It is often a permutation of the broader culture: American, French, or Japanese corporations each inherit certain traits of the culture of their nations, but within each nation various organizations have their own distinctive cultural traits.
The difficulty in understanding and influencing culture is that it is very often not codified. There are no books of protocol or etiquette - or even when there are, there are far more unwritten rules than written ones. No-one owns culture, though there are certain individuals (particularly those of higher ranks) who are highly influential on the behavior of others. So no-one owns it, and no-one can explain it ... but somehow everyone seems to agree that certain behaviors are appropriate or inappropriate - there are obligations and taboos that must be respected.
Changing Corporate Culture
The author contrasts top-down and bottom-up approaches to changing corporate culture.
The top-down approach is management driven, and is accomplished by changes in official policy backed by a system of rewards and punishments to ensure compliance. While this is an effective way to change behavior, it is not an effective way to change attitudes and values - and as a result it may result in subversion: employees will pay lip-service to the values without espousing them and "work around" directives to give the appearance of compliance.
The bottom-up approach is more in the nature of a grassroots movement, in which the existing culture created by employees is adopted by the organization. The drawback is that management does not have any effective control over the organizational culture, and is going along with what employees want. If the culture is negative or destructive, management cannot intervene without seeming autocratic.
The author also speaks of a middle road in which organizational leaders "guide" the process by suggesting values without giving directives, then leave employees to decide how to accomplish the cultural goals put forth by management. (EN: This has been proposed by other sources as well, but it is much easier described than done. It is manipulative to intimate desires in an indirect manner and carries with it the risk that they will be misinterpreted.)