support felt

Perceived organizational support is about as important as training and career development in the employee engagement mix. One particular conceptual framework to map employee engagement in the banking industry is built on four pillars: training and career development, co-worker relationship, perceived organizational support, and reward and recognition. The model is beautiful in its simplicity, and there aren’t many barriers to apply this model outside the banking industry.

Earlier I described training and career development and co-worker relationship. Now, let’s look into perceived organizational support.

Perceived organizational support.

Emphasis on perception. Some organizations think they support their employees quite well, whereas, in reality, the employees indicate feeling little to no support from the organization. Sometimes the underlying reason can be as simple as a misunderstanding. For example, Samia is very ambitious, and naturally, she wants to improve her professional capabilities. Her employer offers courses, online learning tools, and workshops. Except they failed to mention it on numerous occasions. During hiring or pre-boarding, but no later than onboarding, crucial aspects like this should have been brought up.

Organizations seeking out (increased) employee engagement must support their employees. Period. From small, one-off initiatives like a birthday card to large career-spanning initiatives to fully support the people throughout their journey with the company.

One way to go about this is to just ask. Ask the employees what it is they need. Some employees might not be able to vocalize their needs well, which is fine; that’s why a framework to map professional preferences comes in handy.

co-worker combo

Co-worker relationship is the most prominent factor influencing employee engagement in the banking sector. One particular study provides a conceptual framework to map employee engagement in the banking industry, built on four pillars. Training and career development, co-worker relationship, perceived organizational support, and reward and recognition. The model is beautiful in its simplicity, and there aren’t many barriers to apply this model outside the banking industry.

Earlier I described training and career development. (link). Now, let’s look into the co-worker relationship.

Co-worker relationship.

It goes without saying that, depending on the type of job, the kind of co-worker relationships varies. A nurse may have other nurses as colleagues and doctors, to name a few. A junior engineer may be paired with a senior engineer, a project manager, and a tester.

One of the biggest employee engagement boosters is to identify and communicate team roles within a team. When companies help their employees understand their preferred roles within a team, they can build better matches with greater compatibility.

Some people naturally show more leadership characteristics, whereas others are more hands-on. More specifically, some people are helicopters, keeping an overview at all times. Other people are planners, maximizing efficiency within the team.

Different tasks require different team compositions. Start with identifying soft-skills and professional expectations regarding team roles to boost engagement and productivity.

true engagement

An IT support engineer recently asked me if he could call me with good news. I answered; yes, of course.

Amid a rather complex migration issue — one that he’d been working on for quite a while — a new solution manifested itself.

The support engineer said; I can’t tell you how happy I am I found this solution. The intonation and vibe only added credibility to the authenticity with which he relayed the message.

That’s what employee engagement looks like.

job tree

One particular conceptual framework to map employee engagement in the banking industry is built on four pillars. Training and career development, co-worker relationship, perceived organizational support, and reward and recognition. The model is beautiful in its simplicity, and there aren’t many barriers to apply this model outside the banking industry.

In the next few days, I’ll briefly describe each pillar.

Training and career development.

As time progresses, it’s becoming more apparent that one of the best ways to convince people to choose for an employer is the ability of the employer to provide perspective. Not in an old-fashioned kind of way, as in, if you work hard, we’ll bump your salary in eighteen months. If you keep working hard, we’ll bump it again in another eighteen months, and so on…

In this day and age, providing perspective means offering the candidate a map. A map with a pin showing the candidate, today, you are here. Tomorrow, proverbially, these are all the (career) routes you could take. 

Some of them might require hard-skills training. Perhaps additional degrees or certificates are necessary for a follow-on job. Some of them might require soft-skills training. When an employer moves into a managerial position, specific people skills, stress management, and responsibility become increasingly important.

Mapping the current situation, combined with suggesting multiple possibilities and future outcomes, is the foundation for training and career development.

Practical advice: map both people’s and jobs’ hard- and soft-skills to create a tree of internal career possibilities, alongside insight into which skills gaps need to be bridged to move between positions.

still fits

One of the three ways to get to know employees better, with the ambition to boost employee engagement, is to focus on the “talent fit,” according to this Forbes article.

According to the article, the way to focus on “talent fit” is to ask employees if the job still fits them.

Pretty straightforward and not a bad idea at all.

Additionally, companies should leverage a model, preferably academically validated, to build those insights at scale.

thank you

Thank you. These two words, and their impact, have been the subject of many studies. New literature on this topic appears on a daily basis.

When managers thank their colleagues for their contributions and genuinely acknowledge their efforts, people are four times as likely to be engaged with their job. Credit where credit is due.

The return on expressing gratitude is tremendous. Whom are you thanking today?

first gun

I was eleven years old the first time I saw a gun in the streets. Startled by a clinging sound in peak midday rush while I was waiting for a friend right outside the hall of Antwerp-Central rail station.

Looking toward the sound, I noticed a shiny, chrome, Beretta. To suppress panic, I’m trying to see if someone else witnessed what I just saw. The next instant, I looked at the man who had just dropped the gun.

He was getting dumped on, verbally, by his companion. Sounding like a southeast European language, I can only imagine he must have said. You idiot, why did you drop your piece in the middle of the day? At the busiest spot in the city, no less.

The two men looked at me. In about twelve seconds, I developed more panic. I touted my lips somewhat and shook my head in an attempt to relay an “I haven’t seen anything” sentiment.

Why am I telling you this?

55% of communication is nonverbal.

Leaders, managers, and HR professionals can’t overestimate the importance of body language.

Sometimes, everything and nothing is being said at the same time.

why quit

4 reasons why software engineers leave their job.

Mismatch in expectations

Wait a minute, this is not what I’ve been sold. Often, the way the job has been offered initially doesn’t align with what it feels like to actually perform in the role, every day.

Flawed remote work strategy

A remote work strategy shouldn’t revolve around the required amount of days employees must come to the office. It should be about the most efficient way to get synchronous work done. This depends heavily on how teams organize themselves, as opposed to an enforced, top-down approach.

Bigger picture

In many cases, software engineers don’t really feel what their efforts contribute to. For clients or internal projects, ideally, the impact that they helped realize, should be made as tangible as possible.

No recognition

Sleepless nights, plagued by that one stubborn bug that just won’t go away. An architectural innovation that dramatically reduces cost structure or doubles performance… So many efforts go by unnoticed. Without empathic leadership, the proverbial pat on the back, it’s hard to keep pushing code daily.

it’s not salary

How to make sure employees stay? Spoiler alert; it’s not salary.

Jack Parsons once said: “the employee who leaves a company because of the salary can return because of the culture, but the one who leaves because of the culture will never return because of the salary”.

Excellent job culture and company culture aren’t just valuable for current employees, it’s a powerful magnet to attract new candidates, as well as re-attract ex-employees.

Building a company culture, bottom-up, starts with job culture. One employee after the other. Making sure the match is right, both on a hard-skills – and soft-skills level creates an upward spiral that serves as a coil for the above-mentioned magnet.

hero

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own story. This powerful quote by Franz Kafka potentially reveals a lot about us humans.

I believe that many of us are necessarily the hero(in) of our own job.

When employers, specifically managers and leaders, fail to recognize, respect, and empathize with their hero(in) employees, expecting them to be involved and engaged is unrealistic.