A Guide to the Third Element of Employee Engagement: Letting Employees Do What They Do Best
Next up, we’re covering Gallup’s Element of Employee Engagement #3:
- “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”
The opportunity to do what they do best falls into the second level of foundational level of employee engagement– “Individual Contributions.”
Think about a time in your life when you were asked to do something that didn’t align with your skills or interests– A project that required extensive data analysis when your passions come through in creative problem solving, for example. Despite your best efforts, the task likely felt tedious and unfulfilling, leading to your getting frustrated over even being asked to do something so outside of your domain.
That experience highlights the importance of allowing your employees to do what they do best every day.
When your employees are given the chance to leverage their strengths and perform tasks they excel at, you’re creating an environment in which they can contribute more effectively to the organization while also finding greater satisfaction in their roles.
What Happens When We Hold Employees Back From Doing What They Do Best
Preventing employees from engaging in tasks that align with their strengths can have several detrimental effects on both the individual and the organization. Here, we explore the potential negative outcomes of not allowing employees to utilize their full potential.
Burnout and Disengagement
Being stuck in a role that doesn’t play to your strengths day in and day out is draining and demoralizing. Employees forced into such positions experience higher rates of burnout not because the work is challenging but because it’s fundamentally misaligned with their skills.
Eventually, enthusiasm wanes, and productivity plummets as they become clock-watchers doing just enough to get by without any real passion or investment in their work.
Increased Turnover Rates
Unhappy employees are flight risks. A LinkedIn study found that almost 25% of employees doubt that their natural skills are used effectively and that those who feel their skills are underutilized are 10 times more likely to look for a new job.
Once those employees start looking for greener pastures, the impact of their leaving creates a ripple effect across the entire team. Not only do you now have a position sitting vacant until the hiring process is complete, but once someone new comes on board, there’s a delay in productivity as they learn the team dynamics and knowledge necessary to do their job, making it difficult to maintain momentum on long-term projects.
On the other hand, retaining top talent by aligning their roles with their strengths helps create a stable, dedicated workforce that drives the company forward.
Decreased Productivity
What would happen if you asked a lifelong artist to crunch numbers all day and asked an accountant to paint a mural? Even if they tried their best, the effort they would have to put into their work would be significantly higher and would likely still result in a subpar product.
Extend that idea to any role: When employees aren’t working within their personal talents, jobs that could be efficient for someone skilled in that area take longer and are more labor-intensive. Consequently, they become time sinks that bring the productivity of the whole team down, despite putting their best efforts into the job.
Lower Quality of Work
Think of the artist and the accountant referenced above, both of whom underwent intensive training to become masters of their chosen skills. When presented with a task that doesn’t meet them where they are, they’re far more likely to make mistakes, overlook details, and face an impossible situation in which they are asked to produce excellent work despite being fundamentally unable to, through no fault of their own.
When the results don’t meet expectations, a cycle of rework and revision begins that wastes the time and resources of the entire organization.
Morale and Motivation Falter
When individuals feel that their talents are being wasted, it affects their motivation and, by extension, the energy of the entire team. Low morale is contagious; one disengaged employee can drag down the spirits of those around them.
High morale, however, fosters a positive work environment in which employees are eager to contribute and collaborate simply because they feel invested in their team’s overall success.
How to Encourage Your Employees to Thrive in Their Roles
Organization leaders must be willing to create an environment conducive to letting employees showcase their talents and express their value. This is not a passive task. Instead, it takes collaboration, communication, and flexibility, which requires an investment of time and resources but is also an investment in the long-term success of your business.
Identify Their Individual Strengths
A good jumping-off point for helping figure out what makes your employees tick is one of the various strengths assessments available for professionals. A few examples to consider are:
- The DISC Assessment measures four primary personality traits: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. It provides insights into communication styles and workplace behaviors.
- CliftonStrengths Talent Assessment is a Gallup product that identifies an individual’s top five strengths out of 34 possible themes, focusing on what they naturally do best.
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) categorizes individuals into 16 personality types, helping to understand how they perceive the world and make decisions.
Create an Open Dialogue
While assessments are a good starting point for helping identify individual strengths, they’re not the whole picture. It’s equally important to have conversations with your employees about their passions and career aspirations because it doesn’t always align with their most obvious talent.
Consider an employee who ranks high as an excellent, compelling communicator but who is also an introvert who finds in-person conversations draining.
If you don’t speak to them about their wants and needs, you may be tempted to place them on the sales team, which would very quickly burn them out and affect their willingness to perform their job well.
However, placement on the marketing team, where they can leverage their communication skills in the written form, might ignite their enthusiasm for creating narratives that drive results without leaving them feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.
Help Them Outline a Career Path
If you want your employees to stay for the long term, you have to be willing to show them what that path looks like. Otherwise, they may start to feel stuck in stasis, unable to move forward.
When employees can see a future that aligns with their aspirations, they are more likely to stay committed. Regular career development discussions can help outline a trajectory that maximizes their strengths, whether through new roles, special projects, or additional training.
Customize the Role to the Person
It’s much easier to change a job description than it is to change a person, which is why roles shouldn’t be held to rigid standards of what they do and do not include. You’re allowed to shuffle duties to stack the cards in everyone’s favor.
Here’s what that might look like:
You have two employees on the operations team who share the same job description but have different strengths. One is particularly strong in streamlining workflows and maintaining efficiency, while the other is excellent at building strong relationships with vendors that allow them to negotiate more favorable deals.
Instead of both employees handling all aspects of operations equally, you could customize the role to allow each person to focus on what they’re best at, which will more than likely result in overall better performance than if you’d remained inflexible about sharing the load equally.
When Employees Thrive, So Does Your Organization
If your employees don’t all agree with the statement, “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day,” there’s a good chance you have people on your team who feel dissatisfied and unmotivated, which can have disastrous results for your organization’s long-term goals.
Now’s the time to solve that problem by investing in your team’s happiness to improve individual performance and drive the collective success of the entire team. Not sure where to start? Schedule a session with business coach Lori Moen to craft a strategic plan to make the most of the talent you have available.
