Want Engaged Employees? Self-Enable—Don’t Micro-Manage
Most of us who have been in the workforce for a while have worked with a micro-manager. It’s not a comfortable situation. They mean well and are only trying to ensure the work gets done on time, accurately, and with little waste.
However, their need for control and constant updates is counterproductive; in fact, it corrodes trust and reduces employee engagement and productivity instead of increasing it. 
So, how do you satisfy the needs of both the employee and the micro-manager?
The Employee
Trust and respect between a manager and employee, two of the Top 10 drivers of job satisfaction1, begin with a clear understanding of expectations. Today’s performance management solutions are designed to provide role-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) in personalized scorecards with goals for each KPI—and a ranking in comparison to peers.
When managers explain how these KPIs are tied to organizational goals, employees can better understand how their work impacts overall company performance. The scorecards are populated with system data, enabling employees and managers to trust the information and have performance conversations based on objective data vs. anecdotal observations.
While clear expectations and trusted, real-time data on KPIs are important to employee engagement, knowing where to improve and how to improve are two different things.
Many organizations are beginning to use gamification solutions to motivate employees and reinforce activities that help them improve their skills. These solutions provide next best actions such as learning clips and knowledge articles to improve their skills and knowledge associated with their KPIs, and then reward employees for their efforts.
Within the solution, employees can achieve points, badges and leaderboard status. Managers can use this information to recognize employees for achievements during team huddles, in company newsletters, or tie achievements to incentives, such as a free lunch, preferred parking, or other monetary and non-monetary rewards based on the company’s procedures.
When performance management and gamification solutions are integrated, employees gain more ownership of their performance and are self-enabled to improve their skills and job mastery.
The Manager
For managers, next-generation performance management solutions provide the operational data needed to understand, in real time, the specific areas that are falling behind and what needs attention right now.
Instead of spending time interrupting employees’ work to gather information, managers can view a data-driven dashboard that visually presents the KPIs for the group. Moreover, today’s performance management solutions are fully integrated with coaching and eLearning, which can automatically assign elearning lessons or coaching sessions when KPIs reach or fall short of a predetermined threshold.
Managers can then monitor completion of the eLearning or Coaching as well as assess whether an employee’s performance improves after that event.
Read the “Four Steps to Improve Manager Effectiveness” executive perspective for more about how performance management solutions can help improve the effectiveness of the individual employeeand the manager.
To learn more attend the webinar, “Start Your Engines! Gamification Is Driving Employee Engagement,” with guest speaker, Forrester Senior Analyst, Jenny Wise, on Wednesday, June 8 at 2 p.m. ET.
1 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement, Society for Human Resource Management, 2015.
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