Employee Engagement Is a Feeling

What internal communication has to do with how your people feel

Part one of four: Internal Communications for Engagement and Growth

“Our friendly, helpful team is always here for you.”

Some version of that sentence appears on thousands of Irish business websites. Somebody was paid to write it. Somebody signed it off. And whether it turns out to be true is decided somewhere else entirely: at a counter, on a phone, by a person who may never have been told the promise exists.

Think of a business you have dealt with recently where the promise and the experience didn’t match. You may not have complained. You probably just decided, quietly, that you wouldn’t be going back.

A brand promise is only as good as the internal communication behind it.

It is one thing to put “friendly and helpful” on a website. It is another for that to be what people meet when they walk in the door or pick up the phone. So when the promise and the experience don’t match, the first place my mind goes is inside the business. What is the culture there? Has anyone actually talked to employees about that promise and what it means day to day? And how do they feel about it?

Feelings are data

Engagement is how connected someone feels to the work, to the team and to the place. The key word in that is ‘feels’.

Feelings and emotions are data. We tend to sort feelings into good and bad, but this is not accurate. Feelings are an indication of how well our needs are being met and how aligned we are with our values. In the workplace, this is valuable information. When needs are met, people have energy and they are engaged. When needs are not met this leads to frustration, resentment, disillusionment – and ultimately disengagement.

The person who has stopped offering ideas at the Monday meeting is giving you data. So is the one who now sends an email where they used to put their head around the door. Neither is being difficult. Both are telling you something.

This is not about keeping everybody happy all of the time. That is a trap I see a lot of managers fall into. It is about belonging, trust and safety, because those are the feelings that fuel connection.

The line often attributed to Maya Angelou sums it up: “People will forget what you said and what you did. They will never forget how you made them feel”.

Channels inform. Conversations create understanding.

When I ask a business about their communications I tend to hear about the team meeting, the newsletter, the WhatsApp group, the noticeboard.

These are channels and they are important. They get information out consistently. They signal what is important, because what you choose to communicate tells people what the priorities are. They create a rhythm, so people know what to expect and when. They give you moments to recognise good work. They connect people who aren’t co-located – shift workers, people out on the road, a second site, part-time hours. And done well, they give people a channel to feedback and engage.

The limitation of channels is they give the what, the when and the who. However, it is conversations that create understanding: the why, and what this means for me. Those conversations happen between a manager and one person – at the counter, in the van, in the corridor after the meeting. They are where people decide how they feel about what they have just heard and, if managed well, potentially share those feelings with you.

The quality of your conversations is the quality of your culture. Not the strategy. Not the structure. Both of those matter enormously, and I will come back to structure later in this series. But it is the conversations that bring them to life.

What a quality conversation actually is

A quality conversation is not necessarily a harmonious one. It isn’t about everybody getting on or agreeing. It is one where everyone feels heard – not necessarily agreed with – where there is shared understanding of the different perspectives, including where they differ and where there is agreement on what happens next.

You will recognise the alternative. A meeting that felt productive at the time, and then afterwards you hear such different accounts of what was decided that you wonder whether everyone was at the same meeting. That gap, between what was said and what was understood, is where the friction lives.

Most organisations also have a set of conversations that don’t happen, or don’t happen well. The problem everybody grumbles about over coffee and nobody raises in the meeting. The person who has been quietly struggling since the new system came in, where nobody quite says it.

That avoidance is rarely if ever malicious. It comes from a belief that raising it will make things worse. In my experience, the opposite is always true.

Where to start

Engagement isn’t a number on a survey. Engagement is a feeling. Technology will keep changing; people will keep having feelings about what they hear, and about how they hear it.

So if you want to know how engaged your people are, pay attention to how they are feeling. And the quickest way to find that out is to ask. “What’s it like for you working here at the moment?” Then stop talking and let the silence do its work.

In the next article I look at why all of this gets harder as a business grows or changes, and why the strengths that built the business can start to work against it.

If you would like to go further into this, I have written elsewhere about why the quality of your conversations is the quality of your culture. You will find it in the resources section of koiconsulting.ie: Why the Quality of Your Conversations Is the Quality of Your Culture – Koi Consulting

This series is based on a session delivered for the Dungarvan & West Waterford Chamber Communications Series, sponsored by Local Enterprise Office Waterford.