Employee Engagement: Don’t be Puzzled – Find the Missing Pieces

A Review of Missing Pieces by Jean-Pierre Brun and Cary Cooper

Engagement for all. Employee engagement is becoming increasingly important in organizations and the workplace. Employee engagement, as I have stated numerous times, must be for the benefit of all. Employees must benefit and organizations and their customers must also benefit.

Thank you Peter Hart. Before I begin  the review I want to thank my friend Peter Hart of Rideau Recognition for recommending this exceptional book. You can read Peter’s blog by clicking here.

Informative Resource. I appreciated the work of Brun and Cooper on the 7 ways to improve employee well-being and organizational effectiveness. It is not one at the expense of the other but it is about putting all the pieces together to wed well-being with organizational effectiveness. The book is brief, well-written, well-researched, and loaded with practical assessments and simple actions

Brun and Cooper’s 7 Pieces:

1. Recognize your employees
2. Support your employees
3. Develop a culture of respect
4. Reconcile work with personal life
5. Control the workload
6. Encourage and support autonomy and participation in decision making
7. Clarify everyone’s roles

Employee engagement for all. We need to achieve employee well-being and give it more than lip service. On page 11 Burn and Cooper state:

First a healthy business has rules, guidelines, procedures, resources and practices that promote the employee’s physical and mental health. In turn, healthy employees will help the business meet its goals for production or service, for efficiency and for corporate well-being

Time for Recognition. Each of the 7 pieces is a specific chapter. To illustrate their perspective here is a closer look at chapter 2. Are you making time for employees and just being around and “just as recognition is a powerful way to mobilize people and build health, the opposite may be produced by lack of recognition (p. 29).”

Make time and take time for this missing piece. The leading challenge is to increase the time that managers  have to be with employees. Brun and Cooper encourage us to recognize the person’s value, the quality of work, investment in work, and results. I loved their line, “People work each day. Therefore, you should as much as possible recognize their achievements on a daily basis” (p. 25).  Read their conclusion to the chapter on recognizing your employees:

In summary, recognition is key to motivation, to personal development, to positive relationships among people and to physical and mental health to work. It positively affects productivity and service quality, and it plays a significant role in the success and permanence of organizations. It gives meaning to a person’s work and value to what he or she does. Employee recognition is, in a way, an indispensable companion for an individual and an organization.

Book Value: I encourage you to read this short yet informative and well-written and well-researched book. Each of the 7 pieces includes a questionnaire to diagnose your situation and a list of 10 practical actions you can carry out immediately.

The final chapter offers the reader guidance on how to move from words to actions based on leveraging 6 levers of success and overcoming 5 obstacles.  I appreciated the 2,000 working hours pinciple of asking yourself how many hours of work will be improved by an action you take.

Get all the puzzle pieces. Don’t leave out any pieces that will leave you puzzled about weaving together employee well-being and organizational effectiveness, read Missing Pieces by Jean-Pierre Brun and Cary Cooper.