Engagement is about getting individuals involved. No one size fits all. Here’s a story about just that.
One of my first jobs in development required me to work in a production area of a large food factory. I had the role of training and development officer for a plant that worked on a 24hr shift rota. Now this was not a place where there were many college degrees or even where many people had completed school. The work was often repetitive and very boring, monitoring machines or cleaning and collecting waste from the plant.
You can tell how long ago this was, as I was given my first pc , an IBM ( of course) with 4mb hard disk space and a floppy to run programmes from!! I learnt a lot about the basics of computing on that machine and learned to type amongst other things. PC’s were at a premium and time on one precious. This is where on of my most lasting memories and important lessons on engagement comes from. Dominic, lets not give his full name to protect or at least not embarrass the innocent, was a lad who left school early under a cloud. Not the brightest button on the shirt, he made life hard for himself by answering any taunts with his fists or his temper. He found himself working in this plant, easy money if you could stand the boredom. However, the company was trying to engage people who had these repetitive roles by enriching their work experience by giving them paid responsibility for other roles in the plant; safety , quality checking, hygiene regimes and also admin support to the office. Given training otherwise unskilled operators would be paid to spend some of their time doing additional duties like organizing the deep clean regime for the weekend. So how does this affect Dominic? Well his team leader had tried all sorts to get Dom on board , and more importantly attend regularly. Nothing worked so far – but as a last chance he was offered the role as the team admin support – working on spread sheets, and data inputting on the team pc in the office. No one was expecting him to pass the training or take any real interest.
Surprise – Dom came to me one day in my office and asked very meekly and apologetically if he could use my pc when I was away running courses. ” Of course, no problem- but why don’t you just use the one in the office?” He confided that he was slow at learning and didn’t want to make mistakes and have others spot them, in my office he could work at his own speed and learn at his pace.
The outcome that surprised me, was Dom, as everyone called him became a model worker, attendance 100% , working on projects in his lunch hour, excellent presentation of data, going out of his way to learn new programmes, helping his team leaders on fault finding and teaching others how to use the programmes. In short, he had found something he was good at and people respected him for.
Now here’s the lesson for me, Dom was a basket case of an employee, warning letters about his attendance and conduct , lack of trust and low expectations from his peers and team leader. He found a niche that was interesting to him, that he could learn by himself , that was new and exciting to him and that made the routine mundane majority of his day endurable. The same guy went onto become an excellent team leader – a model for self improvement. Engagement can do lots of things, but its about letting people find what they can contribute and getting their commitment to do it well. Dominic taught me a lot about people we write off for no good reason.
