For most of my years as an EOS Implementor™ I have had clients ask me how they could achieve higher levels of employee engagement.
Then the world turned upside down, most of their team members were sent home and told to do the best they could to keep their heads, and the company, above the water line. No one expected people to be “engaged at work” when they weren’t allowed to even come to work.
As the world rights itself we’re reminded that it isn’t like a snow globe, when you shake it up things don’t fall back down in the same basic arrangement they were in before. We are coming to terms with the possibility that viruses and the precautions they require may always be part of our landscape. We’re wrestling with the blessing and curse of knowing that we can do a lot of work remotely with the use of technology, and some work might even be better for it, but that we as humans might enjoy the convenience of working in a virtual environment while craving the connection and camaraderie of in person meetings and hanging out in the hall with a cup of coffee and a few work buddies.
But here’s an often invisible—but possibly the most significant—change leaders are seeing as we navigate our way into a “new normal”: human values have shifted, and fewer people are willing to live and work in a way that doesn’t align with these new values.
I wrote The Human Team – So You Created a Team but People Showed Up! when the pandemic and the ensuing crises were just showing on the horizon. So, I wasn’t talking about the importance of meeting human needs as a way to harness human energy or actualize human potential through the lens of these changes in human values. But in hindsight, the book couldn’t have been more meaningful or timelier.
As we’ve gone from days of scrambling to keep our companies alive so that people have jobs to the days of trying to fill vacant jobs to keep the company alive—the thing they’re calling the “Great Resignation”—it’s obvious that everything leaders thought they knew about “engagement” isn’t enough. Not even close.
One reason is that the way many trainers and leaders approach employee engagement falls under the heading of “nurture.” And when we try to nurture people without meeting their needs it’s a lot like planting a sunflower in the shade and giving it a good watering and a pep talk every day.
No matter how much you encourage that sunflower and tell it how the seeds it’s supposed to bear will provide sustenance for birds and culinary delights for salad-lovers, if the sun it naturally needs to grow and produce isn’t available, there will be no harvest of seeds.
Nature, and our natural human needs, always precede nurture. When we try to engage through nurture, without meeting those needs, we might see a temporary upswing in engagement, but we’ll soon see that pendulum swinging in the other direction. To double down now on engagement, without working to understand and provide what all humans need to thrive and be fulfilled in life and work, is not only counterproductive, it could be disastrous.
If you want to get a nutshell understanding of what many humans are seeking, and what they’re now demanding to be able to achieve at work as well as at home, look to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. During the pandemic many of the lower levels of that pyramid were threatened. As we emerged from the effects of that crisis and your employees regained their sense of safety, belonging, and self-esteem, they naturally began to crave the feeling of self-actualization, which, according to Maslow, is “the ability to become the best version of oneself.”
What we used to think we could achieve through engagement, things like performance, morale, and loyalty, are more dependably and meaningfully achieved through supporting the human beings on our teams in their desire for self-actualization. And while we cannot actualize their potential for them (that’s why it’s called self-actualization) we can activate that potential by ensuring that our culture, our environments, our communications, our focus, and our leadership are designed to support their desire for actualization.
And that is exactly what the framework of The Six Facets of Human Needs™, which I explain in detail in The Human Team: So, You Created A Team But People Showed Up! is designed to do. By using this framework to reimagine and design the workplace to provide clarity, connection, consideration, contribution, challenge, and confidence, leaders can activate the human potential of their teams, opening the door to actualizing that potential and creating a level of fulfillment that people will choose to strive, thrive, and stay in.
I’ve shared 10 ways you can activate the potential of your human team, but there are literally hundreds of possibilities for applying this framework to your workplace. While the last two years may always be painful to reflect on, it is my hope that we will use that reflection for the betterment of all humans and that what we create out of it will be stronger than anything we’ve built before. I know that the desire for self-actualization is there in all of us, and that if it is activated through the fulfillment of our basic human needs, we can achieve it.