Build It summary

Over a decade of research involving 2,000 companies provides the basis of Elliott and Corey’s Engagement Bridge™ concept. It’s tailor-made to help you create a more engaged and productive workforce.

The bridge has ten distinct components – seven “beams” and three supporting “rocks.” You don’t need every part to build a functional bridge, but the strongest constructions incorporate all ten elements.

All the companies the authors looked at in their research made significant progress in one area – openness and honesty. Putting this first beam in place is vital to creating a productive working atmosphere. That’s because being honest with people is the best way to gain their trust.

A good place to start is by understanding just how widespread lying and mistrust are in many business practices.

Say you had to write an obituary for your company. How would you like it to be remembered? What mattered most to it, and what was your company trying to achieve? The answers to these questions make up the second beam – your purpose, mission and values.

Defining these clearly boosts employee productivity.

As we saw in an earlier blink, leadership is what you say while management is what you do. They’re both extremely important elements of the model, but they have to be correctly aligned if you want to build a strong bridge. So how do you slot them into place?

Well, you need to make sure that management is in tune with the values of the company. That’s essential to keeping employees on board.

Things have changed in the workplace. In the old days, a boss was a boss; his word was final. Today, employees have a much more powerful voice. Top-down policies can be rejected from the bottom.

This shift in attitudes is reflected in the rise of websites like Glassdoor that allow workers to anonymously review their employers. More and more people are making use of these platforms – approximately 41 million people use Glassdoor every month!

The production line model was created by the economist Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. He thought that employees shouldn’t be like artisans working on one thing from start to finish but more like individual parts in a larger machine.

But this kind of specialization meant that people stopped taking pleasure in their work. Smith argued that it didn’t matter because money would continue to provide a reliable incentive.

People and organizations thrive when employees are given the chance to learn and develop.

Luckily, that’s easier today than ever before. Companies have a vast array of technologies at their disposal to help teach their workers new skills.

When Elliott was working in a graduate job in the early 1990s, he designed a system that improved his team’s ability to handle administrative tasks. He was nominated for an innovation award and thanked in person by his boss. He felt flattered and pleased that his work had been recognized.

A year later, he received a gift card and an impersonal letter of recognition from a faceless, centralised HR department. That left a sour taste. The lateness suggested indifference. It would have been much better if his superiors had simply left it at the thank you.

In the previous blinks, we’ve explored the connecting beams of the Engagement Bridge. Now it’s time to turn to the supporting rocks. Let’s start with pay and benefits.

Throwing money at disengagement doesn’t solve the problem altogether. But it is an effective strategy to prevent your employees from becoming disengaged.

When it comes to where we work, there’s an important difference between place and space. The second rock anchoring the Engagement Bridge is all about the latter. In other words, it’s about more than how an office looks – it’s the way employees interact with their virtual and physical environment that’s really important.

So what makes for a good working environment? Let’s start with agile working and technology.

A 2016 study found that the average worker took just four days of sick leave annually. Pretty good, right? Well, there’s a catch. Most employees claimed that they were too stressed or tired to concentrate fully on their work for an additional 57 days per year!

That makes well-being essential to productivity. This is the final part of the Engagement Bridge.

Having looked at the basic building blocks of the Engagement Bridge, you might be wondering how to start putting all this information into action. In this final blink, we’ll draw the threads together and get you ready to start building engagement in your company.

Let’s start by looking at the basic principles.