Maximizing Employee Engagement: Break the Rules and Break Away from the Herd

Let workers rebel! Harvard Business School Professor, behavioral scientist and author Francesca Gino believes letting employees cut loose is the key to find balance between conformity and nonconformity. Once that balance is established, a company’s employee engagement level will soar, and it will stay that way, too.

A Dec. 2016 Gallup survey found that out of 142 countries, only 13 percent of employees feel engaged at their jobs. In an ideal work world, a job would be a source of happiness and satisfaction rather than frustration and boredom. So why is it so difficult for leaders to keep employees engaged?

Psychological reasons like peer pressure cause employees and managers to conform to circumstances at work, Gino’s research finds. Conformity can be widespread, costly and take a heavy toll on individual engagement and enterprise excellence.

To counter conformity problems and truly thrive in any industry, leaders should urge employees be themselves, which means breaking the rules and busting out of the status quo. Ensuring the highest engagement requires motivating employees to create innovative, productive workplaces by thinking outside the box, using creativity and deviating from organizational norms and ordinary expectations, Gino says.

Six strategies to win the battle against conformity are available to today’s leaders. The fight starts with encouraging employees to be their authentic selves and bring out their unique strengths.

“Ask why and what if,” Gino says. “We might feel bored in the jobs that we do, and so continually injecting novelty into the work or creating variety are ways in which we can create challenging experiences for employees.”

Narrow points of view are no more. Rather, leaders look for people who can use multiple perspectives to solve problems without getting stuck on a single possible solution.

“You are going to be in rooms with big people who make a lot of money and have big titles, but it does not mean your ideas are not as good or even better,” Ariel Investments founder and CEO John W. Rogers, Jr. told Mellody Hobson in her first days of employment. “I want to hear your ideas. It is incumbent that you speak up.”

Hobson is now president of Ariel Investments, responsible for the firm’s management and strategic planning, and serves and a chairman of the board of trustees for Ariel Investment Trust.

Despite best practices to scrap conformity, Gino says leaders fear the regular use of new strategies, and believe office operations could end up in chaos. She believes the company can adopt the new strategy without hurting the company’s best interests and bottom line.

“To strike the optimal balance between conformity and nonconformity, they must think carefully about the boundaries within which employees will be free to deviate from the status quo,” Gino says.

The management of a team is up to that manager, as long as the style aligns with the organization’s purpose and values, and the manager delivers on that purpose. They work hard to reach the right balance.

Executives and employees tell Gino that when balance between conformity and nonconformity is achieved, boundaries are made clear to everyone across the organization. When it comes to excellence and company reputation, there are specific rules to follow and everyone must be fully aware each guideline. In other cases, strategies to fight conformity are implemented, oftentimes on the fly. The combination of established rules and innovative strategies create conformity and nonconformity stability, ensuring maximized engagement within an organization that will foster achieved goals and success.