Here’s what most companies get wrong about employee engagement. They treat it like a perk instead of a strategy. After helping multiple companies transform their engagement levels, I’ve learned that the best results come from focusing on three specific, research-backed pillars. Here’s how to turn theory into practice.
The most reliable framework I’ve found comes from Dan Pink’s book, Drive. If you haven’t read it, Pink did a Ted Talk on the core ideas, and RSA Animate created a cool animated version. Pink’s book challenges conventional wisdom about motivation and offers a framework for creating workplaces where people are both happy and effective.
Pink identifies three essential elements for fostering intrinsic motivation. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Let’s explore each and how to implement them.
Autonomy and Pushing Decisions Down
According to research cited in Drive, autonomous companies have significantly higher engagement from their employees. Pink identifies four key areas where autonomy matters. Task, Time, Technique, and Team.
The guiding principle for promoting autonomy is simple. Push as many decisions as possible down the corporate hierarchy. Ask yourself whether the decision you’re making is one you absolutely have to make. For example, do you really need to instruct employees on how to dress? General Motors famously reduced their dress code to two words, “Dress appropriately.” They realized that by pushing the decision for how to dress in various situations they increase engagement and the risk that an employee dresses inappropriately is vanishingly small, a good tradeoff (let’s talk about how creating policies to deal with an employee’s behavior doesn’t work).
Task Autonomy
Luckily for us, most agile processes already incorporate task autonomy. Rather than prescribing who should do what, business leaders set goals, and teams figure out how to achieve them at every level of the organization. (let’s talk about rolling out Agile processes and avoiding common pitfalls).
Time Autonomy
End operating hours and core hours policies. Let your employees figure out when they work best. Who makes decisions about time off? Push that authority to the people closest to the work.
Technique Autonomy
Give people goals, but let them determine the best way to achieve those goals. That’s why you hired them. Your goal might be to cross a river. Whether people swim, kayak, or build a bridge should be up to them.
Will people do the job exactly as you would? Probably not. Will they make mistakes? Probably. The key is not to fix mistakes for people, but to help them figure out how to fix their own mistakes. This is how you scale a business. (let’s talk about transitioning from a rescuer to a coach).
Team Autonomy
Get teams involved in hiring decisions. Managers shouldn’t make hiring decisions in a vacuum. Make it easy for people to move between teams and projects when it makes sense.
A Word About Trade-offs
Autonomy isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Some companies won’t be able to adjust their time autonomy. They have support hours that must be covered or client-facing roles with fixed schedules. That’s okay. If you can’t push time autonomy, maybe you can push one of the other dimensions further? Perhaps you can give people more control over the tools and techniques they use to do their job, or more say in who joins their team. The point is to always push autonomy as far as possible in as many different dimensions as possible. Every increment matters.
Mastery and Creating Opportunities for Deliberate Practice
Pink notes that the number one predictor of productivity is “desire for intellectual challenge.” People want to be challenged. They want to be good at their jobs.
Here’s the catch. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000-hour rule” in Outliers, suggesting that simply doing your job for 10 years makes you a master. Unfortunately, this was a misunderstanding of the underlying research. The original researchers, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, wrote Peak to clarify that only dedicated, deliberative practice increases skills.
So what does deliberate practice look like in a business setting? Think of an orchestra. The full ensemble practices together, but each section also practices separately. The violins practice together, the trombones practice together, the cellos practice together. They engage in focused skill development outside of “performance.”
Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide dedicated time for developing particular skills through structured practice. These aren’t free time like Google’s 20% time. They should have someone leading them with clear learning objectives. A coach.
Book Clubs and Lunch & Learns
These are relatively inexpensive ways to encourage learning. Smart companies make it a practice to buy as many books as employees request. Lunch and Learns where team members share knowledge are popular and require minimal investment.
Conferences and Professional Development
These represent higher-ticket items that not every company can afford. But if you can send employees to conferences or support continued education, do it. As the familiar conversation goes,
CFO asks, “What if we invest in developing our people and they leave?” CEO responds, “What if we don’t, and they stay?”
Purpose and Connecting Work to Impact
Autonomy and Mastery will take you far, but Purpose will send you rocketing forward.
One of the first things I implemented was displaying customer testimonials prominently in the workplace. We realized we had tremendous positive feedback sitting in managers’ inboxes. Printing these out and putting them on the walls served as a reminder that someone out there cares very much about the work being done every day.
Get transparent about company goals, earnings, mission, and core values. Spend time talking about where the company is headed. Help people understand how their work connects to the bigger picture.
We eliminated annual “objective” performance reviews and replaced them with a continuous feedback model. We trained managers on how to have constructive conversations with employees throughout the entire year, not just during one stressful annual event.
Getting Started
Implementing these changes doesn’t require a complete organizational overhaul on day one. Start small.
- Identify one area where you can increase autonomy
- Create opportunities for deliberate practice
- Connect people’s work to its impact
The principles in Drive aren’t just theory. They’re a practical roadmap for building organizations where people thrive and businesses succeed. The question isn’t whether you can afford to implement these practices. It’s whether you can afford not to.
Want to understand the business case for why employee engagement matters in the first place? Check out my previous post about the impact of engagement.