Unlocking Employee Engagement and Commitment Through Ownership

Companies run after the mystery of motivation, commitment and involvement, the holy trinity of management.

How can we get employees to engage in their work, intensely and above all, sustainably?

How can they position themselves as masters of their success and thereby contribute to that of their business?

A word responds to its challenges: it is that of ownership, that is to say property. Translated into managerial language, it means behaving as if the company belonged to its employees. In my opinion, it is better if there is really a sharing of value via employee shareholding, or with legal forms such as SCOPs where everyone is truly co-owner of their company. Studies show that the transition from simple employee to co-owner greatly changes behavior: there is an awareness of the costs to be incurred, the risks associated with decisions and the importance of taking care of the work, like others.

The status of owner, even limited to a small share, gives rise to increased responsibility.

Apart from these devices, it is necessary to go beyond the somewhat narrow translation of the word even if it is meaningful, and to make it evolve towards: “to feel in charge of”.

Ownership is then to be the lever to develop the ability to take initiatives and carry out its missions.

But how to give this sense of ownership, how to play on this sensitive chord when de facto, employees are only paid by their salary?

The challenge is to build trust and unite the teams.

This goes through the delegation box. This posture requires the manager to get rid of certain responsibilities to delegate them to employees without taking into account their job titles.

Indeed, the delegated missions must be distributed on the basis of expertise and volunteering, without any notion of rank or even of scope of function. This allows for more fluid relationships, less inhabited by traditional hierarchical contributions. Going out of his field of expertise and/or his usual framework also allows to value the volunteer. It is the logic of responsibility of a project that dominates.

Some defenders of this idea go so far as to speak of a culture of ownership. The principle is to take care of the house, in this case of one’s work or business.

In the culture of ownership, everyone is expected to commit to their actions, take responsibility for themselves, demonstrate an ability to face problems and provide solutions, which implies knowing how to take risks and assume their errors. Of course, this requires trust, but also resources and leeway.

An illustration of ownership is military engagement where everyone is expected to be one with their mission, that is to say, to take all the risks to carry it out and that in case of failure, he knows how to take responsibility for it.

With ownership, we cultivate the valuation of everyone’s skills, we can thus see people who were far from the organization’s projects come back to the fore, because they love what they do and feel pride. to do it.
Ownership: perhaps not a concept but a pictorial way of encouraging ownership of one’s missions.