by Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An “engaged employee” is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization’s reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values. In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work (aka ‘coasting’), up to an employee who is actively damaging the company’s work output and reputation.
An organization with “high“ employee engagement might therefore be expected to outperform those with “low” employee engagement.
Employee engagement first appeared as a concept in management theory in the 1990s, becoming widespread in management practice in the 2000s, but it remains contested. It stands in an unspecified relationship to earlier constructs such as morale and job satisfaction. Despite academic critiques, employee engagement practices are well established in the management of human resources and of internal communications.
Employee engagement today has become synonymous with terms like ’employee experience’ and ‘employee satisfaction‘. The relevance is much more due to the vast majority of new generation professionals in the workforce who have a higher propensity to be ‘distracted‘ and ‘disengaged‘ at work.
Employee Satisfaction only indicates how happy or content your employees are. It does not address their level of motivation, involvement, or emotional commitment. For some employees, being satisfied means collecting a paycheck while doing as little work as possible.
When organizations focus on how to improve employee satisfaction, changes won’t necessarily lead to increased performance. Oftentimes, the conditions that make employees “satisfied” with their jobs are the same conditions that frustrate high performing employees. Top performers embrace change, search out ways to improve, and challenge the status quo. They expect all employees be held accountable for delivering results, whereas low performers avoid accountability, cling to the status quo, and resist change.
Drivers of engagement
Some additional points from research into drivers of engagement are presented below:
- Employee’s personal resources: “it is found that the positive perceptions that individuals hold of their own personal strength and ability allow them to be engaged with the organisation.
- Employee perceptions of job importance: “an employee’s attitude toward the job’s importance and the company had the greatest impact on loyalty and customer service than all other employee factors combined.”
- Employee clarity of job expectations: “If expectations are not clear and basic materials and equipment are not provided, negative emotions such as boredom or resentment may result, and the employee may then become focused on surviving more than thinking about how he can help the organization succeed.”
- Career advancement / improvement opportunities: “Plant supervisors and managers indicated that many plant improvements were being made outside the suggestion system, where employees-initiated changes in order to reap the bonuses generated by the subsequent cost savings”.
- Regular feedback and dialogue with superiors: “Feedback is the key to giving employees a sense of where they’re going, but many organizations are remarkably bad at giving it”.
- Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates: “if employees’ relationship with their managers is fractured, then no number of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss.”
- Perceptions of the ethos and values of the organization: “Inspiration and values’ is the most important of the six drivers in our Engaged Performance model. Inspirational leadership is the ultimate perk. In its absence, it is unlikely to engage employees”.
Effective internal employee communications: which convey a clear description of “what’s going on”.
Importance
Employee engagement goes beyond activities, games, and events. Employee engagement drives performance. Engaged employees look at the whole of the company and understand their purpose, where, and how they fit in. This leads to better decision-making. Organizations with an engaged workforce outperform their competition. They have a higher earnings per share (EPS) and recover more quickly after recessions and financial setbacks. Engagement is a key differentiator when it comes to growth and innovation. To better understand the needs of your organization, administering an employee engagement survey is key. This is not the same as a satisfaction survey.
Moreover, expectations of employees have changed. Mobile professional careers are much more common than “job for lifers”. Retention of top talent is more difficult than before. A company that has an effective employee engagement strategy and a highly engaged workforce is more likely to retain top performers as well as attract new talent. Successful organizations are value-driven with employee-centric cultures.
Hazards
- Methodological: Bad use of statistics: practitioners face a number of risks in working with engagement data, which are typically drawn from survey evidence. These include the risk of mistaking correlations for causation, making invalid comparisons between similar-sounding data drawn from diverging methodologies and/or incomparable populations, misunderstanding or misrepresented basic concepts and assumptions, and accurately establishing margins of error in data (ensuring signal and noise are kept distinct).
- Administrative: A focus on survey administration, data gathering and analysis of results (rather than taking action) may also damage engagement efforts. Organizations that survey their workforce without acting on the feedback appear to negatively impact engagement scores. The reporting and oversight requirements of engagement initiatives represent a claim on the scarcest resources (time and money) of the organisation, and therefore requires management time to demonstrate value added. At the same time, actions on the basis of engagement surveys are usually devolved to local management, where any ‘value add’ is counted in local performance. Central administration of ’employee engagement’ is therefore challenging to maintain over time.
- Ethical: Were it proven possible to alter employees’ attitudes and behaviours in the manner intended, and with the expected value-adding results for the organisation, a question remains whether it would be ethical to do so. Practitioners generally acknowledge that the old model of the psychological contract is gone, but attempting to programme a one-way identification in its place, from employee to organization, may be seen as morally and perhaps politically loaded.
