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Employee Engagement

By 7 October 2014 July 19th, 2021 No Comments

employeeengagement

70% of change initiatives that fail, do so as a result of unproductive management behaviour and lack of staff engagement. (UKCES)

For the last few years many of our clients have been focused on organisational development – ensuring that their structures and processes were fit for current and anticipated future purposes. Their focus now seems to be changing to employee engagement. So what is it and how do you achieve it?

As with many management speak terms, there is no one clear definition. We found over one hundred but the best seemed to be:

“Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being” (David Guest, Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at Kings College, London).

Employee engagement is widely regarded as a combination of attitude, behaviour and outcomes.

Psychologists define attitudes as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way. This can include evaluations of people, issues, objects or events. Such evaluations are often positive or negative, but they can also be uncertain at times. For example, you might have mixed feelings about a particular person or issue. Research suggests attitude is made up of two components, an emotional component and a cognitive component. The emotional component is about how the object, person, issue or event makes you feel, whilst the cognitive component is about your thoughts and beliefs about the subject. Clearly then, in order to change attitudes, you firstly need to change people’s beliefs so that they believe and engage positively in what the business wants to achieve and at the same time, they feel that doing so will be of positive benefit to themselves, their colleagues and the business.

Behaviours are generally defined as the ways in which people react to situations based on their beliefs and feelings. However behaviours can also be learned and learned behaviours often take precedent. “I don’t feel this is right but everyone else does it this way so why should I care?”

Outcomes are the consequences of behaviours and may be intended, unintended or a combination of both.

Although improved performance and productivity is at the heart of engagement, it cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach which tries to extract discretionary effort by manipulating employees’ commitment and emotions. Employees see through such attempts very quickly; they lead instead to cynicism and disillusionment. By contrast, engaged employees freely and willingly give discretionary effort, not as an ‘add on’, but as an integral part of their daily activity at work.

In particular, engagement is two way: organisations must work to engage the employee, who in turn has a choice about the level of engagement to offer the employer. Each reinforces the other.

Although not an exact science, employee engagement is measurable and a variety of survey tools exist for this purpose. Exactly what aspect of engagement these questionnaires analyse varies. Some describe the level of engagement within the organisation which enables comparisons between different parts of the same organisation and benchmarking against external databases. Some enable the identification of the prime drivers of employee engagement for an organisation whilst others look at the preconditions for engagement, and/or the outcomes of engagement.

Whatever approach is used, the data gleaned from engagement surveys should be good enough to allow organisations to identify issues that need to be addressed and measure change, positive or negative.

The key to employee engagement is to:

1. Share company objectives and beliefs and explain why these will be of positive benefit to employees, their colleagues and the company.

2. Define the behaviours that support these beliefs and those that undermine them. Ensure that management from the top down acts as positive role models and actively challenges negative behaviour.

3. Regularly measure the aspects important for the business’s strategy and goals, analyse the factors behind any changes, share the information and collectively devise strategies for addressing them.