Defining Engagement?

[David Zinger]

How do we define employee engagement and make sense of this sometimes very elusive construct?

[Richard Sedley]

Hi everyone

I'm afraid I'm coming a little late to the party here but thought I'd add my perspective. Until recently my team have primarily been focused on customer engagement (just recently we've been asked to more consulting on EE) so our definition is drawn from the customer facing world, but hopefully it will be useful.

Definition: "Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological and physical investment a customer has in a brand (product or company)"

The two key words here are 'repeated' and 'investment'. I believe any definition of engagement, customer or employee, needs to combine both the behavioral and the attitudinal.

So maybe the definition could be:

"Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological and physical investment an employee has in a company, or team or group within that company".

I'm still relatively new to the EE world so I'd love to know if people agree or not with this take.

Thanks
Richard

[Deri Latimer]

I like it, Richard! Especially since the word 'investment' implies that there must be 'value' for the employee's 'investment'. The question for organizations is 'what is the value to the employee?' I wrote a blog post recently referring to Martin Seligman's work on Positive Psychology...I think there is a lot we can learn from PP to apply to organizational effectiveness and EE.

[Paul Herr]

You pose a challenging question, but there is, I believe, a clear and unambiguous answer. Here is my biologic stab at defining enagagement.

Engagement (bonding) occurs, I suggest, when 1) we value something or someone, and 2) we willingly invest effort in that person, place or thing. In other words, the brain contains an investment-tracking mechanism, possibly located in the ventro medial prefrontal lobe, that causes the things we invest effort into to become owned psychological assets that we subsequently protect from harm. These assets could be a friend, pet, career, lovingly restored car, employer or workmates. Whenever we freely invest in someone or something we bring it inside and append it to our identity or sense of self where it quite literally becomes part of us.

This bonding process may be analogous to the territorial behavior exhibited by mammals and reptiles--except that "territory" in the human sense include many more types of assets (skills, relationships, knowledge, as well as conventional assets like money and property).

If someone threatens one of our psychic investments, the amydala is triggered and an emotional fight/flight reaction ensues--which would be measurable with a polygraph. The simplest example of this emotional bonding (engagement) process occurs between a parent and child. The parent invests mightilly in raising the child and, via this investment, brings the child inside. If the child is subsequently threatened, the parent will feel this threat as a personal attack and reacts accordingly. If the child has a success, the parent experiences this success emotionally as well via the identity-merging process. Psychiatrists call this rather spooky identity-merging process "cathexis."

In the case of employees, if they truly value their jobs and employeer and freely invest in them, then they bring the job inside where it becomes an owned asset and part of their identity. If we could hook these invested employees up to a polygraph and then criticize their employer, an emotional response would presumably register--just as if we had criticized the employee directly.

The best indication of employee engagement, therefore, is an emotional reaction when the employer is criticised or threatened. If no defensive reaction occurs, then bonding (engagement) does not exist. Engagement, in other words, is a purely emotional phenomenon created by consensual investment and measurable though emotional reactions. Words have a hard time capturing this stealthy, automatic, emotional process. Your thoughts?

[Deri Latimer]

I really like that, Paul! I believe Engagement is truly about being emotionally connected...and invested. Emotionally intelligent leaders will help facilitate that connection/investment.

[Paul Herr]

Dear Deri,

I have a book coming out in April titled, "Primal Management: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Nature to Drive High Performance," that pursues emotions from a biologic, hard-science perspective. The cathexis process described in my post is the most important concept in the book. If you would like to preview a few chapters please send me an email at [e-mail]. The book presents a survey, metric, and methodology for getting the very best out of human beings by feeding their primal social appetites to invent, master skills, achieve group goals, work productively as a team, and feel protected.

What is your involvement in employee engagement (you can respond to the same email given above)?

Best,

Paul Herr

[Nels Pedersen]

Simple question with a sometimes not so simple answer. The variety of the replies (I certainly can't pick the "best" one and like all of them) suggests that engagement has differing meanings to people depending on their role, their experiences, and perhaps even the industry they are a part of. Engagement is one of those ideas that is hard to describe but you know it when you see it. It's probably more common to see pockets of engagement rather than a widespread culture of engagement. Maybe a good place to start is to describe and define what is the opposite of engagement. Is that disengagement?

- Nels

[Paul Herr]

Hi Nels,

I think a disengaged employee is someone who doesn't value their job and views work as a distasteful chore instead of rewarding work. I look at disengaged employees as the workplace equivalent of underachieving high school students--smart kids who just don't see the point. I designed and ran a tutoring program for underachieving students in the mid 1980s. Perhaps the same procedure, described below, could be used by managers to rehabilitate underachieving employees.

Here are two excerpts from my upcomming book, Primal Management, that deal with the disengagement issue. Let me know what you think of these potential solutions to the disengagement problem.

Best,

Paul Herr

EXCERPT 1:

We must teach employees to value the workplace-game or they will not feel rewarded for playing it. A game that employees don’t value is a chore. We already know from the Gallup Organization’s employee engagement surveys that 69 percent of employees do not value the game they are playing. These employees are the corporate world’s version of high school underachievers.

We should not be surprised that 69 percent of employees don’t value the game. The modern work world is frighteningly complex, and finding one’s place in it is a daunting task. For every employee who discovers his or her passion, makes an enlightened career decision, and finds a supportive tribe, I suspect that five others drift into unsatisfying jobs due to random circumstances.

After employees enter the workforce, other factors come into play that can cause them to mentally check out of the corporate game, even if they had a lot of enthusiasm coming in. Demanding bosses, for example, who never have a kind or supportive word to say, can easily turn committed employees into disengaged underachievers.

Another cause of disengagement is the hyperrational, bureaucratic business model that Western companies are based on. This model devalues human beings and treats them as replaceable components in a machine. The default message to employees is, ‘‘You’re a replaceable cog with little inherent value to the organization.’’ This is hardly a formula for encouraging employees to value the game!

The question in my mind is not why 69 percent of employees are disengaged, but how 31 percent somehow find meaning and intrinsic reward inside the impersonal corporate machine. Perhaps individual managers create pockets of sanity within an otherwise dysfunctional system.

Our ice-age ancestors had it easy. They automatically valued the game. Nobody had to explain to them why hunting, gathering, weaponmaking skills, fighting skills, shelter-making skills, and food-preparation skills were important to the tribe. In other words, the tribe’s survival priorities were straightforward and obvious. The target was clear. The straightforward survival dynamic of our ancestors can be re-created in-side superorganisms today, so long as employees are bonded to one another and the company as a whole. If employees care about their tribe, then they will automatically value the corporate game and want to contribute to its success.

EXCERPT 2:

Most managers, I propose, simply assume that their employees value the corporate game as much as they do. This, I believe, is a grave mistake. As I mentioned above, there are many reasons in our complex society why employees might not value their role in the corporate game the same way we do. How might a manager rehabilitate someone who views their work as a distasteful chore instead of rewarding work?

I dealt with a situation like this in 1985 when I tested some of the ideas in this book on a group of high school underachievers. These were hard-core underachievers whose parents had already tried a number of conventional solutions, like sending their students to tutors or to school psychologists. Underachievers, by the way, are smart kids who view school as a thankless chore—effort expended without emotional compensation.

The dilemma I faced with these underachievers is identical to the dilemma faced by managers with disengaged employees: how to convert a hated chore into an intrinsically rewarding game that employees will enjoy playing. I first devised a simple exercise to show the students how to find pleasure in a seemingly thankless chore. I asked the students to pick one thing they hated the most. The consensus of the class was doing the dishes. I then asked them to imagine what would happen if nobody in the family ever did the dishes. Here are some of the consequences the students came up with:

• The house would stink.

• My friends wouldn’t come over anymore because of the mess and the
smell.

• We’d get sick.

The students then determined that maybe they did have some responsibility for taking care of the family, and perhaps doing the dishes could be part of their contribution. After establishing that doing the dishes was not worthless or stupid, I then asked the underachievers to go home and do the very best job they could on the dish-washing task. I predicted that they would feel good about completing an important survival task for their tribe.

I asked the students the following week if they had gotten any pleasure from doing the dishes. The response was unanimous and enthusiastic. One boy commented, ‘‘My parents thought I was nuts. They freaked out. They couldn’t believe it when I cleared the table and did the dishes without them asking.’’ Everyone had a similar story. Remarkably, they had all enjoyed doing the dishes.

The next step, I told them, was to do the same thing with the school chore. We had to convert it from something stupid and hated into something valuable and rewarding. I started the chore-conversion process by giving students a big-picture perspective so they could understand how the educational system worked and why they were justified in having negative feelings about it. Modern education, I told them, is a goodfaith effort to make the best of a very difficult and unnatural situation.

Education, at its essence, boils down to mastering the survival skills of one’s tribe—skills that have been painstakingly acquired over thousands of years of exploration and trial-and-error experimentation. The sheer volume of survival skills we have compiled since the invention of writing makes it hard to figure out what to teach our children and how to teach it without overwhelming them. Do you teach a lot, with little depth, or a little, in rich detail?

I next explained that modern education is profoundly unnatural compared to the way children are designed to learn. The natural mode of learning for human beings, I explained, is for children to observe adults performing routine survival skills and then mimic the adult behaviors during play. Play is therefore the primary vehicle for learning in natural human societies.

The modern educational system couldn’t be more unnatural. First of all, it separates children from adults so the children can’t see the adults in action and teaches the tribe’s survival skills out of context in a classroom. Play in the modern context is viewed as a counterproductive distraction, rather than as a vital vehicle for learning. In modern society, I explained, we cannot allow children into the workplace to observe adults in action because this would be highly disruptive. The modern educational system, I suggested, was an honest attempt to deal with a profoundly unnatural situation. I suggested that the students stop resisting this unfortunate reality and try to make the best of a difficult situation.

The students were grateful for the big-picture overview and commented, ‘‘Nobody bothered to explain the game to us before.’’ Once the students understood the inherent complexity of the situation, they stopped blaming their teachers and their resistance to learning melted away.

I proceeded to teach the students how to experience the five productive pleasures that are the subject of Primal Management. I figured that once they had tasted the pleasures that nature incorporated into the system to encourage learning, the process would become self-sustaining. I believe I was correct in my calculation. The students’ attitudes and grades improved and they were still enjoying the learning game a year later when we had a reunion.

Managers, I suggest, should never assume that employees view their jobs as inherently valuable. Employees, just like my students, need to understand the big picture and how they fit into it. Don’t automatically assume that your employees value the game. It is far better to assume the opposite and explain to each and every employee how to identify value and purpose within their workplace role.

[Eric Lobser]

Employee engagement is the end result of employees being aligned with the company's interests, as well as the company being aligned with the employee's interests.

What do I, as an employee, need to do to help make my company more successful (starting with an understanding of its objectives)? What can the company do to help me perform my duties and be successful (driven by an understanding of what skills/capabilities, knowledge and behaviors are needed and coupling those with the right support/tools/technology and organizational structures and policies)? Not surprisingly, the customer generally has the final say in whether this is being done successfully or not, and is the reason why customer satisfaction and employee engagement have such a strong link.

While employee engagement may be one-sided, I don't believe the causes are. Additionally, I believe the specifics of what engages employees and what that looks like (culture) would and should vary from company to company, and certainly from industry to industry, but the key elements are the same. Employees and companies interested in the betterment of the other (in meeting the customer's needs).