Profile of an engaged employee

[Mike Healy]

We can see from the vast range of material on this site and elsewhere that there is little agreement on what an engaged employee does/acts like that makes him/her "engaged". Feeling motivated or feeling good about my job/team/boss does not mean that those feelings will be turned into engaged actions. E.g. I may feel motivated to lose weight but I often fail to act. A good example of the spirit beng willing but the flesh beng weak!!

It would be good to know what the engaged person does different from disengaged persons or neutral persons. We are looking to develop an ongoing survey, open to the general public, asking participants about the discretionary effort they take and what/who prompts them to undertake it. From this we wonder if a profile of an engaged employee can be developed.

I would like to hear views from the EE network on the questions that might be asked in that survey or what pointers they might provide.

[Ben Simonton]

Mike,

In my experience, disengaged and engaged people act quite differently, although I prefer to call the former followers and the latter self-directed.

If management has caused the number of disengaged people to arrive at its natural level, about 95%, it will be harder to detect differences since those engaged will have to be quiet about most things in order to protect themselves from negative peer, union, and management pressures. If management treats employees with reasonable respect, the number engaged will rise and more of them will be willing to expose their true natures.

Once a person becomes fully engaged and stops being a follower, they will never revert to be being disengaged. The reason is that being in charge of one's life rather than allowing the weather, your bosses or peers or something else to dictate what you do is pure heaven on earth and no one will give that up once found. This exists in one's mind and no outsider can gain control of that without the cooperation of the person. The proof lies in concentration camp survivors who though physically damaged extensively never surrendered their mind.

In general, disengaged complain about problems and situations not to their liking. Their bosses or a consultant may never hear these complaints from the majority of the disengaged employees because to do so only makes them targets. Thus they "tell the bosses what they want to hear" for self-protection.

Engaged never complain about anything and faced with a problem will search for a solution. This also applies to how engaged view management since they do not place themselves as judges of management and are engaged because they are being paid to do a job and being engaged is their only way to act. Engaged use the word "we" when talking of problems and disengaged use "you" or "they". Engaged never make excuses for their errors while disengaged almost always use some sort of excuse like "the boss did it so why can't I?". Engaged have a very strong sense of ownership of their work while disengaged have little or none.

Engaged are always positive, disengaged the opposite. This pervades everything they do or say. Unfortunately, most bosses and other observers are unskilled at listening and getting people to say what they really feel.

Most bosses are not sufficiently respected to be able to extract how an employee feels. Bosses must earn the respect of their people before their people will dare open up to them.

Hope this helps. For me it became quite easy to tell the difference once I moved to listening to and responding respectfully to what I heard rather than continue being a top-down manager. Actually, this ability was critical to being able to turnaround a management disaster.

Best regards, Ben