What is Engagement? Help Please!

[James Robbins]

Hey everyone. Would love some of your thoughts on this. I had someone ask me the other day, "What's employee engagement?" I got to thinking that this is actually an abstract concept...so I wanted to know your ideas on what is engagement in a tangible sense. ie Employees showing up to work on time etc...
In other words I am looking for tangible, observable behavior that you would classify as evidence an employee is engaged.
Thanks in advance...
James

[Anil Saxena]

James and everyone else...
First, I have to say that I think James' picture is awesome. Love the caricature.
As for this thread, it is a worthy conversation. The problem, in my opinion, is two-fold. First, for too long we have not done a great job in tying engagement to performance. Second, the people who are normally responsible for engagement in organizations don't seem like they work with a sense of urgency.
Tying engagement to performance is something that will not only make CEOs happy, but add credibility to the whole effort within the organization. This is something I do with all my clients. Engagement is not about making people happy, it is about making the organization win. People who play for a winning team are usually happier. I know that is oversimplified. There is no one observable behavior to being engaged. I say that little things like coming in late don't matter as much to a team or organization that is engaged. An engaged team thinks of things like "how do we make the company better, stronger, more effective, etc." My personal belief is that we need to stop talking about employee engagement as a place to get to and start talking about improving organizational performance.

The second issue is that the folks who are in charge of engagement in many organizations seem not to be tied to the success of the business. Here is what I mean by that. I have a client that is going through some major organizational issues. Instead of getting to work on solving them, they are trying to pick the model to use to introduce change into the organization. CEOs see that and say, why are we rearranging the decks chairs on the Titanic. When I work with clients I always make sure to talk about linking organizational metrics (business drivers) to engagement. Almost every client is a little "freaked out" buy that. They want to say - our goal is to have a more engaged workforce. Really? Engaged to what? To what end?

We all have to do a better job at creating and acting with a sense of urgency.

[David Bowles]

Anil I agree very much that performance needs to be a big part of this discussion, as you can see from my posts on the thread. The focus on urgency is also useful. Having said that I am not sure I can agree that we approach this from performance>>engagement. There is an effect in that direction, but there is a much bigger effect in the other direction,.i.e. engagement>>performance. Perhaps the reason is that you can drive performance in many ways which are very much against any kind of engagement, such as intense pressure leading to burnout, threats of various kinds, unethical and illegal behavior (think Enron and Goldman) and so on....all of which might produce performance in the short term but undermine and in the longer term totally destroy any worker engagement you might have had.

As for your comment that telling clients that linking performance metrics to engagement freaks out clients, well that didn't happen with my clients, so I am confused by that. It seems to me that CEOs and other leaders would be glad to hear, from the outset, that what they are doing with engagement is indeed highly correlated with and drives performance. I wrote my book on exactly this subject for these kinds of people, who need to hear such things from consultants, because they do indeed ask "why should I bother with this touchy-feely stuff?" Performance is why they should bother, but I would not put the performance cart before the engagement horse for them.

best

David
www.moraleatwork.com

[Craig Althof]

Good to see this got some new life, although it's akin to a never-ending badminton match. (BOING....)

Reference over to Jim Baran's "HR Estrangement" discussion. Briefly, in my opinion-- for engagement to be credible, the messenger needs to be credible. OD needs to stop talking voodoo babble and playing with models, and get involved in improving and results. Become a value-adding strategic partner who understands the issues in operations, and both the managers' and front line's needs. Speak their language, become relevant to them.