Engaging employees enthusiastically

Engaged employees produce excellent results. This has been echoed in many fronts in many parts of the world. Even though we have discussed it last year, its growing significance demands us to pay it even greater attention. Today’s column is all about that.

Essence of employee engagement

Employee engagement is all about employees’ hands, head and heart. To be precise, it is referred to as employees’ investment of physical, cognitive, and emotional energy and their full deployment of themselves into their work roles or tasks (Kahn, 1990).

According to research by Macey and Schneider, the meaning of employee engagement is ambiguous among both academic researchers and among practitioners. It refers to employee’s psychological state (e.g. one’s identification with the organisation), his/her disposition (e.g. one’s positive feeling towards the organisation) and performance (e.g. one’s level of discretionary effort). In brief, it captures affective (feeling), cognitive (thinking) and behavioural (acting) dimensions of an employee.

It is gaining popularity both in academia and in practice. In academia, a recent search of relevant electronic databases revealed nearly 200 published articles with the keywords employee engagement or work engagement, and these occurred with increasing frequency over the last decade.

Global status of employee engagement

What could be the status of employee engagement in the global arena? This has been one of the most surveyed managerial aspects in the recent past. The Workforce Survey for the year 2010 done by Towers Watson is one such instance, where interesting patterns have emerged. It, in a way pinpoints a watershed moment in the evolution of the employment relationships around the world.

From the global recession and financial defaults to changes in business models and strategic priorities, both employers and employees are being forced to revisit some fundamental assumptions about how they deal with one another. Their study, fielded with over 20,000 employees in 22 countries, reveals a recession-battered workforce — one with lower expectations, increased anxiety and new priorities. Such a scenario calls for urgent strengthening of employee engagement.

Many examples of how employee engagement has resulted in better organisational performance can be found in management literature. In one case, by increasing employee engagement by one tenth of a point, using a 5-point rating, the electronics retailer Best Buy increased store-level sales by $100,000 over the course of one year (BlessingWhite, 2008). In a similar fashion, the beverage company MolsonCoors was able to save $1.7 million in safety-related costs by increasing employee engagement through a company-wide initiative. The company launched this initiative after discovering that engaged employees reported five times fewer safety incidents and were seven times less likely than their non-engaged coworkers to have a loss of time incident.

Furthermore, based on data from the management consulting firm, the Gallup Organisation, nearly 8,000 business units of 36 companies, where unit level employee engagement was positively related to meaningful business-unit performance including customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, profitability, productivity, safety, and a reduction in turnover.

In 2010, Harter and his colleagues replicated these findings with an additional 2,178 business units of 10 large companies and extended these findings through results indicating that employee engagement also related to financial performance.

Types of employee engagement

We see different employees engage in work at different levels. They can be divided into three main categories, based on the studies of Gallup Consulting Group.

Engaged:

“Engaged” employees are builders. They want to know the desired expectations for their role so they can meet and exceed them. They’re naturally curious about their company and their place in it. They perform at consistently high levels. They want to use their talents and strengths at work every day. They work with passion and they drive innovation and move their organisation forward. It is heartening to meet such employees in Sri Lankan organisations as well.

Not-engaged:

Not-engaged employees tend to concentrate on tasks rather than the goals and outcomes they are expected to accomplish. They want to be told what to do just so they can do it and say they have finished. They focus on accomplishing tasks vs. achieving an outcome. Employees who are not-engaged tend to feel their contributions are being overlooked, and their potential is not being tapped. They often feel this way because they don’t have productive relationships with their managers or with their colleagues. We see plenty of them in our organisations too.

Actively disengaged:

According to Gallop consulting, the “actively disengaged” employees are the “cave dwellers”. They are “Consistently Against Virtually Everything (CAVE)”. They are not just unhappy at work; they are busy acting out their unhappiness .They sow seeds of negativity at every opportunity.

Every day, actively disengaged workers undermine what their engaged colleagues accomplish. As employees increasingly rely on each other to generate products and services, the problems and tensions that are fostered by actively disengaged ones can cause great damage to an organisation’s functioning. Unrealistic trade union actions might force some employees to reach this undesirable stage.

There are overlapping aspects captured in the concept of employee engagement such as psychological contract (unwritten expectations concerning the relationship between an employee and an employer) and commitment (identification and involvement with an organisation). Hence, it can be more treated as an umbrella term encompassing many related concepts. It deals with specific human behaviours that were in existence for a long period of time, with a renewed focus.

In essence, as some critiques call it, employee engagement can also be perceived as “old wine in new bottle”. If it is the case, one may ask why we should focus on it. The global tends reveal the timely need of it and vital deeds associated with it.

Engaged employees produce exceptional results. The last column dealt with several such success cases. This time, let’s address a fundamental question related to our discussion. How can we achieve employee engagement? How do we know it is there? How would they add value to their organisations? The answers to the above would come from an exploration. It is the journey of engagement to effectiveness.

Seijts and Crim, two researchers of organisational behaviour offer interesting insights through what they termed as “10 Cs for employee engagement”. Essentially, they deal with what corporate leaders should do in order to strengthen employee engagement. The key focus in each C can further be expanded into possible initiatives. Let’s discuss the details with local realities in mind.

Connect

Leaders must show that they value employees. This can be done by maintaining open channels so that employees can approach their superiors to discuss matters in a mutually beneficial manner. Disconnect leads to disengagement, with dire consequences.Career

Leaders should provide challenging and meaningful work with opportunities for career advancement. They should show employees the way forward in terms of career advancements and options, in motivating them to perform in exceeding expectations. As one leading multinational claim, “we do not offer jobs, but careers, the careers that brand them for life”.

Clarity

Leaders must communicate a clear vision. It should be shared and supported. This includes building an awareness on vision, mission and strategic priorities among the employees, in ensuring that they are clear about why they are doing what they do. It reminds me of the famous story of how President Kennedy went to NASA complex, during the peak of moon mission in late sixties. He saw a minor worker sweeping the floor, and had asked her as to what she was doing. Her response was stunning. “I am helping to send a man to the moon”. This is indeed a classic case of connecting to the organisation vision with clarity.

Convey

Leaders should clarify their expectations about employees and provide feedback on their functioning in the organisation.

This involves ensuring proper conduct of the performance appraisals by training the managers as to how to give constructive feedback objectively. As the communication gurus advocate, what matters more is how you say than what you say.

Congratulate

Leaders give recognition to others. Exceptional leaders do so a lot. Appreciating of good performance of employees by reward and recognition, in a timely fashion is something essential. Gone are the days of “employee of the year” or “employee of the quarter” or even “employee of the month”. What matters is giving due recognition to the “employee of the moment”.

Contribute

Leaders should make sure that employees know how their contribution matters. This can be done by introducing a transparent mechanism of objective setting and then connecting individual objectives to broad organisational objectives. Tested and proven mechanisms such as Balanced Scorecard can be handy in this respect.

Control

Leaders need to set the boundaries with the buy-in of the employees. This involves setting the boundaries of activities with proper systems in place with the involvement of employees, so that they are a part of the decision making process. Modern day control is more viewed as a way of ensuring consistency through conformance, as opposed to coercive courses of action.

 Collaborate

Great leaders are team builders. They create an environment that fosters trust and collaboration. By doing so, they ensure that teamwork is given due prominence with associated mechanisms such as team-based rewards to strengthen it.

Credibility

Leaders should strive to maintain organisational reputation and demonstrate high ethical standards. They should demonstrate being ethical in decision making, so that employees will strengthen their admiration of the organisation. Credibility can be compared to a glass tumbler. Once it is cracked, it is irreparable.

Confidence

Good leaders help create confidence in a company by being exemplars of high performance standards. It involves practicing “walking the talk” at all levels so that employees have better trust and confidence on their superiors. That has far reaching consequences, including better relationships and higher results.

The 10 Cs discussed above should be appropriately blended with organisational priorities, with sound HR practices in place. Once all Cs are taken seriously and put into place, the organisation is well geared to move forward in the path to progress.

Way forward

One cautionary remark however is about the need to have a broader perspective towards work. Employee engagement should by no means confine the employees to the workplace, depriving them of their family and social obligations.

In research literature, higher job security, increased social support and the existence of family friendly policies have been shown to reduce the incidence of work-family conflict. Whilst striving for employee engagement, ensuring a proper balancing of other aspects needs careful consideration.

The best way of summing up the 10 Cs is to link all of them to one “big C”. CARE. Employee-care is the surest way to ensure customer-care.

(Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri is a learner, teacher, trainer, researcher, writer and a thinker in the areas of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. He can be reached on [email protected].)