Lexington, KY - "Sally, I can't seem to get these kids enthused about their work. They just want to come here, sit in their chair, send text messages to their friends, talk on their cell phones, get a little bit of work done, and then collect a paycheck. I'm telling you, it's really frustrating."
"Well Fred, have you asked them what would make their job more exciting?"
"Of course not! They agreed to come work here. They knew what they were getting into. We've got a job to do, Sally. They should know that."
Sounds like we've got a little "employee engagement" problem here - with culpability on both sides.
Employee engagement is a loose term originating from William Kahn in 1990 and popularized by research firm The Gallup Organization and management consultants Towers Perrin. Both organizations claim that more engaged employees will bring larger bottom-line profits, lower employee turnover, increased customer satisfaction and engagement, and many more positive business results.
A consistent definition of employee engagement does not exist. However, based upon existing engagement surveys, I feel that engagement is an umbrella idea embracing many comfortable and time-tested concepts. Let's explore the contribution of each of these elements.
Motivation and hygiene theory
Frederick Herzberg developed a concept he defined as hygiene and motivational factors. Hygiene factors, such as company policy and administration, supervision and work conditions, will cause a worker to become disengaged. Think of it as pushing an employee away if not done well. Motivation factors, such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself, advancement and growth, will engage an employee in their work and the organization. If you look under the hood at some of the employee engagement surveys, you will find many of these factors.
Motivation orientation
The work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan arrived at a general conclusion that individuals tend to fall into one of three major motivational orientation groups: intrinsically motivated, extrinsically motivated or amotivated.
Individuals who are intrinsically motivated enjoy a challenge and will strive to achieve a goal that is reasonably outside their reach. These people are relatively easy to engage. Paint the vision, provide the resources they need, empower them to do their job and let them go.
Extrinsically motivated individuals take a bit more care and feeding. They will strive for an external goal, such as winning a contest or getting a bonus check. While they are higher maintenance employees, they can be engaged in your organization with a bit of creativity and effort.
Amotivated individuals, on the other hand, are a problem. These people will not allow themselves to be motivated to do a job no matter how hard you try. Will they ever be engaged in their job? Nope. So, even if you as a leader do all the right stuff to engage them, it won't work. This is why I feel it is so important to ensure an element of individual differences is included in an employee engagement survey.
Effective vs. successful managers
Research has shown quite clearly that if you want high-performance teams, i.e. teams of engaged workers, you must have effective leadership. This requires leaders spending time with their workers and ensuring they have challenging assignments, sufficient resources, effective team processes and so on.
Unfortunately, as the work of Fred Luthans has shown, the successful managers - that is, the ones promoted frequently - are not often effective managers. And so what you may have in an organization is effective lower-level managers who spend time ensuring they have productive teams and managers who have been promoted frequently because they spend time networking with their superiors and peers.
The result is many organizations with mediocre upper and middle management muddling their way through business cycles, attempting to keep their organization afloat. Is it any wonder we have an epidemic of organizations with disengaged workers?
Flow
Some engagement models do not consider the individual employee's ability to engage. This seems unreasonable to me. If an employee is unable to engage, any actions by the organization will have no effect on the employee's job performance. So the effect, or output, we are looking for requires organizational action and individual action. Flow is the ability to focus on a single task so intently that the sense of the passage of time is lost. Simply put, an employee in a state of flow will be engaged.
Reap the benefits
Having seen the elements of employee engagement, I hope you understand how crucial it is to your organization's health to utilize the diagnostic strength of this type of assessment. We have seen that some elements require work on the part of the management team while other elements require an effort by the employee.
The beauty of this situation is that it gives a leader in any part of the organization something to talk about with employees individually as well as in groups. You can stress the importance of each party's contribution as well as explore strengths and areas for improvement.
Used appropriately, an employee engagement assessment can become a powerful tool for positive change in your organization.
Joel DiGirolamo heads the firm Turbocharged Leadership and can be found on the web at http://www.turbochargedleadership.com.