(AC 1.1& 1.2)
What is Employee Engagement (CIPD 2016)?
Employee engagement is a concept that offers win-win circumstances to employers and employees. It’s an arrangement of organization commitment to the values and the desire to help out colleagues (Organization Citizenship). It’s often seen as the mutual gains in mental, emotional, physical and behaviors in particular work discipline. It’s more than just job satisfaction or employee motivation. It’s something that employees offer as part of unwritten contract based on encouraging environment and culture provided by the employer. It is an approach that growth chances of business success, contributing to organizational and individual performance, productivity and well-being.
Engagement components:
- Awareness or organizational aims and key performance indicators (KPIs); with employees having a basic knowledge of where their company is going, what are its aims, long term and short term goals, and key performance indicators can help employees see the bigger picture and see the value of their contribution to the organization ultimate goal hence being more engaged and productive.
- Empowerment, job satisfaction and role enrichment; being empowered at work it can be used as sort of strategic reward for employees (CIPD 2017), it gives the employee more vertical authority and border work responsibilities, involving the employees and allowing the space for growth and reach potential.
- Psychological contract; code of conduct or code of ethics can easily be formed in a formal medium for employees to know through inductions, awareness sessions, newsletter…etc. to ensure that these instructions are well received by the employees and know their rights and responsibilities, however there will still be some elements of mutual contracting between employees and organization like; expectation to be treated fairly, equal employment opportunities and to be engaged at work for win-win outcomes.
- Team working, sharing of knowledge and involvement; engagement is based on knowledge sharing, this can be challenging for some organizations working at global strategic level, because the sense of trust and ambiguity under false claims of corporate espionage and losing competitive advantage can be difficult to share knowledge or strategic intents. Having that in mind, organization still can share a vast amount of knowledge to its employee for different levels to gain their trust, and showing them that they are part of the organization and needs to know. For a previous employer (Landmark Group 2017) a huge retail conglomerate in MENA region, sharing daily target, budgets, problems, complaints for the working sales men and women in their respective stores was very uncommon practice. After doing an engagement survey and as part of major store managers development and empowerment, they started to share daily targets and annual budgets with their respective sales men and women, the result was massive for the development of teams, productivity, having sense of belonging, reducing turnover rates and more.
Employee engagement principal dimensions:
There are different dimensions of employee engagement that can differentiate and make successful productive organizations stand apart from the rest and determine their destiny.
Figure 1: engagement dimensions
Other engagement dimensions can include:
Figure 2: other dimensions of employee engagement
What Do I Get: This includes basic compensations, benefits, culture and working environment, it can motivate employees to perform at task given with varied engagement at basic levels.
What Do I Give: here the organization expectations toward the employees are stated, where responsibilities and duties are defined, this helps employees to understand what exactly they are expected to give the organization? What are the tasks that needs to be fulfilled? What accomplishment and success looks like? This can help towards meaningful relationship between employees, their mangers, organization and ultimately customers.
Do I Belong to the Organization: when employee’s opinions count and for them to feel as part of something bigger, not just another number or someone only gets job done and goes beyond that can be crucial part in building engagement in an organization?
How Can I Grow: building and fulfilling and developing jobs with continuous growth that can includes promotions, rewards, monetary increments and recognition, are most essential tools to retain employees in the organization.
Restricting employee’s engagement to only motivation or only job commitment or only job satisfactions can be misleading or flawed concept to approach employee engagement.
Commitment and engagement have similarities but also are not the same, here are major differences:
- Committed employees are often focused on finishing assignment at hand however, engaged employees look beyond that of how this assignment contribute to the organization overall goals.
- Some employees might be engaged and not committed, they seem to be developing from theh outside however this development is to move from the organization
- Committed employees may be satisfied by certain achievement levels of their work, however engaged employees are more emotionally attached to the organization goals. Example of that are the fully engaged employees of Adidas, they never purchase sportswear products from competitors and consider it as a matter of disloyalty.
In a survey done by dale Carnegie training (Dale Carnegie 2012) Only 29% of surveyed employees were fully engaged while 26% were disengaged when looking at the characteristics of engaged employees they tend to be:
- Senior management (Senior VP+ level) were they have large access to organization knowledge and objectives or employed in a large corporation
- Have a college education
- Earn $50K annually or more
- Under the age of 30, or over 50 which puts them in baby boomers and millennials categories.
And when looking at those with less engagement it was found that:
- Client-facing and clerical staffers, and despite superficial engagement with customers they tend to be overloaded.
- The most highly educated, i.e., with a post-graduate education, MBAs and masters
- Employees working for highly secured jobs that have deep hierarchy structure like in government, military, education and manufacturing sectors.
- Middle-aged employees (40-49 years old)
- earning less than $50K
- Newer employees, especially those in the organization less than a year that were not exposed to organization goals.
Figure 3: DC survey of engagement (2012)
Finally, aligning organizations purpose, mission, vison, values and strategic intents with engagement components can drive the workforce be highly engaged highly productive. the active support of senior leaders and line managers is crucial for successful employee engagement strategies as well.
- (AC 2.1& 2.2)
Engagement drivers:
Key drivers of engagement often circle around feeling valued and being involved (Robinson et al 2004) and this often reflected through:
- How involved are the employees in decision-making process
- the level to which the company is concerned for employees’ wellbeing and happiness.
- the extent to which employees are able to say their opinions, and managers listen to these views, and value employees’ participation
- the opportunities employees receive to develop their careers
this often leads to benefits for different parties including:
Employees:
- Improved Health and happiness; engaged employees are less likely to be stressed or drained
- Career development – engaged employees are more likely to have better developed careers in shorter amount of time comparing to disengaged counterparts.
- Flexible work conditions; concepts like work-life balance have better have meaningful insights to it as it helps them attend to their personal life while balancing their careers. i.e. working from home, flexi hours, management by objectives (MBO)
- Benefits; monetary compensation when benchmark against average market and add benefits and perks i.e. google (Inc. 2015)
- Team work; the feeling of being part of a community or bigger entity give a level of belonging and security to the employees
- Ongoing Development; investing in employees learning and development activity which help them gain new knowledge, skills and desired behaviors.
Figure 4: characteristics of engaged employees
Employers:
- Reduced Absenteeism; when employees are engaged the levels of absenteeism decreases including medical days off.
- Hiring/Retention; engaged employees are more likely to stay longer with the business and show a commitment to aid and support other employees.
- Competitive advantage; engaged employees can give competitive advantage to their respective organization comparing to other non-engaged through commitment and being ambassadors of their business
- Efficiency and cost optimization; loss prevention, optimized costs, and increased productivity are often terms correlated with engagement.
- Combined Workflows; engaged employees are often very good team players hence capitalize on individual contribution and maximizing work value through their team, they don’t work in separate silos.
This will ultimately benefit customers by receiving better products and services though meeting people who are keen on the business hence benefit stakeholders who will see better returns on their investments.
(AC 3.1, 3.2 & 3.3)
Measuring employee engagement can be a challenging task and difficult to quantify, however there are some diagnostic tools that can help see the difference between engaged and disengaged employees and its impact on the business.
Examples of that could be:
- Employee attitudes/culture/ climate surveys; often have a set of questions often looking for reasons of limiting productivity, get feedback from employees about environment and relationships with line manages, views of top management, assess employees fit and satisfaction.
- Focus groups; where company invites small number of employees from diversified backgrounds and levels often with a moderator or a facilitator to assess informally the level of engagement in an organization.
- HR metrics; that can have broad range that can includes, employee’s turnover rates, absenteeism rates, sick leaves levels, exit interviews analysis etc. It can give the organization a holistic overview of employee’s activities in relation to being engaged.
Other professional bodes come with their own take on engagement:
Blessing White (2016): Five Levels of Engagement
Blessing Whites engagement model focuses on an employee’s contribution to the success of the business and their personal satisfaction within their current role. See appendix I for further details on the model.
The Gallup Q12; a benchmark tool developed by Gallup to measure engagement to worker productivity, customer loyalty and sales growth, it is based on 12 questions (see appendix ii)
There are a lot of sought after companies in the world that are famous for delivering employee value proposition (EVP) or as some may translate it to becoming employer of choice. Come on this list companies like google, SAS and Dell (Great place to work 2016) these companies offer to their employee’s elements beyond the perks and financial compensations, they offer engagement.
Job seekers from all over the world dire to work for these companies for the unique, relevant and compelling offering they make. Element of great work culture and balance work-life conditions allow them to be at optimum levels of productivity and maintain high satisfaction level from their customers.
An example of that is Zappos (Great place to work 2011), a multi-billion dollars’ retail giant with more than 1700 employees and millions of customer, they like to offer their products as “happiness in a box”. The top management at Zappos believe that happy employees can lead to happy customers hence being one of the top retailers in their field. Tony Hsieh, CEO and founder related happiness and engagement to four main elements:
- perceived control,
- perceived progress,
- connectedness (meaning the number and depth of your relationships),
- and being part of something bigger than yourself
With five weeks of training and their revolutionary “offer,” Zappos walks this talk from day one. At the end of the first week of training, Zappos presents an offer to the entire class – payment for the time they’ve already spent plus a bonus of $2,000 to quit and leave the company before they fully assume their roles. This offer stands throughout the entire training and a few weeks beyond. This practice gives new hires a unique opportunity to make an educate choices about their own happiness and whether they can fully commit to Zappos.
HR can be a major influencer in an organization to set strategies for employee’s engagement, this can include:
- Build Common goal; Describe and communicate the clear reasons behind the decision taken by the organization in top management and work to get employees buy in in response.
- Measure and Communicate Progress; key factor in delivering messages is choosing the right channels, time and means of communication to reach employees and properly measure the progress of it.
- Assess Readiness; Help business leaders demonstrably measure the willingness and of people to buy into and support the initiative and objectives.
- Manage Resistance; understand that resistance to change is normal and provide strategies to win over detractors and gain maximum support.
- Create Involvement; build employees ownership and allow for them to be part of the decision and most importantly leave space for mistakes and learn from it.
Additional HR strategies can include, focus groups, sounding boards (employees voice), think tanks and idea banks.
This can be faced by barriers that can include:
- Low perceptions of senior management
- Reactive decision-making
- Inconsistent management style
- Poor work–life balance
- Low levels of advocacy
However, this can be overcome by addressing this barrier through:
Resourcing
Support employees to take on new tasks and responsibilities, this can come in the form of job rotation, on the job training or job shadowing ensuring that new opportunities inside organization are announced internally before looking outside.
Creating channels for Development
Creating opportunism for employees to develop and encourage them to explore, learn and make mistakes. Build career paths and open channels for lateral and vertical development.
Effective Performance Management
Set clear objectives that are SMART (specific, measurable,
achievable, rewarding and time bound) to the employees to set the expectations
of both employees and organization, hence have better clarity of organization
objectives and the ability to measure performance.
References and Bibliography
MacLEOD, D. and CLARKE, N. (2009) Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement. London: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
SCHAUFELI, W.B. and BAKKER, A.B. (2004). Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement: a multi-sample study. Journal of Organizational Behavior.
CIPD (2017) strategic reward and total reward https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/strategy/reward/strategic-total-factsheet
CIPD (2016) Employee engagement: an introduction https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/engagement/factsheet
GUEST, D.E. and CONWAY, N. (2004) Employee well-being and the psychological contract. Research report. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
ROBINSON, D., PERRYMAN, S. and HAYDAY, S. (2004) The drivers of employee engagement. Brighton: Institute for Employment Studies.
GIFFORD, J., FINNEY, L., HENNESSY, J. and VARNEY, S. (2010). The human voice of employee engagement: understanding what lies beneath the surveys. Horsham: Roffey Park Institute.
CIPD (2012) Research: Emotional or transactional engagement – does it matter? https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/engagement/emotional-transactional-report
Dale Carnegie (2012) WHAT DRIVES EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND WHY IT MATTERS? https://www.dalecarnegie.com/assets/1/7/driveengagement_101612_wp.pdf
Landmark group (2017) http://www.landmarkgroup.com/retail/home/home-centre/
Robinson et al(2004) The Drivers of Employee Engagement http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/system/files/resources/files/408.pdf
Inc. magazine (2015) An Inside Look at Google’s Best Employee Perks https://www.inc.com/business-insider/best-google-benefits.html
Blessing White. (2016) | the-x-model-of-employee-engagement | [ONLINE] Available at: http://blessingwhite.com/business-issues/employee-engagement/the-x-model-of-employee-engagement/
Great place to work (2016) 2016 World’s Best Multinational Workplaces http://www.greatplacetowork.net/best-companies/worlds-best-multinationals/the-list
Great place to work (2011) How Zappos Creates Happy Customers and Employees http://saen.greatplacetowork.com/storage/documents/Publications_Documents/Zappos_-_How_Zappos_Creates_Happy_Customers_and_Employees.pdf
Appendix i:
blessing white engagement model
Appendix ii:
Gallup Q12 engagement survey
Employee engagement Slides
