Employee engagement, in various guises, is among the new buzzwords of recent years. To be more accurate, it’s a repackaging of old ideas by the consulting industry. Under a shiny “NEW” label the consultants have found yet another way of exploiting corporate insecurity and thereby picking its pockets.
There appears to be only circular definitions of what constitutes an engaged employee. The CIPD defines employee engagement as “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract.”
In short, an engaged employee is any employee who is engaged. It’s a matter of attitude.
Today’s employers are encouraged to recruit for attitude; train for skill when searching for new employees. That approach saves the job of instilling an attitude seen as ‘right’ by the employer in question, but it only goes so far. Whatever attitude is exhibited during the recruitment process it will only be retain if the employee’s circumstances are conducive.
To a large extent that depends on the employer, but it can equally be affected either by changes in the employee’s private life, or by shifts in their personal beliefs and values. Over the employee’s private life and over beliefs and values the employer has little or no control. And rightly so. An employment contract is an exchange of time and skills for money and associated benefits. It is not entry into a closed religious order.
Most of the literature on this subject talks about measuring employee attitudes and conducting regular employee attitude surveys. Any organisation that needs to do that has to raise an immediate red flag in its own mind. If concern for the attitude and mindset of employees is not part of the daily interaction in the company, if senior management has actually lost touch with how employees think and feel, then there is an immediate problem.
Organisations that have a high proportion of employees who are unengaged or disengaged are offered various approaches to reverse that situation. These include:
• giving the opportunity to feed views and opinions upwards
• keeping employees informed about what is going on
• seeing that managers are committed
• having fair and just management processes for dealing with problems.
Perhaps more telling – and rarely mentioned – is the sobering process of the organisation examining its own value as expressed in its formal and informal manner of doing things. What message is the organisation really giving to its employees (and its customers)? Can people be reasonably expected to sign up enthusiastically to such a message?
This search for paragons of virtue among employees has an interesting parallel in the education sector. In England, when a pupil truants from school, we ask what is wrong with the child. In France, they ask what is wrong with the school. If you are an employer looking for greater engagement then be prepared. If it is absent then the cause may lay uncomfortably close to home.
There appears to be only circular definitions of what constitutes an engaged employee. The CIPD defines employee engagement as “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract.”
In short, an engaged employee is any employee who is engaged. It’s a matter of attitude.
Today’s employers are encouraged to recruit for attitude; train for skill when searching for new employees. That approach saves the job of instilling an attitude seen as ‘right’ by the employer in question, but it only goes so far. Whatever attitude is exhibited during the recruitment process it will only be retain if the employee’s circumstances are conducive.
To a large extent that depends on the employer, but it can equally be affected either by changes in the employee’s private life, or by shifts in their personal beliefs and values. Over the employee’s private life and over beliefs and values the employer has little or no control. And rightly so. An employment contract is an exchange of time and skills for money and associated benefits. It is not entry into a closed religious order.
Most of the literature on this subject talks about measuring employee attitudes and conducting regular employee attitude surveys. Any organisation that needs to do that has to raise an immediate red flag in its own mind. If concern for the attitude and mindset of employees is not part of the daily interaction in the company, if senior management has actually lost touch with how employees think and feel, then there is an immediate problem.
Organisations that have a high proportion of employees who are unengaged or disengaged are offered various approaches to reverse that situation. These include:
• giving the opportunity to feed views and opinions upwards
• keeping employees informed about what is going on
• seeing that managers are committed
• having fair and just management processes for dealing with problems.
Perhaps more telling – and rarely mentioned – is the sobering process of the organisation examining its own value as expressed in its formal and informal manner of doing things. What message is the organisation really giving to its employees (and its customers)? Can people be reasonably expected to sign up enthusiastically to such a message?
This search for paragons of virtue among employees has an interesting parallel in the education sector. In England, when a pupil truants from school, we ask what is wrong with the child. In France, they ask what is wrong with the school. If you are an employer looking for greater engagement then be prepared. If it is absent then the cause may lay uncomfortably close to home.
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