All Things to All People? Why Defining Employee Engagement Matters to Business Results

All Things to All People? 
Why Defining Employee Engagement Matters to Business Results

telegraph.co.uk

Those of us who have been working in employee engagement and related areas such as internal communications or change management have probably developed a personal definition of employee engagement that we use in our day-to-day work. For example, I interviewed 10 practitioners in employee engagement as a part of my dissertation research: six were responsible for engagement programs in large corporations, and four were consultants for firms offering employee engagement services. Every single one had a definition of employee engagement. But no two definitions were the same. And only one of the 10 worked in an organization with a formal definition of employee engagement!

I found this sort of surprising given how much money companies spend in programs aimed at measuring and improving engagement, but it sort of makes sense when you look at how the idea has evolved over the last 25 years. It started as an idea about a person showing up in their job as their preferred self (Kahn, 1990), then was conceived as the positive opposite of burn-out (Schaufeli et al., 2002). As the idea became more widespread, consults with expertise in related topics like job satisfaction or organizational commitment began to integrate their areas of expertise with engagement.

Today, employee engagement has become a buzz word thought to describe a panacea to solve business problems from poor results, to lack of innovation, to top-talent retention. The term has become so imprecisely used that even those of us who are "experts" have trouble describing it concisely. Funnily though, intuitively we all know what it means because we all are (or have been, for the self-employed) engaged or disengaged employees.

Why, you might wonder, is it important to have a precise definition of employee engagement? Think back on your most engaged experience. Weren't you performing at your best? Wouldn't you recreate that feeling if you could? In order to deeply understand what drives employee engagement and the conditions that create it, as well as to fully capitalize on the benefits employee engagement produces, one must measure employee engagement. And in order to measure employee engagement, one must first define it.

Over the course of my dissertation research, I looked at how employee engagement has been defined by academics, by pioneering practitioners and by current experts in the field. I looked at theories that might help us put some boundaries around this complicated concept. I came up with a definition that could be effectively measured, which I'll talk more about in a future post. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from other people in the field ... How do you define employee engagement?