In the Fast Lane: What Drives Employee Engagement

In the Fast Lane: What Drives Employee Engagement

Why building the trust relationship is the most important employee engagement investment a leader makes 

One of the benefits of cleanly defining and measuring employee engagement is that it allows researchers to test whether significant relationships exist between employee engagement and related ideas. Recently, I described some of the outcomes leaders can expect from investments in employee engagement, including business performance.  Today’s post is dedicated to exploring the antecedents, or drivers, of employee engagement.

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Before I share the dozens of antecedents I uncovered in my research and reading on employee engagement, I want you to think about a time you were really engaged. Now, think about the one thing in your work experience that, had it changed, would have most influenced your engagement levels. You don’t have to tell me just yet: just keep it in the back of your mind…

Practitioners I interviewed for my research described a number of drivers or elements leading to engagement, with one calling precursors a “recipe.” Ingredients include: reciprocal trust, two-way organizational communication, recognition, satisfaction with pay and benefits, access to training, support of personal or professional development, strong communication from line managers, job security, and safety to express one’s true self in one’s job. In addition to these, literature suggests engagement levels can be sensitive to: teamwork and cooperation, immediate management, friendships at work, family friendliness, fair treatment, health and safety, performance and appraisal, and job satisfaction.

Is your head spinning yet? One might get the impression from the above list that just about everything in the work environment can influence engagement. And technically, one might be right. But that isn’t very practically useful because investing in all of these things would cost more than the GDP of a medium-sized country. So what’s a leader to do? Here’s where my research can help.

To understand how to prioritize antecedents, I’ll suggest you think back to the one thing that can influence your own personal engagement levels. For almost everyone I interviewed, their personal answer can be classified in one or more of these three (highly related) categories: reciprocal trust, authentic two-way communication and recognition (feeling valued by the organization).

But let me simplify it even further: it’s all about trust. And managers, both direct supervisors and senior leaders, are the primary focus of the trust relationship for employees. Authentic, transparent communications from the organization, as well as a perception of being heard by the organization, are how the trust relationship is built and maintained. Recognition is tangible evidence that the relationship is reciprocal. Recognition, by the way, can occur in numerous forms, from large-scale awards to small acknowledgments by managers for a job well done.

So as a leader seeking to improve employee engagement, what are the top things you can do starting today?

1. Do what you say you will do. Trustworthiness is fundamentally about keeping commitments. And in situations where that isn’t possible...
2. Communicate openly with your employees about what’s going on and why. Talking to employees like they are adults instead of mass-market consumers to influence through marketing campaigns is fundamental to authentic communication.
3. Listen to your employees. I mean, go out to seek feedback and actively listen to what is shared. Repeat back what you hear. Use a neutral third party if needed.
4. Say thank you. Run an experiment: send just one thank you note to just one team member each day for a month. Chances are, you’ll be so happy with the results you’ll start doing the same thing for your spouse.

Of course, these are just starting points. But they are incredibly important first steps without which other efforts may not succeed.

The End (Performance) that Justifies the Means (Employee Engagement)

The End (Performance) that Justifies the Means (Employee Engagement)

What outcomes leaders can expect when they invest in employee engagement

 

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Recently, I’ve made the case that employee engagement can be defined and measured as an attitude regarding one’s work in one’s organization comprising feelings of energy, dedication and absorption; a perception of empowerment, and motivation to act in the service of the organization’s goals. I’ve argued that it’s helpful to draw lines around the idea of employee engagement because the better you define it, the better you can measure it; and the better you can measure it, the more closely you can manage it.

Of course, in reality, employee engagement is for most companies, a preferred means to a end, and not an end in itself. That desired outcome is business performance. But what performance indicators does engagement drive, and how?

According to many agencies specializing in employee engagement including AON Hewett and Gallup, employee engagement leads to: profitability through productivity, sales, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer-focus, safety, and employee retention. The interviewees I spoke with during my dissertation research concurred, and added: going the extra mile, speaking highly of the company, collaboration, staying late, putting in extra hours, assisting colleagues, sharing knowledge, participating in organizational dialogue, and more. My dissertation research demonstrated that employee engagement is correlated to proactive problem-solving, creativity, productivity, intention to stay with an organization and likelihood of recommending one’s organization as an employer.

What’s clear from the above is that an investment in improving employee engagement is likely to drive both individual-level and firm level benefits. And the more that leadership removes barriers that stand between employees and performance, the better the results.

One of the most interesting findings of my research is that different aspects of employee engagement as I define it above are of different importance, depending upon the outcome in relationship to which you position engagement. For example, absorption, or being lost in ones work such that time passes quickly, doesn’t much effect the likelihood of recommending the firm as an employer, but it plays a big role in creativity.

What this tells us is that in many ways, the potential of understanding employee engagement is still untapped. If we can identify the degree to which different aspects of engagement effect desired outcomes, we can design interventions that improve the most important component of engagement to that outcome. That means more efficient and effective interventions. And what business leader doesn’t want to know that they are getting the very best return on their investment in employee engagement?

Object of My Affection: with What Do Employees Engage?

Object of My Affection: with What Do Employees Engage?

Why Leadership at All Levels is Critical to Employee Engagement
 


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 Pop quiz: When an employee is engaged, what is the object of their engagement?

a. Their job
b. Their manager
c. Their company
d. Their work environment
e. Themselves

The answer, not surprisingly, is usually some combination of the items above.

The focus of employee engagement has evolved along with its conceptualization over time. Kahn's (1990) original construct was named "personal engagement" and focused on the preferred self at work. The Burn Out family (e.g., Schaufeli et al., 2002) focused on "work engagement," the primary focus of which was one's immediate work. As practitioner literature began to influence the employee engagement discussion (e.g., Robinson et al., 2004 and Harter et al., 2003), the focus of engagement began to shift towards the organization as a whole.

In researching my dissertation, I asked employee engagement experts working in the field what they understood employees to engage with. Consistently, they noted that employees engage at multiple levels simultaneously, including with: the work they are doing; their physical environment; their peers, work teams or social environments; immediate supervisors; corporate missions, values; objectives and brands; the communications process; customers; and even with themselves.

Pulling these perspectives together, one can say that employees engage with the work they are doing in the context of their organizations. My research demonstrated that, for the purposes of defining and measuring employee engagement, this statement works.

But so what? Why does it matter what entity employees engage with? One reason is that understanding the focus of engagement makes it easier to understand drivers that increase it, as well as what other things like HR policies and practices might interact with employee engagement to drive desired business results.

Perhaps more importantly, understanding that engagement occurs at multiple levels suggests that leaders at every level have an important role to play in facilitating employee engagement. It's not just the executive team reiterating corporate objectives, or first-line managers empowering their staff through delegation that drive engagement. Instead, every employee can help to create an engaging work experience for their team members, for example, by initiating open communication and modeling trustworthy behavior.

As a leader, which would you guess is the most critical focus of employee engagement? As an employee, would you agree?

What Engaged Employees Are Inspired to Do, and How to Help Them Do It

Engaged Employees Want to Forward Your Goals. Do They Know How?

What Engaged Employees Are Inspired to Do, and How to Help Them Do It

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Imagine you're fully engaged in your work in your organization (I hope this isn't too much of a stretch!). Imagine you receive a last minute request from a peer to help out with her report. What are you going to do? [Hint: an engaged employee will likely have more than one answer to this question.]

For the past several posts, I've been making the case for conceptualizing employee engagement as an attitude made up of feelings of vigor, dedication and absorption; perceptions of psychological empowerment; and motivation to contribute. I've argued why examining the motivational aspects of engagement and not just behaviors makes sense. Today I'll finish up this thread by further explicating the motivational component of employee engagement.

As with employee engagement as a whole, the problem is not that there are too few ideas in the motivation category, but rather, there are too many. According to the experts I interviewed for my dissertation research, engaged employees are willing to: contribute to the business in a positive fashion, perform better, stay extra hours, go the extra mile, support colleagues, collaborate with one another, take personal ownership and initiative for achieving individual and collective goals, and proactively engage in problem solving. All of these ideas are important to the business, for certain, but attempting to capture them all individually is impractical. So what is the essence? 

One hypothesis is that employee engagement is about going above and beyond the formal confines of an employees' role, a.k.a. extra-mile or organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). However, most interviewees I spoke to did not care to limit the concept of engagement to "discretionary" efforts. In fact, most said engagement matters as much to how someone does the job they are paid to do as it does to extra-mile efforts. For example, if you have a really smart technologist on staff, you care as much about that person being innovative in their role as you do about them covering for a co-worker who's ill. 

Instead of worrying whether the motivation is towards something that is in or out of job scope, what matters (my interviewees informed me), is how closely aligned it is with the company's aims. In other words, the motivation in employee engagement is to act, both within and extra-role, in the service of the organization's goals. In my research I called this "citizenship motivation" to honor OCB's influence.

The implication for leaders is straightforward: if you want employees to be motivated to act in service of the organization's goals, they've got to understand what those goals are and how they contribute to achieving them. Some simple best practices can help you point your engaged employees in the right direction:

• Review goals at each organization level on a monthly basis.
• Ensure that performance goal setting discussions incorporate not just organizational and individual objectives, but a discussion of how they are linked. 
• Ask managers to allocate 5 minutes each staff meeting to one person explaining to their peers what are her objectives and how they link to team and corporate goals.
• Create feedback opportunities for employees to share how they think the organization can accelerate its progress towards its objectives. Report back on those that are adopted.

If this sounds fairly familiar -- good! It's been long understood that helping employees understand what's expected and how they can make a difference is critical to satisfaction and to performance. No doubt many of you reading have an arsenal of tricks for directing motivation, and I hope you will share them below :-).