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

http://thejoesweeney.com/

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 :-).