Turning Employee Engagement into Results: Removing Barriers to Action

Turning Employee Engagement into Results: Removing Barriers to Action

The main reason businesses care about employee engagement is because engaged employees do more: they perform better, they go the extra mile, they stay late, they solve problems, they coach their peers, etc..  In short, employee engagement is important because of the behaviors that engaged employees demonstrate. But where do these good behaviors come from? They come from engaged employees being motivated to act, both within and beyond the scope of their roles, in the service of the organization’s goals.

There are two ideas worth discussing with respect to the motivational component of employee engagement. First (the subject of this post): why should we distinguish between motivation and action in the employee engagement context? Second, (the subject of next week’s post): what precisely are engaged employees motivated to do? In other words, how do you draw boundaries around the motivational aspect of employee engagement? 

Behaviors are such an important outcome of the state of being engaged that many people in both the academic and practitioner communities blur the lines between employee engagement and the behaviors that result from it. Although the difference might seem semantic, it’s not. Distinguishing between motivation and action makes sense from both a research* and practitioner perspective.

For leaders, one good reason to discern motivation from action is that, as we all know, a lot of things can come between intention to actual behavior.  It’s true at home (“I really meant to do laundry this weekend but then …”) and at work (“I was planning to attend that online training but then ….”).  It follows then that employee engagement levels may not be the only cause, or even the primary cause, of not achieving results. Instead, employees may face barriers to acting on their motivation to contribute. By identifying and removing these barriers, leaders can better harness the potential of employee engagement.

What sorts of barriers stand between engagement and results? Here are three broad categories of barriers (adapted from VitalSmarts):

1. Individual barriers. An employee is engaged but lacks skills to contribute at the level she wants to. This one is relatively easy: help this person acquire the right skills through traditional or non-traditional learning opportunities.

2. Social barriers. An employee is engaged but in an environment where action is discouraged. If the problem is more widespread than one micro-manager, a culture-change program aimed at empowering employees may be appropriate. 

3. Structural barriers. An employee is engaged but is systemically prevented from action by bureaucracy, inadequate resources, poor processes, etc.. Again, unfortunately, no quick fix exists. In the long run, a long-term commitment to continuous improvement for internal operations can create an environment in which engagement translates to action.

I’m interested to hear from you how you’ve personally or organizationally overcome barriers that stood between engagement and performance!

* For researchers, distinguishing between motivation and behavior enables a clearer definition of employee engagement, thus facilitating better understanding of the construct in relationship to antecedents and outcomes. Specifying the motivational component of engagement complements the emotional and rational components, consistent with attitude theory.

Power Up! Why Empowering Your Employees Is Critical to Success

Power Up! Why Empowering Your Employees Is Critical to Success

t0.gstatic.com

You've just had a great day at work. You're on top of the world. You think, "I can do anything!" You're ready for that next big assignment. As Hans and Frans would say (am I dating myself too much with this reference?), your workday has Pumped You Up!

Now, pause in that moment of triumph and notice what precisely is running through your head. What sorts of thoughts are you having? You may be thinking some good things about the company, or a customer, or your colleagues -- but the important part is that you are thinking good things about yourself in your work -- you are doing something important; you are capable of successes; you are kicking butt!

In my prior posts (and my dissertation research) I've argued that employee engagement is an attitude, and as such it has rational or thinking components; feeling components like energy, dedication and absorption; and motivational components which together lead to desirable behaviors. The thoughts described above are the essence of the thinking part of employee engagement: an individual perceiving themselves as what academics call "psychologically empowered" in their work environment.

Psychological empowerment has four main aspects, which are described in prior literature and in my interviews with experts as important components of employee engagement:

• competence, or perceiving one's self as up to the task and capable
• meaning, or perceiving one's self as doing personally meaningful work
• self-determination, or perceiving one's self as having autonomy in how work gets done 
• impact, or perceiving one's self as influencing the larger system

So how can leaders increase psychological empowerment and thus employee engagement in their people? Empower them of course! Studies have shown a strong a direct link between structural empowerment (the perception that external factors like company policies are set up to help the employee be successful) and psychological empowerment. Allowing employees things like flexible schedules, simple praise for work well done, and giving them visibility to more senior teams are all easy, cheap methods of empowering staff. 

As one of my expert-interviewees says, it's as simple as "knowing that my company believes in me makes me believe in myself."

Unfortunately, I've heard a lot of arguments why difficult business conditions make it justifiable to disempower employees. I won't argue that sometimes keeping a tight reign on things like expenses can make sense. Too often, though, I've seen fear turn a perfectly good leader into a micro-manager who starts making the sorts of decisions for their employees that he originally hired these capable professionals to make. 

If I start feeling like no one on my team is capable except me, then I need to consider the common denominator -- me. Am I feeling disempowered and passing that down to my staff? Do I have to keep doing that? Or can I do the right thing for my team and the business by choosing to trust them? What small practices can I put into place to turn the tide?

Another thing my research shows is that empowerment is consistently one of the top aspects of employee engagement related to desirable outcomes like retention, word of mouth and proactive-problem-solving. In other words, a little empowerment goes a long way towards business success!

What a Feeling! Influencing the Affective Aspects of Employee Engagement

What a Feeling! Influencing the Affective Aspects of Employee Engagement
Why how employees feel matters to business success, and what leaders can do to change it

www.farhanadhalla.com

Close your eyes and think back to the best work experience you've ever had... What sorts of feelings did you have about your work and your company? How did your feelings impact the way you worked? Were you more creative? Productive? Fun?

For those of us who have worked in employee engagement, or even just been engaged employees, it makes perfect sense that engagement has an emotional component: when we're engaged, we feel good. We're energetic, focused and committed. We're enthusiastic and excited. We bring a little extra umph to what we do.

I have yet to find a serious employee engagement model that doesn't acknowledge the "feeling" part of being engaged. From an academic standpoint, the affective part of engagement is one of the better understood components. Schaufeli et al. (2002) say engagement is made up of vigor (energy and resilience); dedication (commitment and pride); and absorption (getting lost in one's work). These emotive descriptors of engagement are widely accepted in the academic community, and I used this model to capture the emotional component of engagement in my dissertation research.

But for companies, the real challenge is not to characterize which emotions are part of engagement. It's to understand how to change the way employees feel about the work they are doing in their organization. Changing how people think can be done through logic, argument and persuasion. But to change how they feel requires a different sort of approach: it requires connecting at a deeper level.

How can your company start connecting with employees at a deeper level? Well, think about what works best in your one-on-one relationships with other people, then scale up. Feeling good in a relationship stems from trust. How do you build trust in a relationship? You do it through open, honest and respectful communication. You do it through being trustworthy over time. You show one another that you care through small acts of consideration. You acknowledge when things are going well, and give each other the benefit of the doubt when they aren't so smooth.

As with many things, this may be easier said than done. But, as leaders, we can do something about turning the tide in our own areas: we can practice these behaviors in the best ways available to us in this moment. When we do this, we may even find ourselves more engaged!

Healthy Boundaries: How to Draw the Line in Defining Employee Engagement

Healthy Boundaries
How to Draw the Line in Defining Employee Engagement

kristiholl.net 

The key to improving something is to measure it, and in order to measure something properly, one has to define it clearly and concisely. My doctoral research aimed to do just that for employee engagement: put some boundaries around this expansive idea and create a tool to measure that definition of employee engagement. According to people who do measurement of abstract ideas for a living (e.g., university researchers), definitions of complicated ideas should be grounded in: (1) history, (2) reality and (3) context (MacKenzie et al., 2011).

I described in my most recent post how employee engagement evolved over time to include both academic and practitioner influences. As a result, employee engagement has become all things to all people. I also interviewed 10 practitioners who had 10 different definitions of employee engagement. So when history and reality fail to converge to define employee engagement, one can turn to context or, in this case, know scientific theories, to begin to draw clean edges.

Of course, there are many theories that might be meaningfully applied to employee engagement and its relationships with other concepts in organizational and management science. For example, many researchers look to social exchange and equity theories as ways of understanding how employee engagement relates to organizational practices or structures. But few theories discussed in literature provide in and of themselves a rationale for including or excluding attributes in the definition of employee engagement.

One theory I found useful in making sense of employee engagement is attitude theory. Attitudes are predispositions to respond to something favorably or unfavorably, and they are powerful predictors of behavior. Attitudes have three components: thoughts, feelings and motivation to act in a particular way. Not only did describing employee engagement in these three facets make sense intuitively, it was consistent with descriptors of employee engagement I'd found during my literature review and interviews with experts. For example, Towers Perrin has described employee engagement in terms of rational, emotional and motivational components.

In the coming several posts, I’m going to speak in a bit more detail and share some quotes from the experts I interviewed that will demonstrate where I think the boundaries lie with respect to the different facets of employee engagement. In the meantime, I would be interested to hear form all of you about what theories you’ve heard discussed in relationship to employee engagement!

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?

Welcome to Adventures in Employee Engagement!

The goal of this blog is to use what I've learned about employee engagement as a researcher and a practitioner to inspire dialogue and discussion about this critical business topic -- and to engage you in mutual learning about employee engagement.

Why should you care about employee engagement?

Because people are at the heart of economic growth and corporate success. If you can engage your people, they will bring their best selves to work -- not just applying effort, but also creativity, innovation and proactive-problem solving to help your business succeed.

However, if you're reading this blog, chances are you already care about employee engagement. Perhaps instead you're wondering, What can this blog tell me about employee engagement that I don't already know?

Hopefully you'll see some new ideas in what I'll share with you from my research and experience (my recently-published doctoral dissertation is about employee engagement, and I have been working in related areas for almost 15 years). Certainly, you can expect to find some of your knowledge and intuition confirmed.

Perhaps the better response is to ask you: What do you want to know about employee engagement? What do you know already that you've not yet seen printed? What questions are going to take our discussion about employee engagement to the next level?

I'm really looking forward to getting to know more of you in the employee engagement community and sharing our expertise towards creating value through engagement.