What are the characteristics of an engaged employee?
Seeing yourself as a part of your organisation is a key characteristic of an engaged employee
“What are the characteristics of an engaged employee?” is a question they’re asking over at David Zinger’s ‘The Employee Engagement Network’
There are many different ways to characterise an engaged employee but one stands out for me – seeing yourself as part of the organisation rather than apart from it.
In my experience, engaged employees are those who care about some (or all) aspects of the work they do. Engaged employees care about doing their part well because they can see how that feeds into developing and safeguarding the thing they care about. They perceive themselves as part of the business and know where they fit in the bigger picture.
Disengaged employees, on the other hand, care more about their pay packet than the experience or importance of what they do – or how they do it. They see themselves as apart from the business, can only see through the view-frame of their own interests and often speak of themselves as though they were engaged in a struggle against the company.
Productivity can come from one of two basic motivations: either external or internal. If you try to force productivity up through external motivation, you end up with an organisation that can only treat its people like slaves: resources to be exploited and controlled through a range punitive measures. This approach will eventually create disengagement and at best, compliance.
Since you’re going to need ideas, creativity and willingness to keep productivity and innovation high, it follows that the only motivator that really makes sense is the internal one. Helping people to care about the organisation, what it stands for and to see the part they can play in its success will go a long way towards making that motivation personal – with far higher levels of engagement as the reward.
What do you think?
The Employee Engagement Network is free to join and features a wide range of interested people discussing employee engagement.
I like the apart or a part perspective of engaged employees. Chris Bailey said it well when he talked about the holographic organization:
Rather than viewing an organization as a bland, uniform, static structure, consider the organization as a hologram. Within a holographic image, each section contains a complete image of the original object. So the real beauty of the holographic perspective is acknowledging that the organization is a vibrant collection of all the individuals within it. It recognizes that each individual is fully reflected in the whole. The organization is the individual and the individual is the organization. The interests of each individual and the organization are interconnected and interdependent.This approach offers a more human organization. ~ Chris Bailey
David
Thanks, David. I like the holographic idea – I’ve always felt that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm and vice versa. Similarly, it’s my experience that how we are in this moment tells everything about us.
Congratulations on your network, btw. It’s so good I signed up twice (accidentally)!