The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has just published a new report by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke on employee engagement.  We wholeheartedly recommend this report – it makes some great points and is filled with useful case studies.  It’s very hard to get to the end and still avoid the conclusion that having an engaged workforce really does improve bottom line results.

But what actually is engagement?  Is it an attitude (e.g. pride, loyalty), a behaviour (going the extra mile) or an outcome (e.g. lower absenteeism)?  The authors amassed over 50 definitions and share three, all of which are a bit woolly.  Many of the contributors just said “you know it when you see it”.  Here’s the definition they end up with for the report:

Engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

This is probably a good summary of how the word is typically used in HR and internal communications departments.  There are lots of things to say about it, but my underlying concern is this:  It implies that engagement is something that is done to people.  I want to suggest a different starting point.

The starting point is to notice that “engagement” is a metaphor.  Historically the word means a connection – a coming together.  You use a clutch to engage a gear, armies engage in battle, and of course people become engaged with other people when they buy their services, agree to marry them, or just make an appointment to see them.  The extension of the word into emotional experience is just an extension of this sense of connection.  If I have an engaging experience at the theatre or the cinema, it’s because I’m connecting with something – I care about what happens to the characters, or how the underlying themes are developed.  The same sense is true of engaging books, engaging conversations, engaging stories and so on – they are all examples of connecting with things we find important.

If we take this sense of connection as the central meaning, we get a very clear and simple definition of workplace engagement:  A felt connection between what is important to me as an employee and what is important to the organisation I work for.  A voluntary staff member working for a charitable cause they passionately believe in will obviously be much more engaged with their work than a student working at McDonalds.

By simplifying the definition of engagement down to this level, we can create a clearer picture of what it looks like when people are feeling engaged:

A successful “engagement” intervention is anything that increases the size of the orange overlap in the centre of the diagram, the space in which leadership concerns and workforce concerns connect.  Notice that whatever your role in your organisation – business partner, OD manager, senior leader – whenever you instigate some form of “engagement” activity – i.e. you create this central space – you are taking on the role of a leader.  How engaged people will feel as a result correlates directly with the quality of this interaction:  Its openness, honesty, integrity, clarity, vulnerability and so on.

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I’m always being told how lucky I am to “be able to draw”.  Everyone seems to assume that any artistic ability – musical, visual, poetic or whatever – is an innate skill and that you either have it or you don’t.  Harder edged skills – reading, writing, arithmetic – on the other hand, are basic abilities that everyone should be able to develop.  Now in my work I get the opportunity to blur the edges between what’s hard and what’s soft.  Every day I structure information, solve problems, tell stories and make new discoveries for clients by translating their concerns into visual form.  It’s incredibly powerful.  It’s so powerful, in fact, that I sometimes wonder what it would be like if they could do it for themselves rather than relying on people like me.  So, is drawing a freak skill or something anyone can do?

Now let’s be clear from the outset that for a normal, healthy human brain, drawing should be difficult, because we don’t see things in 2D.  When you look at a table top, you are conscious of its rectangular shape, even though the retinal image received by your eye is probably a trapezium or a rhombus or something.  The brain is more concerned with what your environment is good for (its affordances) than what exactly it looks like, so to be able to draw anything you have to “unlearn” the way you know things are in order to re-create the way they appear.

One group of people who are very good at this is autistic savants (think Dustin Hoffman in Rainman).  The Economist last week had a report into savant-skills, and referenced one of the most famous autists, Temple Grandin, who has (with a lot of effort) written books about what it is like for her to “think in pictures”.  The thing I found interesting in the report was a reference to new findings that suggest a lot of these skills may be learned rather than innate.  My understanding was always that savant-skills were already there in everyone’s brains, but were normally “masked” by other abilities; in autists these abilities (empathy for example) were somehow “switched off”, allowing the brain’s incredible computational powers to run riot.  But what if this “switching off” wasn’t “unmasking” unlearned skills, but rather freeing up time for practice?  To quote the article, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”  So perhaps the visual savant who can draw photographically from memory has developed this skill because his/her pathological disinterest in other more “normal” human concerns has freed up time to observe the appearance of things with microscopic precision.

This is all very well for prodigies and geniuses, but what about the rest of us?  Well I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made with the everyday skills we take for granted.  Just stop and think for a moment how complex a task reading and writing is – the ability to learn from scratch an (almost) completely abstract system for notating spoken language.  Yet whenever we pick up a newspaper or start writing a note we aren’t at all conscious of alphabets or grammar or syntax – it all just flows naturally.  It’s a skill we take for granted because we were all forced to learn it over many years from infancy.  What would happen if primary school children were forced to spend the same length of time learning to notate music, for instance, as they currently spend learning to read and write?  Everyone recognises (and most people can hum) melodies, but no one can write them down because no one was ever taught.  We all know when someone is singing out of tune, even if we don’t know how.

Similarly, everyone knows when a drawing someone else has created is wrong, but very few people have learned how to correct the mistakes.  I saw a presentation a few years back at the RSA about the experience of some schools who brought in an artist to teach primary school children how to draw.  The results were astonishing – within a few weeks of being taught the rudiments of proportion and perspective the children were creating imagery that would have shamed most adults.  What was more astonishing was the reaction of some of the parents, who were upset that the lessons seemed to be “corrupting” their children’s innocence, on the basis that “real” children draw people with eyes at the tops of their heads and houses with windows in the corners.  This seems strange, because I don’t know any parents who encourage their children to carry on making spelling mistakes and adding up wrong because it’s sweet and adorable and childlike.

So, can anyone draw?  I think the answer is yes.  Obviously it comes much more easily to the naturally gifted than to the rest of us, but then that’s true of everything.  I think the reason people can’t draw is because they aren’t taught, and the reason they aren’t taught is firstly because there’s no one to teach them and secondly because no one sees any real need to.  Which is a whole new article …

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Meaning Inc:  What does it all mean?

Meaning Inc came out about a year ago now, and is basically a manifesto from business psychology consultancy YSC. Although its stated author is YSC’s CEO Gurnek Bains, judging from the Acknowledgements it was very much a collaborative effort. The models and case studies (not to mention cover recommendations) are evidently drawn from client history. This isn’t problematic, although the content does sometimes wander into sales-pitch territory, and I think awareness of potential clients reading the text has probably watered a lot of it down.

There’s a long line of purpose / values / culture books that started with Peters & Waterman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the early eighties, all stressing the importance of motivation through vision, values, culture and so on. The question is, is YSC’s “blueprint for business success in the 21st century” genuinely new, or is it the same old ideas re-packaged with new labels? The authors raise this question themselves by making a big deal about the year 2000 as a reference point for change, saying that “what worked in the 1980s and 1990s is not working any longer”. So do they have a different answer?

What is meaning?

The whole package revolves around the central concept of meaning, a word that I imagine will scare off quite a few people right from the off. So what do they mean by it?

“Here is a broad, yet precise, definition of the term: essentially the meaning of any word is directly related to the other words it connects with or the external reality to which it relates. It is the sense of connectedness with something that lies at the heart of meaning in a literal sense … Meaning is experienced when we are able to connect our thoughts or activities with something else in a way that creates a sense of relevance or context.” P79

“(Meaning Inc.) refers to companies whose success is founded on creating meaning for their employees, as well as for their customers and other stakeholders”. P15

So meaning, at its simplest level, is connection. As the quote suggests, this is most obvious when we talk about the meanings of words, but it applies to other forms of meaning as well. For businesses, meaning arises “when people are able to connect what they are doing to things that matter to them”. The connection idea may seem a little abstract, but it’s actually a really helpful concept. Firstly, as the authors suggest, it matches what we know about the way brains physically work. When we make sense of something, the wiring in our heads actually changes, making new connections to reflect the new learning. Secondly, it gives leaders a simple mental picture about what meaning creation looks like: Somebody somewhere is connecting whatever they’re seeing reading / hearing / overhearing to something that’s important to them. Similarly, meaninglessness is disconnection. Think of the average corporate conference – lots of slides, lots of presentations, but no meaning if people can’t connect what they are seeing and hearing with the things they care about.

Meaning creation

The book proceeds to cover the various ways that leaders can help their employees create meaning, which can be summarised as follows:

• Articulate the “why” – not just the what and the how. To do this, leaders need to be more authentic, which means doing one or two things really well rather than trying to be all things to all men.

• Move the company’s purpose beyond either simple metrics (the “we will be number one” mentality) or an existence rationale (“we make great widgets”). You need to “place employees as players in a wider social narrative”.

• Help employees connect to the organisation’s history and values, creating meaning by locating themselves in an ongoing story. Everything else may be moving, but the “corporate DNA” has to stay consistent.

• Base the brand on the corporate DNA, and make sure it’s lived from the “inside out”. Brands “find life in the behaviour of people”.

• Help people have an impact, by giving them clear outcomes and the freedom to achieve them creatively.

• Promote employee growth – both professionally and personally. As with leadership, this means turning “spikes” of competency into “towering area of distinctiveness”.

• Help people feel “liked, accepted and validated” in order to create a sense of belonging.

• Take work-life balance more seriously.

But why “meaning”?

This is a great list. My problem is, exactly the same content could be (and has been) written many times without needing to talk about “meaning” at all. All of the above activities are supposed to create meaning by connecting what people do with things that are important to them. I’m not saying for one minute that they don’t, but surely the question is how? Because the exploration of meaning itself is so shallow, the question of how never arises … all the practical chapters could be re-written without reference to meaning at all. I suggest there are two foundational building blocks missing, which would cast the list above in a new light:

Firstly, the relationship between meaning and personal experience. Things are more meaningful to us when they are more closely connected to our experience. If a child wants to know what a word means, I need to explain it to them in light of what they already know. So I explain the meaning of “horse” to a four-year old in relation to “cow”, not in relation to “mammal”, because I can connect to their experience of cows, not mammals.

The problem in business is that most leaders try to connect what they are saying to their own experience, rather than the experience of their people. “Profitability” and “competitive threat” may be highly meaningful to a chief executive, but probably mean nothing to a fork-lift truck driver.

Secondly, the relationship between meaning and representation. Meaning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the “components” of meaning the authors describe – purpose, strategy, values, “corporate DNA” and so on – are described in the abstract, but they are things that people have to represent to themselves in some form if they are to have any meaning. The strategy has to be written down. The business plan has to be drawn up.

This makes it astonishing to me that there is virtually no discussion at all about communications. The main way in which leaders attempt to pro-actively make meaning for their people is through communications. I think most of those attempts fail because – as I said before – people can’t connect the abstract content they hear and read with the physical experience of their everyday lives.

So, in conclusion: There’s little here by way of practical advice that I haven’t read before. That doesn’t mean the book won’t be hugely valuable as a stimulus and source of ideas. But to my mind there’s a much fuller popular analysis of meaning yet to be written, that could cast new light on the problems this book addresses.

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