“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.

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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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