What is engagement?
Engagement is Connection …
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.
Interestingly, current academic research makes just the same observation as Steve that the MacLeod and Clarke definition of engagement (along with definitions offered by many management consultancies and survey firms) regards engagement as something that is done to employees. Surely this cannot be right; engagement isn’t itself a “workplace approach”, rather it is what certain workplace approaches, or engagement strategies/interventions, are intending to bring about.
The point is made in the recent report “Creating an Engaged Workforce” publishing findings from the Kingston Employee Engagement Consortium Project (KEECP). The preferred view of KEECP, along with most of the academic community, is that engagement is something that is experienced by employees – “a state of being” rather than something which is done to employees.
I also noticed that feeling connected is a key component of the KEECP’s preferred definition of engagement (as experienced by employees) as:
“being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others.”
Arguably, experiencing meaningful connections to others is the most important part of the KEECP’s definition, for surely making the connections gives rise to the willingness to contribute intellectual effort and to the experience of positive emotions.