DD has posted a bit on Employee Engagement and I thought I would pitch in too. He touches a bit about branding but I think I would talk about it in a different perspective.
To be frank, I find the word "engagement" a confusing word. It's one of those 'mould-to-suit-yourself' kind of word. If I have to think about engagement more thoroughly it would be great to view it through Herzberg's lens.
1. Hygiene factors: These are the factors that first determine whether or not I take a job. Usually refered to as the basic requirements, these are dependent on the context of the industry and location. If all other organizations in the city offer commuting services, and you don't, it's tough to expect that people will join you, or even after joining be happy about it. So, admit it, step one in employee engagement starts outside the organization!
2. Motivators: Once you have the hygiene factors in place, doesn't mean that people are going to be all happy and mushy about your organization. It merely means that they are NOT going to be unhappy. That's an important distinction. To motivate people, organization has to offer things that are above and beyond hygiene conditions. These motivators could be tacit, explicit, tangible or intangible.
But, and this is a BIG but, the thing to remember is, factors move from the Motivator bucket to the Hygiene bucket faster than you can realise. Remember the time ESOPs were offered initially as a reward mechanism? They were a huge motivator then, but as more and more organizations started offering ESOPs they quickly moved to the hygiene bucket for certain classes of jobs.
The SECOND BIG thing to remember is that motivation is an individual issue. One person might be motivated to work by working on research issues, while another might be motivated by working on large initiatives with an enterprise impact. If you switch their jobs, all things remaining same, they would be disengaged and de-motivated.
Sure internal communications does play a role, but it can only do so much. The actual work of making employees engaged lies in the hands of their managers.
So to find out if you as a manager have engaged employees try agreeing or disagreeing to these questions:
- I know what is important to my individual employees.
- I have plans for each employee to meet their career goals
- I know their respective strengths and weaknesses and can coach them to amplify their strengths.
- I can show them a career path that links to their goals in my organization.
- I have developmental plans to help them close the gaps in their skills.
If you can answer these questions with a “yes”, then there is a good chance that you will have engaged employees.
Anything else is a bonus !
"Engagement" is the hot management buzzword right now.
ReplyDeleteBut I agree that there is a fuzziness to the term.
In the realm of marital relations, engagement means that two people have made a solemn commitment to each other, based on love, and symbolized by the giving of rings, that they intend to seal in matrimony.
Translating this into the organizational realm is giving me a headache.
Terry
Gautam:
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is confusion over the term. I unfortunately also agree that this is one of those very annoying buzzwords. However, let me try to define it (or at least give my definition).
Engagement is the state of an employee when s/he decides to give an employer an hour of discretionary time. Remove all motivators such as incentive compensation, deadlines, upcoming performance reviews and such. An employee is engaged when they willingly give up an hour of personal time to provide the employer with added value.
Why would someone do this? Employees do this without additional rewards because they are provided with some form of personal fulfillment by their job. I could ask a similar question to you and I about why we blog. We both spend many hours doing it for no tangible reward. However, it is meaningful to each of us in some way.
The trick is how to formulate your HR strategies to increase the number of engaged employees an organization has. You are correct in saying that compensation is a recruitment tool, but less often a retention tool. For engagement, you need good workforce planning, career development, and an honest finger on the pulse of what drives your employees. A difficult task that can never be done to 100% perfection.
BTW - I have moved to systematicHR.com
-Dubs
"Q12 framework by The Gallup Organization can be perfectly used to measure the engagement levels of employees within the organization"
ReplyDeleteYou can't be serious? '...can be perfectly used to measure engagement'. How on earth can 12 items be argued to surmise 'engagement' across all contexts for all employees? It's a nonsense. These 12 items have been plucked from a climate measure (employees perceptions of their work environment) and a label applied to fit with management need to latch onto the latest buzzword (the Gallup survey has been around a lot longer than the 'engagement' term - why the name change in recent years?). If engagement is the cognitive-emotional-behavioural aspect of peoples' reaction to their work environment, then aggregating 12 climate perception items hardly taps into reactions. For that you need to actually assess the consequence of climate perceptions, not the perception itself. I wish people wouldn't get sucked so easily into the marketing spin provided by a large consulting firm. Maybe practitioners and consultants need to engage themselves more with educating themselves before allocating an inordinate amount of money to the Gallup bottom line.