Effective Employee Engagement

... is defined by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) as: ‘A positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation. The organisation must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer and employee.’

Why is employee engagement important?
Research has shown that when employees feel engaged, they feel more positive about their organisation; this can lead to enhanced motivation, performance, job satisfaction and quality of working life.

What factors influence employee engagement?
Research by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) identifies a number of factors which influence employee engagement:

Source: IES Survey, 2003 The IES concludes that the main driver of engagement is a sense of feeling valued and involved. This has several key components:

Involvement in decision making
Freedom to voice ideas, which managers listen to and value
Feeling enabled to perform well
Having opportunities to develop the job
Feeling the organisation is concerned for employees’ health and well-being

The research also identifies a number of building blocks which need to be in place if attempts to raise engagement levels are to be successful:

Good quality line management
Two-way communication
Effective internal co-operation
A development focus
Commitment to employee well-being
Clear, accessible HR policies and practices, to which managers at all levels are committed

We recognise that the way senior management and line managers behave towards and communicate with employees, plus the way work is organised and jobs defined, contributes significantly to making work meaningful and engaging.

Thomas Petzinger Jr., the author of ‘The New Pioneers: 'The Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace and the Marketplace’, discusses the pieces of a powerful revolution currently reshaping the face of business. In his company research, he found important and consistent themes relating to vision, employee involvement, control, measurement of work processes, simplicity, communication, fun and energizing environments, excellent work tools and training, and commitment. If you can create these in your organization, you'll retain your committed, motivated employees.

CASE STUDIES
Rowe Furniture Company

"Being good in business calls on being good at being human," Petzinger concludes after studying the turnaround of Rowe Furniture Company. Rowe, which had been a very traditional manufacturing company, identified the need to utilize the brains and talent of its employees. Charlene Pedrolie, its manufacturing chief, truly believed that the people doing the work should design how the work is done.

With the assistance and consultation from a much reduced management team and engineers, workers redesigned their work. They moved from an environment in which each person handled part of a work process to fully cross-trained manufacturing cells producing a whole product. From standing at an assembly position all day long, they created work which allowed some freedom and movement. They eliminated the formerly "deadly dull" jobs. At the same time, the flow of information they received, which allowed them to know exactly how they were performing, increased dramatically.

The new sense of personal control, according to Petzinger, "bred a culture of innovation in every corner of the plant... It reveals the creative power of human interaction. It suggests that efficiency is intrinsic; that people are naturally productive; that when inspired with vision, equipped with the right tools, and guided by information about their performance, people will build on each other's actions to a more efficient result than any single brain could design."

Monarch Marking Systems
At Monarch Marking Systems, Jerry Schlaegel and Steve Schneider had a deep respect for the minds of their workers. When confronted with a workplace in which people had been paid not to think, they instituted a "small set of simple rules" to break that mindset.

They required people to participate on teams that were formed specifically to improve a particular performance numeric. Teams were allowed no more than thirty days to form the team, study a problem or opportunity, and implement a solution. Perhaps a bit heavy-handed to start, the success of over 100 teams has created a new culture within the organization.

Dupont
Manager, Richard Knowles, when leading a manufacturing plant in a more participatory manner, decided to stop setting goals for people, because he always set them too low. He discovered that when people found meaning in their work, he could count on them donating their "discretionary energy."

This is the energy, enthusiasm, and hard work available, beyond the minimum required to keep a job, when people work in conditions that allow them to find meaning at work. This is the energy organizations want to tap to fully utilize employee involvement and employee engagement for organization and personal success.

GENERATING ENGAGEMENT
Recent research has focused on developing a better understanding of how variables such as quality of work relationships and values of the organization interact and their link to important work outcomes. 84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization's products, compared with only 31 percent of the disengaged. From the perspective of the employee, "outcomes" range from strong commitment to the isolation of oneself from the organization. The study done by the Gallup Management Journal has shown that only 29% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. Those "engaged" employees work with passion and feel a strong connection to their company. About ⅔ of the business units scoring above the median on employee engagement also scored above the median on performance. Moreover, 54% of employees are not engaged meaning that they go through each workday putting time but no passion into their work. Only about ⅓ of companies below the median on employee engagement scored above the median on performance.

Access to a reliable model enables organizations to conduct validation studies to establish the relationship of employee engagement to productivity/performance and other measures linked to effectiveness.

It is an important principle of industrial and organizational psychology (i.e. the application of psychological theories, research methods, and intervention strategies involving workplace issues) that validation studies should be anchored in reliable scales (i.e. organized and related groups of items) and not simply focus on individual elements in isolation. To understand how high levels of employee engagement affect organizational performance/productivity it is important to have an a priori model that demonstrates how the scales interact. There is also overlap between this concept and those relating to well-being at work and the psychological contract.

As employee productivity is clearly connected with employee engagement, creating an environment that encourages employee engagement is considered to be essential in the effective management of human capital.

Below are some of the influences of that environment:

a. Employer engagement - A company's "commitment to improving the partnership between employees and Employer." Employers can stay engaged with their employees by actively seeking to understand and act on behalf of the expectations and preferences of their employees.

b. Employee perceptions of job importance - According to a 2006 study by Gerard Seijts and Dan Crim, "...an employee’s attitude toward the job [’s importance] and the company had the greatest impact on loyalty and customer service then all other employee factors combined."

c. Employee clarity of job expectations - "If expectations are not clear and basic materials and equipment not provided, negative emotions such as boredom or resentment may result, and the employee may then become focused on surviving more than thinking about how he can help the organization succeed.”

d. Career advancement/improvement opportunities - "Plant supervisors and managers indicated that many plant improvements were being made outside the suggestion system, where employees initiated changes in order to reap the bonuses generated by the subsequent cost savings."

e. Regular feedback and dialogue with superiors - "Feedback is the key to giving employees a sense of where they’re going, but many organizations are remarkably bad at giving it." "What I really wanted to hear was Thanks. You did a good job. But all my boss did was hand me a check."”

f. Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates - "...if employees’ relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss."

g. Perceptions of the ethos and values of the organization - "‘Inspiration and values’ is the most important of the six drivers in our Engaged Performance model. Inspirational leadership is the ultimate perk. In its absence, [it] is unlikely to engage employees."

h. Effective Internal Employee Communications - which convey a clear description of "what's going on". “If you accept that employees want to be involved in what they are doing then this trend is clear (from small businesses to large global organisations). The effect of poor internal communications is seen as its most destructive in global organisations which suffer from employee annexation - where the head office in one country is buoyant (since they are closest to the action, know what is going on, and are heavily engaged) but its annexes (who are furthest away from the action and know little about what is happening) are dis-engaged. In the worst case, employee annexation can be very destructive when the head office attributes the annex's low engagement to its poor performance… when its poor performance is really due to its poor communications."

i. Reward to engage - Look at employee benefits and acknowledge the role of incentives. "An incentive to reward good work is a tried and test way of boosting staff morale and enhancing engagement." There are a range of tactics you can employ to ensure your incentive scheme hits the mark with your workforce such as: Setting realistic targets, selecting the right rewards for your incentive programme, communicating the scheme effectively and frequently, have lots of winners and reward all achievers, encouraging sustained effort, present awards publicly and evaluate the incentive scheme regularly.

An incentive program will not compensate for lack of training, a poor product, or inadequate marketing. However, as a part of an integrated business/people strategy, well-executed incentive programs motivate and engage people at all levels of the organization. The bottom-line is the organizations that successfully motivate their workforce to achieve specific goals will realize the greatest financial gains over time.

Employee engagement resources

UK Government Report on Engagement: David MacLeod 2010:
Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development:
CIPD factsheet on employee engagement

Everyone a Middleman, Thomas Petzinger, Jr.

The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace and the Marketplace,
Thomas Petzinger, Jr. A compilation of success stories.