Engagement Demystified
What is employee engagement, really?
A lot has been written about employee engagement. But what does it mean? We’ve studied the definitions provided by the biggest names in the business (AonHewitt, IBM, OPM, BlessingWhite, Gallup, Burke, & The Conference Board), and have concluded that “engagement” is a complex, individual-level psychological phenomenon. Its primary character is emotional, whether expressed as an enthusiasm for work; involvement in the job; a willingness to exert extra effort; or, heightened emotional commitment, dedication, and persistence. The psychological construct that best describes these phenomena is motivation, defined as an emotion or desire operating on the will and causing it to act.
In this Perspective paper, the approaches taken by these 7 organizations are examined with an eye toward consistency of topic areas, as well as clear delineation of causes vs. effects vs. correlates. The full set of survey items drawn from the 7 instruments are compared and contrasted leading to a distilled definition of engagement and each of its 12 sub-components. An indispensable guide to any organization considering the measurement of their workforce’s engagement.
Register to Get the Full Article
Environmental conditions are not motivations.
The conditions that foster and promote the development of engagement within individual employees are not engagement itself, but are a set of facilitating factors. These environmental factors may be important to assess for diagnostic purposes since causal linkages may exist. For example, managers providing regular feedback to employees may lead to increased engagement but the presence of a feedback systems doesn’t necessarily mean that employees are engaged. One could argue that positive attitudes toward the work environment, e.g., agreement with “there are opportunities for growth within the company,” may be influenced by the level of engagement within each employee, and hence may be correlated with engagement, but they are by no means direct indicators of engagement.
Business outcomes are not motivations.
Similarly, a host of positive business outcomes attributed to high employee engagement have been enumerated. These include a set of measures of external performance indicators (customer satisfaction and loyalty ratings, sales results/revenue growth, profitability), internal process measures (productivity, quality/defect rate), and lower rates of negative employee behaviors (turnover, absenteeism, theft, safety incidents). We argue that these indicators are affected by employee engagement to varying degrees depending on company- and industry-specific factors (for example, the degree to which surveyed employees interact directly with customers), but these, too, are in no way synonymous with engagement.
