Employee engagement – new wine in old bottles?
There’s little doubt that management believes engagement is important – it’s been linked to a variety of organisational benefits from retention and improved customer satisfaction, to increased profits – the latter tending to concentrate the mind.
It appears that many employees are not engaged by their jobs. Research from YouGov last year reported that only half (51%) of employees feel fully engaged by their company. This was no small scale sample, either – it surveyed 40,000 employees in all sectors and at all levels of the economy.
However, there’s a lot about engagement which is very familiar and raises doubt about the difference of the concept. The willingness to go “the extra mile” echoes the concept of discretionary behaviour, itself seen as an outcome of commitment. Engaged employees desire to stay with the organisation and feel proud to tell people who they work for, and produce better job performance – and these are also outcomes of commitment, a much older and well-researched organisational construct.
Some believe that engagement is more emotionally charged than either commitment or job satisfaction – that engagement makes employees enthusiastic, vigorous and wholehearted. The Institute of Employment Studies believes that engagement needs knowledge of the business context to enable employees to improve the organisation and that engagement is two way. Like the psychological contract, engagement can be broken by the employer.
As the idea of engagement is not yet universally agreed, it’s not surprising that the measurements of the concept also differ - sometimes quite considerably. A diagnosis called the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) focuses on personal feelings at work, the IES engagement measure looks at the actions engaged employees take. Yet another measure, developed by Gallup considers what employees experience in the workplace in terms of recognition, praise, and having the right resources to do their job.
All of these have been tested with high levels of responses, refined and validated; they all claim to measure engagement. But which engagement? And what are the lead indicators for the concept?
According to the UWES, the predictors of engagement are elements which again, look awfully familiar. The indicators of job autonomy, task variety and performance feedback bear an uncanny resemblance to the job characteristics model developed by Hackman and Oldham, the outcomes of which are intrinsic motivation, job satisfaction and work effectiveness.
For the IES, the most important predictor of engagement is “feeling valued and involved”. Thus if the organisation has managers who care about employees, keep them informed, treat them fairly and encourage them to perform, are interested in their career and support them in training and development opportunities, give them opportunities to voice their views and are fair in pay and benefits – then you’re helping employees feeling valued and involved. Which, according to the research done by IES, then leads to engagement.
But the concept of engagement is far from clear cut, and the variety of definitions, different predictors and measurements demonstrate its complexity.
In addition, it seems that the above look like a list of good HR practices exhorted by management writers for the past decade and the concepts of engagement as they currently stand overlap with too many other constructs, such as commitment, the psychological contract and even job design. This raises concerns about measurement.
And indeed, you might think that as so many of the predictors of engagement could be labelled as best management practice, you could save yourself the bother of measuring a concept for which there isn’t a concrete definition – and just implement the best practice instead.
fe3 is a specialist consultancy, staffed by experienced, established organisational and communication consultants. Founded in early 2002, it was the first consultancy to put the HR and marketing toolkits together to craft stronger relationships between employees, customers and the organisation.
Written February 2009