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After introductions, Karen welcomed people to the mindstretch® and went through the
agenda.
She commented that when fe3 started to pull this together, it became clear quite quickly that it’s not possible to talk about engagement without some reference to other concepts, particularly the antithesis of engagement, employee burnout.
She said that employee commitment is so well researched and established as a concept, again, it’s hard not briefly examine where it differs from and is very similar to, the new kid on the block, engagement.
However, before examining the research, she asked participants what they thought about when hearing the word “ engagement”. Words and phrases that were put forward:
Chris wondered whether the concept was local or general and Gary pointed out that none of the comments could be classed as an outcome.
Karen presented three definitions. Kahn talks of harnessing of employees’ “selves” to their work roles and expending additional physical, cognitive and emotional effort to the task which is linked to the concept of “flow”. This is where people don’t notice the passage of time.
Schaufeli defines work engagement as a positive, fulfilling, work related state of mind that is characterised by vigour, dedication, and absorption. Their measurement – although NOT their concept - also includes professional efficacy.
Vigour is defined as high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistence in the face of difficulties.
Dedication is a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge.
Absorption is characterized by being fully concentrated and happily engrossed in one’s work, whereby time passes quickly and the employee has difficulties with detaching from work.
Thus, engaged employees feel vigorous and strong, are enthusiastic about their work, and they often get immersed in their work activities.
IES consulted HR contacts during 2003, and a view of the behaviours exhibited by an engaged employee emerged. They developed a series of statements that were then tested with 14 NHS Trusts, with a total database of more than 10,000 cases. Significant differences in IES’s concept of engagement are the awareness of business context and the two way relationship.
Chris raised the general Issue of whether values can be defined or even exist as a unified concept – what do we mean by “the organisation”? Keith agreed, citing the number of ethnic minority staff in the NHS Mental Health Trusts where there was not only the issue of different languages but also tribal affiliations.
Other comments were that the values referred to in the IES definition don’t always get translated into action and that people’s needs/expectations from work much more diverse than formerly. The IES definition was considered more operational/sellable but ran the danger of oversimplification and therefore unfulfilled expectations about outcomes.
Referring back to Gary’s comment about the outcomes of engagement, Karen turned to the next slide.
She explained that some academics believe that work engagement is a distinct concept which is negatively – although not perfectly, related to burnout. The second school of thought is that burnout and engagement are two opposite ends of a continuum, where burnout is “the erosion of engagement with the job”.
Also this is an academic question for the most part, if you decide to a) measure it and b) try and engage employees because the concepts are not the same, and low scores either may imply burnout – which has implication of duty of care for organisations - OR a lack of engagement.
A lively debate followed. Participants discussed the potential for engagement, particularly for women: childbearing changes the needs of the female workforce and two-way engagement is needed to retain mothers in the organisation, although Chris wanted to know how someone can be engaged if they are off work. Can someone be said to be engaged if their prime concern is family?
Alison thought that engagement is about authenticity- credibility of proposition: links between values, policies and reality. Brian said firmly that with the skills and experience of women workers make child rearing breaks a sound commercial investment for PwC, not simply the fulfilling of policies.
In the discussion about benefits for employees, Karen suggested that engagement could act as a facilitator of flexible working – in lieu of a webcam in employees’ homes.
When talking about having too much engagement, where are so engrossed in their job that that they end up working all the hours God sends, Karen noted that engagement was not apparently linked to workaholism….!
Which brought us to the concept negatively linked to engagement, burnout. Burnout has been described as a “confrontation with high job demands” where the items on the slide, combined with a lack of resources (e.g., autonomy, social support, feedback) increases employees’ risk of burnout.
And how do you recognise someone who’s burned out? Burnout is characterized by three related, but empirically distinct, elements: namely exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.
Feelings of exhaustion or energy depletion are generally considered a core symptom of the burnout syndrome. Cynicism is a negative attitudes toward work and the people with whom one works (e.g., clients and colleagues).
The third dimension of burnout, reduced professional efficacy, is the belief that one is no longer effective in fulfilling one’s job responsibilities. Thus, burned-out individuals suffer from feelings of fatigue, behave indifferently toward their work and clients, and they believe that their performance has suffered accordingly.
Interestingly, said Karen, the characteristics of burnout are not enduring qualities, but are responsive to the organisational context – so it’s not something employees “ have” in themselves, it’s something specific to the way the organisation runs. There was some disbelief about this – Gary in particular believing that some types of individual are more likely to suffer from burnout.
Some commentators view burnout to be incompatible with the capacity to accept new challenges or undertake fundamental change at work (Leiter and Harvey 1998).
In Schaufeli’s view, two of the characteristics of engagement, vigour and dedication are the direct positive opposites of exhaustion and cynicism respectively. However he doesn’t view burnout and engagement at opposite ends of one continuum, but TWO different concepts.
Burnout has obvious health implications for employees – but are the consequences of a lack of engagement as serious?
Paul felt that what the concepts seemed to be about was personal/organisational equilibrium, balancing what the person needs and what the organisation needs. It was felt to be important that the values of the organisation were clear and that they weren’t used to manipulate employees. A comment was made that organisational values were often not the ones in use, and that the implicit values were the ones that employees take notice of.
Participants thought that burned out people were often those waiting for retirement/pay-off (although this isn’t explicit in the literature – KD).
Can organisations recover burned out people? Paul, recounting a personal experience, thought yes, it was possible, if enough changes were made.
Moving on to the comparison of commitment and engagement , Karen reminded the group of the different types of commitment and wondered if there would also be different types of engagement:
Comparing the outcomes of commitment and engagement found engagement with a longer list than commitment, although Karen pointed out that outcome studies are much less numerous for engagement than commitment and that engagement research was still in its infancy.
The possible consequences of work engagement are linked to positive attitudes towards work and the organisation, such as job satisfaction, organisational commitment and turnover intention. There are also links to positive organisational behaviour – personal initiative and learning motivation, and proactive behaviour and to job performance. Finally, the positive benefits to employees make the idea of engagement attractive to employers wanting to fulfil its duty of care.
Overall, there does seem to be a view that commitment is a generalised feeling for employees, but that engagement is more “local” – a day to day concept related to the job role, and this differentiates it from the broader concept of commitment. There are some views that engagement is a direct antecedent to satisfaction (Jones and Harter 2005).
Keith commented that ISR work a few years ago showed 10% increase in commitment increased bottom line by 1%.
IES reference a simple, three factor model from RBS where 1% increase in measures gives 0.3% increase in profit. The three factors were that employees “say” positive things about the organisation; want to “stay” in the organisation; and finally, will “strive” and exert additional effort to reach business goals.
IES Sainsbury’s project showed high commitment (to products and own manager) increased sales/customer satisfaction. The Sears model, which links profit to employee attitude was also mentioned.
It was generally agreed that there was a lot of crossover between satisfaction, commitment and engagement which made discussion of the concept confusing.
Karen said that according to the IES noted a couple of general points from their research:
Participants thought it interesting that engagement can be different at different levels in the organisation, and notes that different concepts have different assessments, which in turn can give different results/diagnoses. It was generally agreed that cross sectional questionnaires (i.e. measurements taken at one point in time) has their own issues and that follow up qualitative research would add granularity to the picture.
After the coffee break, Gary suggested a bell-curve relationship between engagement and personal effectiveness where if engagement was too high, performance would go down. An optimum engagement level would ensure that employees retained some balance and didn’t become so absorbed that they overworked – and thus became ill.
Keith thought that in the “real world” the curve might be more like a sine wave than a normal distribution curve – although not everyone agreed! Karen added that there seemed to be a different view from researchers, where one set of academics (May et al, 2004) believe that there are three requirements for engagement:
psychological meaningfulness or the value of a work goal or purpose (made up of three elements, job enrichment, work-role fit and co-worker relationships);
psychological safety or feeling able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image (made up of three elements, supervisor relationships, co-worker
relations, co-worker norms); and
psychological availability or the cognitive energy expended by employees on work (made up of three elements, resources availability, work role security and outside activities)
(Note – apologies from Karen that she didn’t remember it exactly during the session!)
Karen pointed out that according to May and colleagues, outside activities were negatively related to psychological availability – implying that, for engagement to be present, work would be the main concern of the individual. There was some disquiet about this.
Introducing the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale Karen explained that data were collected in 10 different countries with more than 14,500 respondents to develop the scale.
In studies, these questionnaires are also used with the Maslach Burnout Inventory which looks at Exhaustion (I feel used up at the end of a working day) cynicism (I doubt the significance of my work) and professional efficacy I can effectively solve the problems that arise in my work).
Schaufeli and his colleagues have identified that professional efficacy is part of the concept of work engagement, but can’t say in which direction the relationship runs – professional efficacy leads to engagement or engagement leads to professional efficacy.
Brian said that one of the issues under consideration at PWC was whether access to the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace would be allowed. He added that to make help engagement of employees at PWC, a number of social groups were supported and funded e.g. gay/lesbian and bisexual groups. It was felt that mixing of employees from different parts of the company, but brought together in social events, would help to cross fertilise business. There was some discussion about non-inclusion and ghetto-isation – and the tension which might be caused by employees who don’t belong to these groups.
Gary asked if engagement is only available to organisations with large resources OR do only large organisations have sufficient resources for these sort of activities to engage people. Interesting thought that HR policies don’t really try to excite people – more about hygiene factors.
This is what an engaged employee looks like, according to the IES.
Their engagement model and questionnaire was developed through a study done specifically within the NHS using more than 10,000 responses from 14 NHS organisations.
This demonstrates the cross-over between engagement and commitment very well – but also illustrates the consequences of commitment – like OCB At its core, it’s quite a rational, management led conception. The questions are (clockwise from top):
Keith pointed out that this is an NHS based study – the “Treats others with respect …” is a big driver in social and primary care, and may not be relevant in other types of organisation.
So what leads to engagement? Karen showed a list of potential antecedents from studies using Schaufeli’s conception of engagement. There were some general comments that this felt familiar. Karen commented that with this and the following slides, some of these elements you’ll have seen before in work done on the concept of procedural justice, an important element of the psychological contract and some are from the Job Characteristics model of Hackman and Oldham.
Core Job characteristics |
Critical Psychological states |
Outcomes |
|---|---|---|
| Skill variety | Experienced meaningfulness of the work | High intrinsic motivation |
| Task identity | ||
| Task significance | ||
| Autonomy | Experienced responsibility for work outcomes | High job satisfaction |
| Feedback from the job | Knowledge of results of work activity | High work effectiveness |
Looking at the IES version of engagement, here the most important driver for engagement is feeling valued and involved.
IES’s research indicates that the following areas are of fundamental importance to engagement (shown in order of importance, with the top factors being the most important) –
Managers who:
Also important are:
Gary noted that the list looked a bit like Guest’s list and other comments wondered how a lack of regular contact with remote staff would affect the model. Keith thought that a study on the engagement of interims would be interesting!
The group had Issues with design of instruments (some of the questions were thought to be a bit ambiguous) and with different ethnic minorities, language might also be an issue. The group agreed there would be a need for qualitative follow up to illustrate/explore to get past the usual issues of questionnaires. There would be differences between individual and organisational views.
When we came to the final part of the session, participants pointed out that there was a difference between policy and execution – between good HR (policies, the realm of the HR professional) and good HRM (practices, the role of every manager).
Paul commented that the previous list (IES) doesn’t look like it would deliver engagement, but maybe would remove some of the barriers to it. Maybe this is a list of necessary but not sufficient conditions?
Alison believed that the key question is “why” the list is important. The core may be the creation of trust – what’s the company doing nice things for?
The group commented that there was lots of overlap on the list – and some really big concepts, which led to some doubts about the whether the construct of engagement had been sufficiently “buttoned down”.
Conclusion: as a call to action, the list is too broad and diffuse – the earlier slide was more compelling ie:
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