Culture Care Technologies
  Human Resource & Organization Development Specialists in Company Culture

Employee Engagement?

According to The Canadian Manager (Winter, 2004), “employee engagement is probably running neck-and-neck with talent management as HR's biggest buzzword these days”. Is it just another buzzword, a repackaging of some popular ones from the present, such as work-life balance, and past, such as QWL, quality circles or empowerment? Or is employee engagement a unique and now necessary attribute for success?

The first difficulty in answering these two questions is the lack of consensus on definition. For example:

• "Employee engagement is a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, absorption, involvement and efficacy"
• "An engaged employee is an employee who is satisfied, who is committed, who is loyal and who gives that above-and-beyond discretionary effort"
• “Employee engagement is the harnessing of organization members' selves to their work roles [by which they] employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performance”
• “Engaged people are passionate about their jobs, have an extra bounce in their step, listen more intently and embrace the company's goals and aspirations as their own”
• "Engagement refers to the energy, the passion, the "fire in the belly" that employees have for their job and their employer. By definition, it is the state in which individuals are emotionally and intellectually committed to the organization"

An examination of these and the many other definitions reveals a broad range of features. At one end of this continuum are those typically surfaced in climate surveys. They include trust, respect, support and fairness and are associated with aspects of engagement such as an employee “who is satisfied” or has “a positive work-related state of mind”.

At the other end are features that go well beyond satisfaction or motivation and into the realm of commitment. They reflect aspects of engagement such as “passion”, “embrac[ing] the company's aspirations as their own” and “the harnessing of organization members' selves” to the organization. These types of features are inextricably linked to organizational culture. For example:

• When the beliefs and values required to accomplish the mission or realize the vision are deeply held by a member, are a part of who he or she is, then the self of that individual has been “harnessed” to the organization
• When individuals “embrace the company's aspirations as their own”, they take on the organization's vision of its preferred future as their own

Since values and beliefs are attributes of both an organization (i.e., its culture) and an individual, it is through widely shared and deeply held cultural beliefs and values that the individual employees and the organization can merge: they can become one. And the extent to which they merge through culture is reflected in the degree of employee engagement at the commitment end of the continuum. Company culture is the basic medium through which the engagement features of commitment (do or do not) manifest themselves in the organization.

Traditional surveys have long established a clear link between features at the climate end of the continuum and positive outcomes such as higher degrees of employee satisfaction and lower rates of voluntary turnover. More recent surveys have begun to include some attributes further towards the culture/commitment end of the engagement continuum. For example:

• Hewitt Associates' has collected data on more than 4 million employees from almost 1,500 companies and compared scores with actual business outcomes. The results demonstrate a strong positive relationship between engagement and organizational performance. In examining this relationship through a comparison of publicly traded double digit growth (DDG) companies -- - those with five-year compound average revenue growth of 10 percent or more – to those that achieved less than 10 percent growth, Hewitt showed that, in the great majority of cases, the higher levels of employee engagement in the former had risen prior to the improvement in performance or growth. This provided good evidence that increasing engagement results in better performance rather than the other way around. ( The Missing Link: The Role of Employee Engagement in Business Success. Ray Baumruk. Workspan. Scottsdale: November 2004. Vol.47, Iss. 11)

As for research that focuses primarily or exclusively on the culture end of the engagement continuum, one of the the most comprehensive studies was conducted before employee engagement was invented. The research of J. Collins & J. Poras, (Built to Last: The Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 1994) showed that over the long term of 50+ years, the most successful organizations shared the common attribute of a strong culture. This consisted of a near fanatical adherence to a fervently held “core ideology” and a widespread feeling of “being a part of something special and elite”.

The long term financial success of companies with this high degree of employee engagement in the culture is impressive. One dollar invested in each of the 18 visionary companies (e.g., Ford, General Electric, and Marriot) in 1926 would yield $6,356 by 1990. One dollar invested in the comparison companies (e.g., General Motors, Westinghouse, Howard Johnson) would have yielded only $955. The potential downside of this type of engagement was the basis of the “strong culture” debate of the late 80s. The upside is cultural vitality.

Cultural vitality reflects an organization's capacity to tap the commitment and focus the energy of its employees. Focused human energy is akin to the dynamics of light. In the average light bulb, as in the average organization, energy is dissipated and its impact minimized. In a laser beam, as in then visionary companies, that same energy is focused and concentrated. Its impact is significantly greater.

In a rush to capitalize on the positive impact of employee engagement on organizational performance, it's easy for an organization to short-change satisfaction in pursuit of the “passion”, “fire in the belly” and “emotional and intellectual commitment” at the culture end of the engagement continuum. Unfortunately, companies are not entitled to the “discretionary effort” of employees that can emanate through culture. This level of effort must be evoked and can only be given voluntarily.

A prerequisite for this voluntarism is a healthy climate -- employees who are quite satisfied with their work environment and feel respected, supported and valued . After all, you can hardly expect an employee to have an "extra bounce in their step" if they don't trust management, get no support in career development and/or don't understand how their job links to the bigger strategic picture. However, meeting the prerequisite of a healthy climate does not automatically lead to an organization reaping the benefits of commitment. This is because tapping the energy of culture engagement usually requires the collective learning of new shared cultural beliefs through which to see the world and from which to think

The temptation with cultural learning is for management to try to impose it in a top down fashion through varying degrees of indoctrination. Not only is this approach doomed to failure, it can easily negate the efforts that went in to climate development. The organization risks being left with not only an ineffective culture but much damage to its climate.

It is only through a participative approach to cultural change that an organization's culture becomes the medium for the engagement features of commitment and the basis of a broad consensus of meaning among all members of the organization. It is one that unites them in thinking from a shared set of fundamental beliefs and values that are held as a social contract -- an agreed interpretation of reality based on a mutuality of meaning, shared understandings and reciprocity. At this point members have voluntarily harnessed their “selves” to the organization and displays of “above-and-beyond discretionary effort” start to become the norm rather than the rare exception.