Recipe for Employee Engagement: What are the Ingredients??

Yesterday, I attended a workshop on Employee Engagement. Often faced with the challenge of accurately defining the engagement process, post the workshop I thought of making an attempt at it. I walked out with the following thoughts on the same.

Engagement is a religion where you convert the employees to the organization’s cult. I would personally define it as a heightened level of devotion wherein the employee is unable to identify any gaps in the religion’s offering i.e. The Value Proposition.

It is the ability to foresee and meet the stated and the unstated needs in such fashion that you create a state of mind where the employee is so addicted (the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice) that he chooses to go beyond the contract. So in short employee engagement is analogous to addiction. It is the organization’s ability to make the employees dance to its own form of music i.e. move them towards value creation and achieving heightened levels of excellence. The employee exists to own the success & failure of the organization and intervenes to improve business results.

As Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman have put it in their book, First Break All the Rules, these needs have to be met in a set hierarchy. They say that the act is analogous to climbing a mountain where you get acclimatized to a certain type of atmosphere and then move further up and if at all you try to skip a level it will lead to mountain sickness.

So, I guess we could say that we need to meet the vanilla requirements before we add the chocolate sauce.

The inability of the above or inefficiency at it would lead to haunting of the ghosts of disengagement. Disenchantment at work may result in the draconian threat of attrition. And if at all, the disengaged stay back then they will turn into parasites working towards converting the religion of the engaged employees (to that of disengagement).

A colleague rightly put it; Engagement can be compared to a marriage wherein you are marrying the employee to the organization. Like in every relationship, the employee will fall for the charisma of the brand, then there will be the initial commitment phobia from the employee’s end, he may get cold feet and hence there would be domestic issues but it is the organization’s job to create that chemistry i.e. an Occupational Intimacy which will make the employee Say, Stay and Strive (the 3 behaviors of an engaged employee as defined by Hewitt Research) i.e. become a talent magnet. If, however, the brand is mishandled then the dynamics of the r0elationship will get eroded and the reactive approach of wheedling with fresh promises, exit interview approach in this case, doesn’t help too often. Oprah Winfrey spoke similarly about marriage, it’s about Am I in it today? It’s not about will I be in it tomorrow, or should I have been in it yesterday, it’s about being committed to it today.

However, having said that the Engagement process is not a story of mush and romance alone. It has a strong business case. Research has shown a positive correlation between engagement and business performance.

Hewitt Research on the subject suggests that successful employee engagement leads to:
· Increased Shareholder return
· More Market Value/Employee
· More Sales/Employee
· More Profit
· More Revenue
· Greater Customer Retention
· Higher Profitability
· Reduction in turnover cost

Gallup research Statistics say that successfully engaged organizations are:
· 18% more productive
· 12% more profitable
· 12% better at engaging customers
· 51% less likely to leave
· 27% less likely to indulge in absenteeism

Now of course there is always a debate on who owns the onus of creating that magic. It is obvious that it is the line manager who is the driver of the experience of the brand, for any employee. He is the first face of the employer for any employee. HR being a default engagement champion will act as a catalyst to provide a successful & supportive macro environment (providing the processes, methodologies, platforms etc) but it will be the line manager who has to act as an anchor and give direction to the employee.

Would like to sign off with a recently heard quote by Henry Ford: “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”