Abstract
Employee engagement is an issue that has perplexed scholars and practitioners since time immemorial. Organisations keep trying to find the magic pill that would motivate all employees to be engaged at maximum levels. After four decades of being involved with human resources in various roles, I can confirm that the quest to understand and box employee engagement into a convenient category is likely to continue for the foreseeable future and beyond. In my opinion, this is because we are approaching the topic from the wrong angle, trying to find a one-size-fits-all solution to this complicated problem. In this article, I discuss what I have gleaned through my involvement in teaching, training, and consulting, and offer four lessons for organisations. But the most important message of this piece is that engagement is not a goal—only a means to get to the goal, which is optimal individual performance. Below, I discuss four engagement triggers that I have identified (a) reward/recognise individuals for their achievements, (b) identify and separate bad apples, (c) remember routine discourages engagement and (d) share information with employees so they can make better decisions.
Introduction
Over the last four decades, I have been blessed to have worked in the human resources function in various roles. During this period, the one question that has persistently befuddled practitioners and scholars alike is how to increase employee engagement. Here, the belief is that if employees are more engaged, they will be more productive and contribute at optimal levels to the organisation’s bottom line. Of course, this is a valid reason to concentrate on employee engagement. However, employee engagement does not lend itself to a simple cause-and-effect model. The good thing is that when done right, it is also not a zero-sum game.
Having worked in industry, academia, and consulting, and having had the opportunity to work with organisations of all manner, in several countries across the globe, I have concluded that there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for increasing employee engagement. Indeed, I believe that the quest itself is misguided. Let me explain. At a very basic level, I believe that most, not all, individuals are driven to do a fair job in exchange for fair compensation and associated benefits. Of course, we recognise that this changes from culture to culture as well as between different types of industries. Here, a nation’s cultural, political and social environments play a critical role in determining the type and amount of effort that individuals will exhibit in their day-to-day roles in their organisations. Of course, the culture of the organisation and the leadership within will also have a huge impact on engagement levels.
So, what exactly do we mean by employee engagement. While there are numerous definitions available on the web and in academic and practitioner publications, at the core of the concept is the degree to which an employee is committed to giving his/her best for the organisation. Of course, it is difficult to define what engagement really means given that an employee’s engagement is not totally within his/her control. For example, how a manager treats his/her employees has a huge impact on how an employee feels about his/her organisation and the consequent type and amount of effort exerted by that employee. Similarly, the degree to which an employee is provided the tools and/or support that he/she needs to perform at optimal levels also has a significant impact on his/her engagement levels.
So, what are the successful engagement triggers that I have seen over the years? I list these below and discuss each briefly.
The Four Engagement Triggers
Reward/recognise people for their achievements: First, the sense of achievement that an individual draws from having successfully completed a task is a critical determinant of his/her readiness and engagement levels for the next task. Here, the supervisor and the organisation (i.e., management systems) often become hindrances rather than enablers. In other words, when individuals do a good job, they should be appreciated for this and offered relevant recognition and/or rewards. While some individuals are motivated by seeing their names or imprints on the final product, others may expect a monetary reward. Whatever the reward, within the constraints of the organisation’s policies, managers need to make sure that these are awarded timely, and in a fair manner. Of course, this requires that organisations establish fair and transparent policies that are implemented objectively.
Beware of the bad apples: In most organisations, there are a few pretenders who are simply interested in receiving their paycheck at the end of the period and really could not care less about their contribution and/or the final outcome. These are the folks who work hard enough to get fired. Expecting them to be engaged at optimal levels, or any level, is just setting up oneself for failure. As such, organisations need to ensure that their recruitment and selection systems are foolproof and help the organisation hire people who are a good fit and are willing to perform at the highest levels. Of course, there are many who can slip through even the best-designed systems and then fail to perform at the expected levels. The truth is that many of them were never interested in contributing to the organisation in the first place—they just wanted a place to park themselves and draw a fat paycheck. These individuals are not going to get any more engaged than they are by any interventions the organisation brings to bear. This is a group that often stays undetected but ends up harming the organisation and also helps to demotivate others in the organisation. I have personally experienced this. Let me briefly recap this for you.
Years ago, when I first started graduate school, I needed to find a summer job as the assistantship typically does not cover the summer session. I found a job working as a student assistant for the executive training division and was assigned a very simple, though routine, task. This was before the days of the Internet, so this Institute used to send out regular bulk mailings to all the corporations in the area with the listing of all the executive training programmes they offered and the potential dates and charges, and so on and so forth. My task was to fill envelopes with the programme listings and then seal them. Of course, there were tens of thousands of these brochures that had to be mailed and the task was boring but straightforward. This was a simple task and did not require too much thought or effort, and we were paid on an hourly basis. At the end of the day, we were required to record the number of envelopes filled and then drop these off at the local post office for bulk mainlining. I was very happy to have this job and worked as fast and as hard as I could since this additional money would help me survive the summer.
There was another individual who had been working on this task much longer and he and I sometimes worked in the same room at a common table. One day, I heard the director of the division knocking outside the men’s room and calling out his name, which took me by surprise. Later, on inquiring, I found out that he had a habit of going inside the toilet and spending a lot of time there because he was getting paid by the hour, so it did not matter how much he did or how many packets he sorted. Apparently, he used to just wait for the 8-hour day to be done and so he could leave. I had just arrived in the country and was interested in getting as much done as fast as possible, so I could attend my classes and work on study-related projects.
This was my first brush with the notion of employee engagement—I often thought about this and tried to guess why my co-worker and I took two different approaches. And then it struck me—while I was doing this job to make extra money during the summer, my primary goal was to pursue my graduate studies and be done soon enough so that I could start teaching and launch the career that I was working towards. On the other hand, the other individual was doing this as a full-time job and took a different approach so he could extend his employment and get a regular paycheck. It was only later that I found out the reason I was hired was because he was not getting the task done on time and they wanted to make sure that they were able to send out their bulk mailings on time, that is, before the end of the summer.
Routine discourages engagement: The third category of engagement that I have seen is when there is an extraordinary situation that gets everyone across the organisation engaged. To take an example, when COVID-19 hit a few years ago, everybody was impacted by it, albeit in different ways and to different extents. Nonetheless, for organisations to pull through and survive during this period, they needed everyone to do their bit and then some. In almost every case around the world, organisations that managed to get everyone on board survived, while the others did not. Over the years, I have seen numerous instances where organisations have successfully managed to marshal all their resources when they are faced with a situation that is out of the ordinary, especially when they are teetering on the brink of survival. Once this message gets out, organisations find that almost everyone jumps in to do their bit and even go beyond their usual routine work to help the organisation survive. At some level, this is perhaps because their own survival is dependent on the organisation’s survival, but nonetheless, the fact remains that engagement levels can go extremely high when there is an emergency facing the organisation. The question, of course, is how to sustain such engagement levels once the emergency is over with and has been successfully tackled. This is where the organisation’s culture can play a huge role in helping to sustain such engagement. In some cases, I have even found organisations creating false emergencies, just to get everyone engaged. While I am not recommending this as a strategy, it might be something to think about.
Share information to get employees engaged: Finally, I would like to discuss a topic that is often overlooked when discussing employee engagement or developing interventions to increase engagement. Here the notion of cognitive schema deserves some discussion. At a very basic level, schema is the way we make sense of the world around us. Put another way, our schema allows us to process all the information that comes to us. So, any information that we have in our schema, accumulated over the years, is used to then process any events that we encounter throughout our lives. Any employee in any organisation, irrespective of the level at which the individual is working, views the organisation through this prism, that is, his/her schema. As such, if organisations want employees to understand why they should engage with the organisation, they have to be provided relevant information, especially about how their work impacts the organisation’s strategy and bottom line, how important he/she is to the organisation. Of course, this is then supported by how they treat him or her.
Since individuals based their decisions and develop their attitudes from the schema, it is critical that the organisation introduce relevant information into employee schema through training, policies, cultural practices and so on. In addition, it is important that employees are made aware of the organisation’s short- and long-term goals so that they can figure out, with the help of their immediate supervisor, where they fit into the larger scheme of things. Further, relevant information would also help employees to decide what their contribution could be or should be in helping the organisation achieve its short- and long-term goals. Clearly, when individuals are not aware of their organisation’s strategy and goals, they are forced to see their jobs as routine, whereby they come in and do the same thing day and day out.
SAS Inc.: A Short Case Study
Before I conclude, I would like to share a short case study, one that shows that when done right, employee engagement can lead to improved and sustained performance across the organisation. While there are numerous examples of corporations around the world that have highly engaged employees who perform at the highest levels, let me tell you a little bit about a company called SAS, Inc., © a company based out of Cary, North Carolina, in the USA. For over four decades, SAS has been the leading developer and seller of analytics software. During this period, the company has been consistently profitable and has one of the lowest employee turnover rates among companies worldwide, and not just in the software industry. So how have they managed to achieve this? To keep their employees engaged, SAS consistently innovates and develops programmes with the stated goal of ‘making their employees lives easier’. This includes such benefits as playing basketball or pool during office hours, as well as participating in scores of other programmes designed to keep them loyal and engaged. However, as their HR Director has stated they do not do all this because they are altruistic—instead, they develop and implement programmes that make good business sense. The more you get your employees engaged, the better they perform. This, indeed, is the crux of employee engagement.
Conclusion
As organisations worldwide continue to struggle with low engagement levels, it is time for scholars and practitioners to revisit our understanding of the notion and nuances of employee engagement. Clearly, it is time to approach the subject differently. First, organisations must acknowledge that some individuals will never be engaged at the levels that they desire, and that this is often a result of inadequate selection and screening systems. Thus, they need to address and revamp their selection systems. Next, organisations need to recognise that when routine kicks in, motivation and engagement levels are bound to go down. Here again, organisations need to find ways to keep people engaged, for a long period of time.
Finally, the more individuals know about their role in the larger picture, the more they are likely to be engaged. I have often heard organisations say that they only share information on a need-to-know basis. It is no wonder then that many employees just work hard enough not to get fired.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.