Employee Engagement

Employee engagement – Are we measuring the right thing? Globally on an average, one in three employees are not engaged with their work. It is therefore not surprising to note that employee engagement has come under the corporate radar. Engaged employees are presumed to be more satisfied, productive and act as the companies brand ambassadors. Whilst an engaged employee can infuse enthusiasm, poorly engaged employees can cause or fuel toxic behaviour. A lot of investment therefore goes in measuring and developing strategies to measure and monitor employee engagement. There are various organisations that offer tools to measure engagement. Managers have as a result been able to see where their workforce is in the spectrum of engagement. Academic research clearly confirms the link between employee engagement and productivity. Despite doing all this, it is rather difficult to fuel employee engagement let alone measure it. There are few reasons why this happens, the fundamental reason being the lack of understanding of the employees engagement needs. Traditional measurement systems measure employee engagement from an organisation perspective. They focus on the culture, support and other factors that can dampen or destruct employee engagement levels. There is nothing wrong in having a set of expectations about engagement from an organisation perspective, but it is equally important to view this problem from an employee perspective. By creating measures focusing on these issues, companies attempt to understand where their employees stand. An employee decides or has already decided the role they would play, the value they would add to their role and the balance they would have with their career and personal life even before they walk through the organisations door. If that decision has already been taken by the employee, then whatever an organisation does or enforces would not enhance employee engagement. Fundamentally, employees are engaged at three levels, intellectual, emotional and financial. Studies have shown that everyone has a unique mix of these three forms of engagement which is driven by their own value systems, which shapes their behaviour and as a result influences their engagement levels with the organisation. If organisations understand the forms of engagement of their work force, their strategic initiatives could be more focused and yield better results. For example an employee with high intellectual engagement would prefer a challenging role. It would be the organisations responsibility to constantly challenge that employee intellectually. The problem with the current measurement system is that it is uni-dimensional as it measures only the organisations perspective. Measures that monitor an individual and an organisations engagement style are more strategic and would yield better results. Companies, which fail to do so could end up with efficient measures that are not effective in revealing the true engagement levels.