This word engagement sticks in the craw of some people. I still use it. In fact, I recently signed on to teach an online course on organizational communication and employee engagement for the University of California, beginning next February.
But what exactly does employee engagement mean? How do we recognize it?
In a casual sense, engagement is all about an orientation to, and a preoccupation with, the success of a business enterprise. However, there is no precise, standardized meaning for the term, and dictionaries don’t provide much help.
Dictionaries favor non-business definitions such as a betrothal, or a meeting (as in a speaking engagement or a dinner engagement), or even a battle in wartime. Some dictionaries don’t even bother to define the term in the context of business. (So if you Google the word, be prepared for lots of extraneous references!)
In business, employee engagement has a common understanding around focus and passion, but experts tirelessly debate exactly what it means and what behaviors are necessarily associated with it. Thus there is a definition, inasmuch as everyone concerned with it generally agrees on the broad outlines; but there isn’t a definition, inasmuch as no one has ever been able to pin down a precise meaning that everyone is willing to use.
There is also a lot of confusion over three other terms, all commonly used in business, which mean something similar to engagement. People talk of morale, alignment, and commitment in the same breath as engagement.
It may be splitting hairs, but we can think of morale as contentment or happiness, which can result from any number of things—winning the lottery, falling in love, buying a new car. We can regard alignment as a physical, nearly mechanical consistency with expectations, such as compliance with an ethics code or a production process, and we can think of commitment as loyalty to an organization, its mission, and the satisfaction of its patrons and stakeholders.
Engagement, on the other hand, is an attitude or orientation to the work itself for the sake of the work and its importance to customers. Engagement is what matters.
Most of the serious work on employee engagement has come from practitioners of one kind or another, especially consultants who have an obvious economic self-interest in the subject. Surprisingly little research and writing on engagement has come from the academic community. Thus, only sporadic research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and what has emerged from academic literature tends to be narrowly construed and of marginal practical value.
Perhaps the earliest academic definition of engagement was offered in 1990 by W.A. Kahn, who coolly described it as “people who employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.”
A decade later, N.P. Rothbard went further. Rothbard put the emphasis on attention (“the cognitive availability and the amount of time one spends thinking about a role”) and absorption (“being engrossed in a role” and “the intensity of one’s focus on a role”). Meanwhile, W.B. Schaufeli and a team defined engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” Similar work by others since then is in the same general orbit.
In any case, it is safe to say that few if any academic researchers on the subject of employee engagement are well-known in business circles. Yet the subject of employee engagement commands keen interest among business leaders at the highest levels, because of its plain impact on an organization’s efficiency and performance.
The Gallup Organization, an American company known originally for its broad consumer and political public-opinion surveys, and more recently for its business consulting services in human resource management, offers a popular but simplistic approach to employee engagement. It strikes me and many others as, well, intellectual pretzels.
In part to promote its consulting practice, Gallup devised a twelve-point checklist of factors that it asserts are closely correlated to employee engagement. Keep in mind that correlation is not causation; just because two phenomena show up together (like baseball and dandelions in springtime, for example) doesn’t mean that one of them causes the other.
However, because of the proprietary nature of Gallup’s research and the absence of any peer review, its assertions are impossible for you to validate. None of that has stopped hundreds of large companies from adopting the paradigm, at an appreciable financial investment.
The twelve-point Gallup checklist consists of these factors:
1. Knowing what is expected of oneself on the job.
2. Having appropriate materials and equipment.
3. Having the opportunity to do what one does best every day.
4. Receiving recognition or praise for doing good work within the past seven days.
5. Having someone who encourages one’s development.
6. Having a supervisor who cares about oneself as a person.
7. Being heard and taken seriously.
8. Feeling a connection to the organization’s mission.
9. Having coworkers who are committed to doing quality work.
10. Having a best friend at work.
11. Receiving a progress report on one’s work.
12. Having opportunities to grow and learn.
Although this framework is probably the dominant reference point to employee engagement in business today, it has many critics who observe that certain of the variables (especially having a best friend at work) seem well-beyond the capacity of management to affect and, in any case, are of dubious causal relationship to real employee engagement.
Gallup also sorts employees into three camps: engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. It describes engaged employees as those who “work with passion and feel a profound connection to the company” and who “drive innovation and move the organization forward.” Gallup describes disengaged employees as “checked out . . . sleepwalking through their workday, putting time but not energy or passion into their work.” It describes actively disengaged employees as “acting out their unhappiness” and actually undermining “what their engaged coworkers accomplish."
Gallup has not revealed just how it makes its calculations, but its business customers seem more interested in sheer numbers (perhaps to document a business case) than in the complexities of methodology anyway.
I favor a simpler definition of engagement, a definition we can grasp and accept intuitively because our own experience conforms to it. It is just this: lots of focus, lots of curiosity, lots of passion, and lots of courage in the workplace to do whatever is necessary and proper to satisfy a customer.
My argument is straightforward and, I think, irrefutable. Think over the course of human history. Think of all the great things that our forebears have ever done. Think of ending slavery, of setting foot on the moon, of conquering diseases, of splitting the atom, of settling the western hemisphere, of establishing democracy. In our time, think of building computers, of tearing down the Berlin Wall, of ending apartheid, of transplanting a human heart, of creating a global network of cellular telephones or the Internet—you name it.
Then pause to realize: Nothing of great value has ever been invented or discovered, and nothing of great significance has ever been achieved, that wasn’t, at some time, the point of someone’s intense focus, the subject of someone’s deep curiosity, the object of someone’s all-consuming passion, and the product of someone’s relentless courage—and not much else. Money? Sure. Timing, granted. Luck or prayer? Perhaps. Maybe even desperation. But the variables that always count are focus, curiosity, passion, and the courage to persevere, to try again, to search, to keep on going.
That, to me, is the real stuff of engagement. It’s closer to the elixir we need to bring people at work fully into the service of customers. Come to think of it, that is really why I work.
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