Employee Engagement: I WANT IT, what is it?

CORNELL UNIVERSITY
2007 White Papers
Employee Engagement: What Do We Really Know? What Do We Need To Know To Take Action?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: PAPER ABSTRACTS

Employee Engagement: I WANT IT, what is it?

There is confusion and misdirection as to what exactly employee engagement is. The primary causes of this confusion and misdirection are a lack of congruity concerning the definition and measurement of employee engagement and a lack of distinction from other closely related concepts. This paper addresses these issues in greater detail as well as provides advice for human resource leaders.

Employee Engagement and Fairness in the Workplace

There is little doubt that employee engagement can be strengthened by fairness and its related elements, just as employee engagement can be weakened by unfairness and the like. As both the workforce and the workplace evolve, organizations may find that in order to win the “war for talent,” they must first win the battle for employees’ hearts. Justice, trust, perception and risks are only a few pieces of a greater puzzle; and their roles are can be made clearer. This paper clarifies these roles and addresses the links between fairness and engagement as well as discusses the impacts of perceived unfair treatment on engagement.

Old Wine in New Bottles? Engagement and the Bottom Line

Beginning with a discussion of employee engagement as a theoretical construct and its operation within the firm, this paper examines the extant research linking engagement, and related measures of employee attitudes and commitment, with bottom-line financial results. From here, discrepancies between and within the academic and practitioner literatures are addressed as are possible alternative explanations of the engagement-business-outcome relationship. Last, the implications for HR managers and executives are considered.

Employee Engagement and Change Management

This paper provides an overview of change management and employee engagement. It details background information on the two concepts; relates the two concepts to each other; introduces findings on the relationship between organizational commitment and change management; discusses types, key functions, and strategies of change management; and presents barriers to as well as success stories about engagement during change management initiatives.

Communicating for Engagement

By now, it has become common knowledge among HR executives and the employees within their respective firms that the nature of internal communication within the organization can have a dramatic, if not revolutionary, impact on the conduct of business. However, the methods of communication your company employs as well as the manner in which those methods are carried out can have a large effect on both the process and results of your company’s efforts to get the workforce engaged. This paper explores how to maximize the effectiveness of your company’s engagement efforts by maximizing the effectiveness of communication within the firm.

"Seeing Clearly:" Employee Engagement and Line of Sight

Establishing a clear line of sight and building an employer brand around it from inside the organization while leveraging leadership, communication, employee development and corporate & social responsibility may not be something entirely new to the world of strategic HRM, but it does appear to be a worthwhile investment, especially with regard to employee engagement. This paper examines engagement as it relates to employment these subjects and offers suggestions for HR practitioners.

Goldman Sachs CEO Taking a Leadership Cue from Top Small Workplaces?

Goldman Sachs CEO Taking a Leadership Cue from Top Small Workplaces?
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 by Mark Harbeke

Is it just me or does Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, sound of late like the leader of a Top Small Workplace?

SmartBrief today referenced a recent New York Times interview with Blankfein, whose current leadership stance they summarize as follows:

It's not enough for employees to show up on time and do their jobs well... Workers need to have broad views of their responsibilities, so that everyone is watching out for everyone else. Creating that kind of environment starts with the leader, he notes, because workers are more likely to accept responsibility for each other when their boss has empowered them to take risks.
Broad views of responsibilities, taking risks – loyal readers of this blog have heard these steps for greater workforce effectiveness before from our Top Small Workplaces.

Mostly privately held, these honored small firms value long-term brand integrity before the shorter-term goals of publicly held firms, such as steady returns for their shareholders. Which makes Blankfein's assessment last week that Wall Street bonuses are out of control all the more interesting.

Yesterday Daily Finance charted Goldman Sachs' "amazing rebound" after the financial system nearly ground to a halt a year ago. James Cullen wrote that while the company initially looked like it had the most to lose from the panic, it restored itself through two building blocks common among Winning Workplaces:

Trust, Respect & Fairness for the customer: Like (on a much smaller scale) Paducah Bank and Phelps County Bank, Goldman Sachs avoided many of the bad mortgage assets that its competitors embraced.

Open Communication: Cullen says that while mum was the word from other investment firm management teams last September – other than to say that all was well on a ship that was clearly sinking – Goldman Sachs had the fortitude to reach out to investor Warren Buffett and give him "attractive terms" on his preferred stock investment.

Are You Measuring Engagement vs. Only Employee Satisfaction

Most "employers of choice" do some form of employee "satisfaction" survey. The question is: Is it worthwhile, and if so, why?

In the current economic climate, one might be tempted to ask: "Why bother?" With unemployment at record high numbers, one might assume that employers have employees "over a barrel," that they (the employees) don’t have many other options, so it's not necessary to go out of our way to give them what they want.

This argument fails on (at least) two levels. Even overlooking the crass opportunism of such an argument, theatre operators need to recognize that while overall national unemployment rates climb to record levels, the current jobless rate for working-age teenagers (our key employment demographic) remains little changed over the last several years, at 21.6 percent.

The other way in which the "over a barrel" thesis might fail would be if we were only measuring satisfaction. But most companies that do this "right" aren't measuring mere satisfaction; they're measuring engagement.

What's the difference? In a nutshell, satisfaction is simply how happy or content your employees are. Engagement is a measure of their level of motivation and their potential for discretionary effort.

Big difference.

While satisfaction is certainly a component—or driver—of engagement, so are many other things, like trust, company pride, feeling valued, commitment, and feeling your work is significant or relevant. Given that definition, it's easy to see how someone could be satisfied, but not engaged. Having a bunch of happy employees might make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside; but it’s not going to necessarily have any impact on the business.

Employee Engagement, Commitment and Satisfaction

"Companies with high levels of employee engagement earn returns that are more than double those of the overall market" As HR managers consider the various options open to them for conducting their employee surveys, here at Insightlink we've been asked questions relating to the role of "employee engagement" in our surveys. In particular, we've been asked to compare our approach with that of alternatives such as the Hewitt Engagement Model and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Insightlink's standard 4Cs employee survey contains many of the same measures that organizations use to assess employee engagement, such as "You are willing to work above and beyond the call of duty for your organization," "Your work gives you a feeling of personal accomplishment" and "You feel proud to work at this organization."

However, our experience analyzing numerous employee studies is that employee engagement alone is not a sufficient barometer with which to gauge organizational performance, particularly in terms of influencing more concrete measures such as predicting turnover. In fact, our experience with employee engagement as a survey measure is very similar to the conclusions of the article "Work Engagement in Japan: Validation of the Japanese Version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale" that (a) all engagement items load on a single factor (rather than the multiple factors included in the Work Engagement Scale), which means that the scale is evaluating just one construct, and (b) that work engagement is positively related to job satisfaction. In other words, we place much more emphasis on the measure of employee satisfaction (using the 5 point scale "Extremely satisfied," "Very satisfied," "Somewhat satisfied," "Not very satisfied" and "Not at all satisfied") as the key predictor of organizational well-being. Our approach has been validated by a recent article from Wharton University of Pennsylvania called "Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices."

To obtain a copy of the full article, contact us at info@insightlink.com For this study, they examined the stock returns of companies with high employee satisfaction and compared them to various benchmarks, including the broader market, peer firms in the same industry, and companies with similar characteristics. They concluded from this evaluation that companies with high levels of employee satisfaction earn returns that are more than double those of the overall market. Our own model of employee satisfaction uses a range of factors to help explain an organization's level of employee satisfaction, which we summarize as the "4Cs": Culture, Commitment (which includes engagement), Communications and Compensation. These findings are then used to highlight both the main strengths of the organization and its primary opportunities for improvement. In all Insightlink 4Cs surveys, we also create what we call the "Loyalty and Engagement Matrix," which is a four-quadrant calculation that combines the level of employee satisfaction with anticipated tenure (a measures that has been proven to be an accurate predictor of eventual behavior) to create the following segments:


Committed Loyalists: Extremely/very satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay 2 or more years
Satisfied Opportunists: Extremely/very satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay less than 2 years
Dissatisfied Compromisers: Somewhat/not very/not at all satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay 2 or more years
Change Seekers: Somewhat/not very/not at all satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay less than 2 years

In most cases, we've found that the sum of Change Seekers and Satisfied Opportunists is usually pretty close to the organization's actual level of employee turnover. In response to a question about the engagement level of Millenial employees (specifically, "of course I think about leaving all the time -- I'm young and I have a long career ahead of me, but that doesn't mean I'm not engaged"), we would place more emphasis on their likelihood of leaving, since that can easily translate into turnover regardless of their level of engagement.

On a related note, we find the prospects of advancement within an organization can be just as important as current engagement in terms of preventing turnover, although many companies do not pay enough sufficient attention to the importance of career advancement/enhancement in their HR management. Our main focus of analysis, however, is on the Dissatisfied Compromisers. Since they are not satisfied with their jobs but plan to stay, they can have a very detrimental impact not only on individual productivity but also overall morale. We focus our analysis on determining what changes the organization needs to make to shift them into becoming Committed Loyalists. The good news is that we find that, when organizations commit to creating Action Plans based on the survey results, they can see improvements in overall satisfaction, with similar declines in the other segments. On average, we measure an increase in 7 percentage points between studies in top two box overall satisfaction.

To learn more about how Insightlink approaches the issues of employee engagement, commitment and satisfaction or For a guided Webinar walking you through Insightlink's 4Cs survey process, contact us at info@insightlink.com or call 866-802-8095 x705.

Insightlink offers a variety of professional services that can help organizations both improve employee engagement and evaluate their reasons for leaving. Our services include: Insightlink's 4Cs Employee Engagement Survey - a comprehensive diagnostic tool to determine how your employees feel on all 4Cs of employee satisfaction: Communications, Culture, Commitment and Compensation.


Insightlink's Exit Survey System - a powerful online exit survey management tool that provides survey results in real time and the ability to create aggregate summaries as needed.

Closing the Employee Engagement Gap

On a recent trip, I picked up a book at LAX that was written to show how great companies unlock employee potential for superior results, sharing stories from the authors' experiences as consultants on workforce effectiveness and employee engagement.

What I read were inspiring examples of how leaders (or what we may think of as senior management) can tap into their employees' energy and passion and turn them into a competitive advantage. Although I agree with David Zinger's criticism of the "us vs. them" mentality, I still believe there is much value that can nonetheless be gleaned from the book.

For those of you who are unfamilar with it, the premise is that there are five keys that, when together, unlock employees' potential (the "Them" in the list below):

1. Know Them.
2. Grow Them.
3. Inspire Them.
4. Involve Them.
5. Reward Them.

Over the coming weeks, I will look at how these five keys dovetail with the employee engagement model in Insightlink's 4Cs Employee Surveys.

5 Leadership Inputs into Employee Engagement

http://davidzinger.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/5-leadership-inputs-into-employee-engagement-mmp-27/

Key inputs into employee engagement from leaders and managers within the organization:

1. Engage yourself. Before you can foster or enhance the engagement of employees, never lose sight that you are one of those employees. Keep a focus on your own levels of employee engagement as you also champion engagement for others.
2. Hold engaging conversations. Avoid making employee engagement an announcement or policy. Ensure your employee engagement has a grass roots conversational quality to it. Talk with your employees. Doc Searls talking about
   conversational marketing stated: conversations are about talking, not announcing. They’re about listening, not surveying. They’re about paying attention, not getting attention. In many ways, employee engagement is less about what you put in and more about what you draw out of employees.
3. Be strong and strengthen others. Employees who work from their strengths and have work designed around their strengths are more engaged. As leaders, we must also talk with people about their strengths. There are many pathways to strengths.
4. Apply the simple and significant. I am passionate about employee engagement and believe it makes a huge difference for all in the workplace and I recognize how many things the average leader must attend to. It is not my intention to make employee engagement an imposition in an already overcrowded day. I encourage you to find the simplest yet most significant thing you can do to advance employee engagement.
5. Engage the clutch. My experience with the majority of leaders in organizations is that they respond to the full slate of demands with an excess of engagement and hours worked. We must regularly engage the clutch and go to neutral. Engaged leaders also find time for rest, recovery, and renewal. The path to full engagement also involves periods of disengagement — our walk to the desert for renewal.