Engagement: a new way of thinking about people

Engagement is a relatively new way of thinking about leading people — a sort of magnetic rather than a coerced approach to getting people to want to do whatever is necessary to ensure the continuous high performance and success of the business.

As a philosophy of management, “engagement” centers on an individual’s degree of dedication to the organization and its goals with an implied reward of self-actualization or personal growth. The assumption in the business world is that engagement level predicts the positive intensity and quality of effort the organization can expect from an individual within job confines. In this regard, engagement’s value to the business is a predictor of future behavior and effort.

Business leaders should care about employee engagement because, when correctly measured, engagement profiles provide management with a statistical method to maximize return on human capital. For example, our studies show that positively engaged employees have higher than average individual productivity and innovation events plus they remain with the company longer than disengaged employees. In addition, the discretionary efforts of the fully engaged are of higher quality and of a more positive intensity than other less-engaged employees: their economic contributions to the business consistently exceed their employment costs. From a quality of work life perspective, positively engaged employees are energetic and enthusiastic which makes them more productive in group efforts and makes them a pleasure to work with...oh, fully engaged employees also solve problems.

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.

Engagement: High-performance Culture

A high-performance culture is critical for building employee, engagement, commitment and enthusiasm, acting with speed and flexibility and driving and sustaining growth.

It is characterized by:

A clear, compelling, communicated corporate purpose to shape business decisions, generate customer loyalty and inspire employee engagement, passion and maximum contribution

Shared organizational values that guide people as well as influence business practices and decisions as the organization delivers on its promises to all its constituents

An environment that encourages individual ownership of both the organization’s bottom-line results and its cultural foundation.

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.

dearth of skilled employees?

As many companies are finding out, the old adage that "a good man (or woman) is hard to find" is becoming increasingly true and government predictions suggest that even in times of high unemployment, the dearth of skilled employees is only going to get worse. Factors such as a changing economy and an aging workforce can join together to create an employment environment where competent employees who are unhappy in their current situations are motivated to find a new place to "hang their hats." When these factors are combined with the apparent weakening in employee engagement, employers may find themselves faced with a confounding problem: Unwelcome employee turnover.

In fact, a recent Insightlink National Employee Satisfaction study shows that only 21% of U.S. employees feel fully committed to their employers and only 12% agree that their employers are fully committed to them. Not surprising, however, the degree of commitment between employees and employers is directly linked to the level of job satisfaction expressed by employees. Among employees who are extremely satisfied with their jobs, 94% also feel extremely or very committed to their employers. Compare this to those employees who are not very satisfied where only 13% feel that level of commitment.As in any marriage, trust, security and the knowledge that your needs and opinions are being considered are among the traits that keep commitment strong. At work, these qualities can be even more important than the value of monetary compensation and rewards - in fact, emotional rewards can actually have a larger impact than monetary rewards on overall employee satisfaction. In other words, although employees might leave one job for another with better pay, their cause for leaving might not be salary at all but a myriad of other reasons - often more than likely having to do with mistrust of the company, feeling unappreciated, not respected or not recognized for the time and effort they have put into their work. The primary implication is to emphasize the importance of employee-employer relations and the need for organizations to really demonstrate that they are serious about their workers. There is substantial research indicating that employers can favorably influence how their employees feel by taking positive steps to create a work environment that indicates, by action, that the employee is valued. Although important, pay is only one part and employers must also address fairness, quality of supervision and support for employees to successfully achieve a work/life balance. The following specific factors and initiatives have been shown to positively affect employee satisfaction:

Clearly stated guidelines defining appropriate work behavior and job requirements.
Supportive communications with immediate supervisors and senior management.
The quality of the supervisory relationship.
Favorable developmental training and experiences.
Clearly-defined career goals and paths.
Frequent recognition, both formal and informal.
Fair and objective feedback on performance, provided on a regularly-scheduled basis.
Personal and family-oriented policies and actions.
Sufficiency of pay, benefits and rewards.

Employee Engagement -----> Customer Satisfaction -----> Organizational Strength

Engaged employees are the essence of “Insightlink” – a connection that can make or break an organization’s revenue growth and profitability. Without this “Insightlink” (engaged employees performing in an engaging manner resulting in customers responding more loyally) profits and future growth can be compromised or even cease to be.

The Insightlink is basically the bridge – whether it has the strength of a chain or the precariousness of a thin thread – that correlates employee engagement to an organization's strength, most typically financial strength.

Employee Engagement ----> Customer Satisfaction -----> Organizational Strength

Discerning who is an engaged employees is actually more challenging than one may think. Defining engaged employees requires looking at results of all employees in context. Among the reasons organizations choose Insightlink is for its expertise and independently-commissioned benchmark norms. Based on experience, Insightlink can tell you that engagement is not only crucial for the employees with direct customer contact – it’s also important for behind-the-scenes employees who indirectly impact an organization’s revenue and profitability by the way they support managers and other employees.

You may be surprised to hear that improved customer satisfaction is linked to cost savings and revenue gains so organizations can predict and even measure the return on investment from action planning goals stemming from employee engagement survey results. Bottom line: Employee engagement surveys and strategic actions based on quality engagement surveys are a sound investment for the organization and its customers.

Before you dive in, know that key players from top management to HR points of contact need to be on board. Organizational success on relies on successful communications and needs to ensure that employees:

Grasp the purpose of your employee-engagement initiative
Understand the financial goals of the initiative
Clearly understand how senior management is committed to a survey that supports an employee engagement-customer response-organizational growth model

Employee Engagement & Customer Satisfaction

While there is no magic pill or instant solution for employee engagement, Insightlink’s years of experience with organizations of different sizes and spanning various industries reveals clear connections between employee engagement and organizational strength. One of the strongest connections (what we call the “Insightlink” itself) is often customer satisfaction.

The Insightlink is the bridge – whether it has the strength of a chain or the precariousness of a thin thread – that correlates employee engagement to organizations strength, most typically financial strength.

Employee Engagement ----> Customer Satisfaction -----> Organizational Strength

Engaged employees function as the beginning of the link and, ideally, the other side or end is the organization’s strength as a whole, In between, customer satisfaction is crux of the “Insightlink.” The Insightlink takes the strength employee engagement and leverages it into revenue growth and profitability. Engaged employees performing in a manner leads customers to act more loyally, which in turn, generally leads to greater profits and future growth. Non-engaged employees (such as what Insightlink’s 4Cs framework calls “Dissatisfied Compromisers”) do just the opposite.

So how do we help organizations build and strengthen this link? When it comes to employee engagement, the process and practice for appropriate alignment of survey results with subsequent action planning optimally includes:

Leadership involvement from senior executives, particularly the top executive
Clarifying and establishing overall objectives; determining drivers of engagement
Communicating internally the objectives
Aligning to objectives, including appropriate accountability
Measurement of the work-life environment
Acting on the results

The underlying premise is that successful organizations need to retain people who care about their work, who care about how they perform it and who care about the overall success of the company. When engaged employees are what customers regularly encounter and they create value internally that is felt by customers externally, customers gain an intrinsic sense of value in doing business with the organization and will stay loyal, purchase more and/or more often and tell others about their experiences.

12 Ways Employees at Larger Organziations are Less Satisfied

What was surprising was a virtual lack of significant differences between perceptions of supervisors linked to employee size. In fact, one’s immediate supervisors having a clear vision of the organization’s future was the one of the only areas of difference -- and it is not surprising given the size of larger organizations that direct supervisors do not have as clear a vision as they may at other companies (50% for <101,>500).

In looking at what employees feel is important, attitudes were fairly similar across the board, with the importance of there being someone at work who encourages your development (63% for <101,>500) appearing to be one of the only attributes showing a downward trend in importance linked to employee size. On the other hand, there were a dozen measures where assessment of performance revealed a 9 or more percentage point difference between companies with fewer than 100 versus those with over 500 employees.

1. It is possible to cut through the bureaucracy to get things done at your organization
2. Is doing a good job of hiring the right people for the appropriate positions
3. Senior management listens and responds to employee ideas
4. Providing useful coaching to improve your performance
5. At work, your opinions seem to count
6. There are few rules or tasks that get in the way of work
7. This organization shows a genuine interest in its employees
8. Employees all over the organization talk and share ideas
9. Learning new skills is a high priority in your organization
10. Employees have input into the training they receive
11. You feel that people primarily get ahead in your organization based on the merits of their work
12. Senior management encourages employees to have fun at work

These findings reveal that employees are willing to put up with less satisfaction in several areas in exchange for satisfaction is one important one -- benefits. Benefits appear to eclipse salary and job security as reasons employees who appear to be dissatisfied stay put. Of course, contributing factors to these differences may at least be somewhat attributable to industry or job functions disproportionately represented among companies with over 500, such as manufacturing and production. Nevertheless, satisfaction with benefits is just one of the areas explored by Insightlink’s 4Cs survey and, in light of these findings, Insightlink recommends spending time evaluating your organization's benefits (as assessed by employees) and making sure they provide incentive for top performers to stay. Insightlink offers separate benefit-focused surveys in addition to its well-known 4Cs survey, which includes a battery of questions about compensation generally as well as benefits specifically. Want to learn more about how Insightlink stands out from other survey companies with its 4Cs approach to employee surveys, independent norms, unparalleled service and great value? Interested in seeing how your organization can benefit from its own employee survey?

Employee Engagement by Organization Size - Part 1

Employers may underestimate the role that benefits play in keeping employees, according Insightlink’s annual normative survey.

In looking at satisfaction with various aspects of employee engagement, satisfaction with benefits literally appears to be the only area where employees at larger companies (i.e., over 500 employees) seem to be significantly more satisfied than their peers at smaller companies.

On literally all other scores showing variances of 8 or more percentage points, usually organizations of 100 or fewer employees (and usually even ones with between 101 and 500) showed higher satisfaction scores.

Overall satisfaction was significantly lower at organizations with over 500 employees (60% for <101, 59% 101-500, 54% 500+) and satisfaction with senior management dropped as organization size grew (49% <101, 44% 101-500, 37% 500+). Similarly, morale – personal, departmental and organizational – decreased as the employee number increased.


Morale of dept/work group 50%/45%/38%
The morale among employees 46%/39%/35%
of your organization as a whole
Your own morale 60%/58%/51%

Employee engagement 2.0 has arrived courtesy of Google

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum (May 20, 2009)

If you thought Google employees were the most engaged in today’s cutthroat and recession-riddled corporate world, think again. Despite receiving more than 700,000 applications a year to work for the planet’s most forward thinking Web 2.0 outfit, the company has seen hiring slow, been forced to cut back on some of its infamous perks such as afternoon tea and its annual ski trip and has even seen some of its most talented Googlers jump ship to competitors such as Twitter and Facebook.

So what has it gone and done? Well being the most advanced and innovative algorithmic genius in its class it’s gone and done what it’s best at doing - created an algorithm - but this time has taken employee engagement 2.0 to an entirely new and never-before-seen level. It has produced an algorithm so advanced and so ingrained in the employment and engagement process that it can supposedly crunch employee data such as appraisals, salaries and promotion history and decipher who among its staff is the most unhappy and who among the 20,000 engineers, developers and nerds it employs is the most willing to leave. Not only does it know every move we as web users make online, it can now pry into the work-life habits of its own and work out who should stay and who should go. It’s hard to fathom but Google’s boffins know the answers before their staff do.

Currently in a test phase, the system, if proved effective – and it would have to be faultless considering the information it gathers and the consequences it could have on people’s lives – could forever change the way businesses and their internal communications departments around the world vet and engage or even dismiss their employees.

The web giant has so far, however, discovered one key trend. Those of its employees that feel underused are more likely than others to leave. But the further it looks into the problem and examines employee reviews and pay histories the more I can imagine it will uncover more detail about how its workers think, behave, and react to certain emotions and situations. The key element will be to determine whether or not this research is effective in engaging more staff, unearthing those that are unhappiest and crucially, considering the economic times we are living in, what result this has on the bottom line. Could this be the ultimate tool, the Holy Grail, that we’ve all been looking for, to finally and accurately measure how we can effectively engage our employees and return a healthy profit in order to keep share and stakeholders happy? The possibilities, as with anything this company seems to do, are endless.

Google’s engagement algorithm – why now?

Crunches data from employee reviews, promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula to identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to leave.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula that is still being tested.

Google says the algorithm has already identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.

Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can’t make the same impact as the company matures.

Google's algorithm has been described by one HR commentator as “helping the company get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave”.

In recent weeks several top executives has left the company including advertising sales boss Tim Armstrong and display-advertising chief David Rosenblatt, Doug Bowman, engineering director Steve Horowitz and search-quality chief Santosh Jayaram, both of which have switched sides to Facebook and Twitter.

7 Organizational Inputs into Employee Engagement

David Zinger on Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement: Monday Morning Percolator #26

To achieve full levels of employee engagement, efforts must come from organizations, leaders, and employees. This will outline 7 actions organizations can take to foster higher levels of employee engagement.

1. Assess and remove any roadblocks or hurdles to employee engagement. Ask employees what could be removed or lessened to increase their level of engagement with the organization.
2. Create a culture where employee engagement is valued, discussed, shared, and lived. Employee engagement needs to be both recognized and appreciated.
3. Ensure that the top leaders within the organization are committed to employee engagement, engaged themselves, and they are willing and committed to investing organizational resources into the engagement initiatives.
4. Move beyond measuring employee engagement to taking action on those measures. Attend to your metrics but focus on your people.
5. Help employees see the benefit of employee engagement for themselves and their customers. Don’t let your engagement initiatives become organizational manipulations to merely squeeze out more productivity and discretionary effort from employees.
6. Study your highly engaged employees to determine the vital behaviors they perform that contribute to their high level of engagement. Once those behaviors are determined work at spreading those behaviors to other people within the organization. Strive to make employee engagement a viral phenomenon for the organization.
7. Educate leaders and managers within the organization on how to foster employee engagement and help leaders understand and leverage their key role in employee engagement efforts.

http://davidzinger.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/7-organizational-inputs-into-employee-engagement-mmp26/