Feb
1
Personal choice - and employee engagement
Filed Under Human Resource Management ( HRM), Motivation, business
I spent yesterday in conversation with leaders - on the topic of leadership. Earlier this week at the launch of the Edinburgh HR Academy our table discussions were about employee “wellbeing”. In both the issue of engaging and engaged employees came up. You don’t have to Google “employee engagement” to realise that it is a hot topic.
Kris Dunn has come up with an interesting test for employee engagement. Kris refers back to a previous post on the definition of employee engagement which caused a fair bit of debate. Amongst the comments was this
… a sure factor in one’s “engagement quotient” is [the employee’s] eagerness/willingness to take on a challenge.
Now that’s interesting. Does that mean that people who do what they were hired for but don’t take on anything extra - eg the plodders - have a lower engagement quotient. Or are they fully engaged - but at a different level?
In coaching conversations when the person I am coaching decides on an action I will ask them to rate on a scale of 1 - 10 ( with 1 being no chance and 10 being absolutely) the chance of doing what they say they will. Anything less than 8 and I doubt that they are “engaged with” or committed to that action to make it happen and we go on further to discuss why that might be. So -people being people - understanding why someone would engage with an employer or task may be the critical element of good levels of employee engagement? Hmmm…
As I scratch my head over that one - I guess ( depending on your work ethic and personal values) doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay should be a given. Do engaged people give more by way of discretionary effort - ie will they go the extra mile - or only for the right employer?
Can we make assumptions about the engagement with the task meaning as much as the engagement with the employer - or vice versa. I guess that someone with a calling into say teaching - can remain totally engaged in being a teacher but be engaged at different levels with their employer depending on the school they are in? In this case does their engagement lie with their profession - and not the employer?
Thinking about why I chose the title of this post I am most interested to know if being engaged in your work/with your organisation is an act of conscious (or I suppose unconscious) choice based on a number of varying elements depending on what the employee’s interests and values. And with that in mind how can any employer have a successful strategy for employee engagement?
