Business Leaders- How do you know your employees are really engaged on the job?

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Permalink Reply by Carol Smith on June 27, 2008 at 8:25am

I'm not a business leader. I work in HR. My question would be how do they know their business on on track. I'm sure that business leaders would use many different ways to track their business and should also use a variety of ways to measure the engagement of their employees.

One key difference I see is that engagement has an emotional element that changes day to day, moment by moment, from one person to the next. This does not happen in quite the same was for productivity/sales for example

Not sure that this answers your question - but hope it gives a view point

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Permalink Reply by Lawrence Polsky on June 29, 2008 at 9:32am

That is a good point. Results do speak to engagement. Good results, good engagement.

Based on the 2 research reports I saw last week (one from ASTD and one from Towers Perin) on engagement, only 25-33% of people are very engaged on the job. Could it be that companies are getting decent results, but could get even higher results if more people were engaged but they don't think they can because people have been so disengaged for so long? They get used to level of results they achieve. So if they look at results, could it be that it doesn't tell them about the possibility of even higherr results if even more people were really engaged. And by looking at engagement numbers and engagement data it would show were the possibilites are.

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Permalink Reply by Jon Ingham on July 22, 2008 at 3:59pm

I think you make a really important point Lawrence. In any other area of business the finding that 70% of resources aren't fit for purpose would be seen as scandalous.

I think the reason it's not for HR is that changing the ways organisations work to make a significant, transformational difference to engagement is just too difficult, even to comprehend never mind execute.

Wouldn't doing so be a great source of energy though!

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Permalink Reply by George Reavis on June 29, 2008 at 12:32pm

I agree engagement is a very emotional (soft) element that changes. For that reason we choose not to measure it, but rather help our front line leaders (user-centered approach) to make their own assessments (informal opinions which foster dialogue) on a continuum with only three categories--engaged (involved with heart and mind), not engaged (neutral), and disengaged. Leaders help move everyone towards engagement by working with them to ask (mostly non-verbally) the critical questions for "How are we doing?"

These front line leaders understand not to take it 'personally' that they cannot engage another person (telling them what to do to engage), only help them to let daily activities/experiences themselves provide feedback (think for themselves to engage). While the focus is on daily activities, people are certainly a big part of those activities so we would expect to see the energy from an engaged person flow to others and then to witness that same person be re-energized by the experience.

By the way, Blessing White also just released results of an international engagement survey they just finished - http://www.blessingwhite.com/EEE__report.asp . Very similar results in most all recent studies the past several years! I look at this as about 3 out of 10 people have learned to get feedback from their own daily activities (whether they realize it as is not taught in any curriculum) and bring their heart and mind to group efforts. About 5 out of 10 follow instructions and have learned to rely on colleagues and supervisors for most all feedback (is taught in most every curriculum). Thus 2 out of 10 are distracted or do not care. Once a person experiences the self-fulfillment of engagement they are energized by it.

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• Engagement Continuum.JPG, 108 KB

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