It is bandied about like the Holy Grail – but what do people mean by employee engagement, and how do we define an engaged employee?
Let’s start with definitions. Employee is easy enough. We can all understand that. Engagement is trickier though: a promise to get married, a formal arrangement to go for dinner, or a battle between armed forces are the leading options from the OED. Let’s park those definitions at the back of our minds.
One online article, teasingly titled ‘Here’s the best definition of Employee Engagement you’ll ever see anywhere’ comes up with a definition from Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. His argument is that there are three levels of leadership: one is getting people to do what you want them to, the second is getting people to think what you want them to.
“But the best is getting people to believe what you want them to believe, and if people really fundamentally believe what you want them to believe they will walk through walls. They will do anything.”
Here we see, very clearly, two of the problems we get with much of what passes for definitions of employee engagement.
The first is too often people are really talking about the quality of leaders, not employees. They’re missing the target.
The second problem is much more fundamental.
Does an employer really want their employees to unquestioningly, like lemmings, follow everything they’re explicitly told and subliminally feel? (Is there only one true message coming down from GOD – our Group Operations Director?)
It’s close to saying ‘an engaged employee is a happy employee who does exactly what they’re told’. Of course nobody wants to work alongside a bunch of miserable cynics – that would be exhausting – but we wouldn’t wish to alongside those who blindly follow either. And importantly, this latter state would not be good for a business either.
Fortunately, his is not the only voice.
Dan Crim and Gerard Seijts have a more rounded argument: “An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work.”
This is much better – and it’s better because of the word ‘involved’.
It recognises that employees who care about their organisation can help make it a success. And if we take a moment to reflect on the word ‘care’ we see it’s a two-way process: a mother cares for her baby and gets something in return; a child cares for their elderly parents. It’s mutual, not one way, it’s not top down – it’s a partnership. It implies a spirit of teamwork, cooperation and mutuality.
It’s also much closer to our OED definitions of engagement: of two people getting engaged to be married and of having friends round to share a pasta bake and a bottle of rioja.
It recognises that engaged employees can help companies develop new ideas, can spot new ways of working, and help develop new business opportunities. They can challenge the status quo to change the way things that have always been done because the organisation has created an environment that involves that employee.
As communicators, our job is to help create that environment of mutuality. To give voice to people who want to be heard and to stop our GOD asking us to get employees to walk through walls for them.
It’s really a very simple concept. You don’t need to read the very many thousands of turgid words written about employee engagement online to develop a workable definition.
You don’t need it because 2,500 years ago the Chinese philosopher Confucius summed it up: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
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