Recognise This! – You can’t change someone; you can’t engage someone. You can create environments of trust, appreciation and purpose in which people want to engage, grow and develop.
What’s the number one most helpful (or most heard) relationship advice?
I reckon it’s to remind people, “You can’t change the other person.” And this is wise advice, indeed. Too many relationships fail because one person thinks they can change the other person’s annoying or downright disturbing habits or mannerisms over time.
This simply isn’t true. One person cannot change another. But don’t worry; this isn’t turning into an Agony Aunt blog (or, for my American readers, a “Dear Abby” blog).
Whilst I’m sure the vast majority of you agree with this advice, many of you also likely think you can do something (create a programme, start an initiative) to engage your employees. This, too, simply isn’t true. An engagement programme (and certainly not an engagement survey) will never engage employees.
But, much like building a relationship based on mutual trust and appreciation, you can create a workplace culture and environment in which employees choose to engage.
What brought all of this to mind? An engagement battle going on amongst several bloggers I regularly follow and admire:
Argument 1: Happy Employees and Engaged Employees Are Very Different
It started with William Tincup’s post on Fistful of Talent, “The Long Con of Engagement” in which he says (ellipses are original to the content):
“Do me a favour…for just one moment today…think critically about engagement. Do you really want happy employees? Please stress test the logic…what if they are happy but they suck? Do you still want them in your organisation? What’s more important to your particular organisation: happiness or competence?…Lastly, I’m tired of people pimping out engagement as if it were some super elixir that fixed everything that ails us. It doesn’t. Truth hurts sometimes.”
I agree with William on this, with one very important caveat. Happiness and engagement are two very different things. Happy employees (like satisfied ones) could be so because you offer Starbucks in the café.
But truly engaged employees are voluntarily working harder every day because they want to, and they’re working hard on projects and objectives that matter to you.
Argument 2: Engagement Is Not a Programme “Done” to Employees
Then Paul Hebert chimed in on his i2i blog, pointing out:
“The problem is that most companies still think of engagement as something they ‘do to’ employees or in even worse cases, ‘do for‘ employees. And engagement isn’t something employees “give” employers.…If you want engagement – the real kind – make it a dialogue. Both parties give, both parties get. It’s not about what you want or what the company wants. Engagement is about what is right for the both of us. No one was ever engaged by being handed everything they ever wanted. No one is engaged when they get absolutely nothing they need.”
I also agree with Paul. No “programme” will ever deliver what both employees and employers need. But everyone benefits from a strong culture of recognition in which everyone wants to engage. (Be sure to click through to Paul’s post for an excellent Dilbert cartoon parodying engagement in its worst form.)
Argument 3: Engagement Is Not a “Definition”
Then Jason Lauritsen chimed in to point out that we can’t even agree on what the definition of engagement is, much less how to go about creating an environment where engagement can happen. His advice is spot on:
“Why wouldn’t you want your employees engaged in their work and in your organisation (however you define it)? It’s not engagement that’s the problem. The problem is how we are practicing and managing employee engagement. Employee engagement isn’t a survey or a score. A survey is a tool. A score is number. Engagement is neither of those things. The key to cracking the code on engagement is in the execution. We need to be much more intentional and deliberate about our work with engagement starting with getting clear on what we mean when we say engagement and how it impacts our business.”
Argument 4: An Engaging Culture Is Possible – If We Want It
Finally, Jessica Lee (again on Fistful of Talent), boiled this all down to the real question:
“Why can’t we – especially us HR and recruiting types – simply believe in a better vision for work and bring that vision to life for our organisations? Even if it means we slowly chip away toward that diamond in the rough. Engagement. Not sheer, pure ecstasy for the work we do. Not an ultra-scientific thing that we hypothesise, test, re-test and analyse. But something else.”
It’s that “something else” that I believe all the employee engagement pundits are trying to get to. Yes, as William Tincup says, “work is work.” But it doesn’t have to be soul crushing.
We might not enjoy every aspect of what we do every day we do it. But we should, at least, believe in why we’re doing it, appreciate the people we’re doing it with, and enjoy the culture in which we’re able to work. What say you? Where do you fall on “engagement?”
Derek Irvine is senior vice president of global strategy at Globoforce.
We welcome any and all contributions from the community, so please feel free to share your views and opinions with us, your colleagues and peers via our blogs section.
6 Responses
Breaking the Mould
The Management culture has everything to do with optimising and maintaining productivity levels, attendance records and avoiding a too high staff turnover rate. If engagement = productivity+attendance+retention then why dont we call it that ?
Most working people I know really want to feel engaged in their work. From the really ambitious and sychophantic "greasy pole " climbers to those that just want to keep busy to reduce boredom and make the days fly by so they can go off and do something they are really engaged in. This self determined engagement level will increase or decrease as a result of Management action or innaction.
The base influences on human satisfaction levels all come into play related to levels of engagement whether they are influenced by Management, are as a result of external social and environmental factors, or are a hybrid.
The nature of the business is also a significant factor e.g. Working in a "dog eat dog", competitive, purely for profit business or as part of an altruistic organisation I would argue have different types of satisfaction or comfort levels.
Perhaps we should be trying to define what the meaning of engagement is to the different organisational groupings rather than follow a one size fits all approach which on the face of the evidence available to date does not work for any?
PS It is never too late to learn from history. With that in mind I always attempt to remind myself of W Edwards Demings 14 points for Management every now and again. See:
http://www.managementwisdom.com/wedde14po.html
Don’t confuse Engagement and Enjoyment.
If you don’t know what it is, anything will look fuzzy.
When Prince Charles got married, the first time, he was asked about love. He said "I am sure it will come, whatever it is."
Should we get rid of love because not everybody knows what it is?
We cannot enjoy everything all of the time and repetetive tasks, even ones that we started by enjoying, can become monotonous.
If however we are engaged it means that even though we are not enjoying the moment, we are aware of our position in the bigger picture and are able to be proud of our part in it.
— Peter A Hunter http://www.BreakingtheMould.co.uk
Engagement – and enjoyment?
I think David’s point in his reply about ‘job-enjoyment’ (not ‘happiness’) is critical to engagement. It surely defies common-sense to think that anyone will engage significantly and productively with any organisation, where their job is down-right ‘unenjoyable’?
So can a ‘horrid job’ actually be ‘enjoyable’? You bet it can! Even though your ‘horrible’ may not be mine.
Depending on how we each are made, it could most traditionally be about shared goals, values and recognised achievement, reciprocated team loyalty – and even shared adversity. Think ‘the Arned Services’ as a great example, and many others. (I’d personally add many nursing roles and coal mining, as other interesting examples in completely different worlds. All jobs I wouldn’t want to do myself, yet I know many personally who have said they truly *loved* their work!)
But it could be much more about personal achievement and challenges overcome. Think ‘Accountancy’, or ‘Dentistry’ perhaps, or ‘Software Engineering’, or even being an Olympic athlete? – in case that helps you to think usefully of roles you might personally hate, but which clearly can engage many others collegiately?
Or it could be just about ‘control’, (hmm, I’d better be careful here! Eg: some managers and many entrepreneurs?), or as a psychological subset, just ‘free choice’, which may well apply to many of us?
And of course it could even be more about some ‘greater purpose’, which may perhaps have none of the above qualities of a job. What about being a Bishop for example? – probably one of the least understood and most demanding of roles, even if that particular career-path may never have occurred to you! Or a Careers Counsellor a Fund-raiser or Politician?
However we are made though, I can offer a more global, generic shaft of insight. Job enjoyment and satisfaction, that may lead to ‘engagement’, to my mind requires at least all five positive answers below, typically known as ‘Sapiential Choice’:
1) I know WHAT my job is;
2) I know WHY my job is important, and how it impacts on the rest of the organisation;
3) I know HOW to do it, and others give me credit for this:
4) I am told WHEN I have done it well, and the consequences of this;
5) I know HOW I might do it even better, and am encouraged to do so.
How does that sound and feel to you?
This is not of course the full story. This doesn’t cover the ‘felt fairness’ of comparative rewards, or even absolute reward versus perceived needs. It doesn’t equally take into account any subversive elements of counter-ideology, the effect of historic promises broken, core values breached or insensitve approaches to wholesale change. But not a bad start?
Best wishes,
Jeremy
Engagement
Well done for stimulating a debate on this subject. I would also like to add a comment on the latest drive for "Improving employee levels of discretionary effort" as part of an engagement initiative. It is simply this. It is immoral for people who tend to enjoy bigger salaries and bigger bonuses to encourage those on lower salaries and lower or no bonus to work for nothing ( zilch, zero, thin air, nuffink, nought…..). The people who think this is a good practice should be advised that at least two well respected but sadly long gone gentlemen called Wilberforce and Luther King would not approve. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot would of course but we dont want to follow their philosophies, do we ?
Tincup for President….
Excellent, provocative stuff, Derek. Hadn’t read Tincup before; direct and irreverent – what a bloke!!
If we struggle to define ‘engagement’, why is the word even out there in this particular context? And if you locked ten people in a room who thought they could define it, they’d be disagreeing within minutes.
I think that if someone is conscientious and reliable (two qualities which to some extent also embrace ‘competent’), it’s as much as you can rightfully expect, although some will go the extra mile… and credit to them. Put another way, if slapping processed cheese onto burgers all day is all I could get, I’d do it as well as I could, but don’t insult my intelligence by expecting me to ‘high-five’ about it; it seems that some peddlars of engagement think that we should all perform tasks with missionary zeal; you don’t need to buy into a vision or mission statement to do something well. Some jobs just aren’t very stimulating physically or mentally, and no-one should be beating themselves up over it!
Bin the cult of engagement…. it’s simply too fuzzy, (surprise, surprise!!) and sometimes even damaging.
(I must confess, I’ve spoken about ’employee engagement’, but audiences never received what they expected!)
John
great post.
Youve made an intersting point about staff engagement ans how it seems to be something that is forever talked about and wanted but difficult to see happening in real life. What does an engaged employee actually look like? For an employee to be fulyly engaged with their work, they will have to enjoy what they are doing and get pleasure from it, otherwise work is simply work.