As January comes to a close and a sniff of spring is in the air – the daffodils have broken through in my garden and the cherry tree’s in bud - we would hope for a bit more optimism for the future. However this year seems to have started on a downer before we have even begun. VAT rises, fare increases, public sector cuts, and now dismal economic figures seems to point to all too many of us are battening down the hatches and seeing 2011 as a year to be endured rather than a year of growth and new opportunities.
With all this in mind I have been trying to put together a presentation on employee engagement where I have been asked to look to the future and talk about where engagement might be going next. I just could not help however but first reflect on the past and the fact that despite all the evidence linking high engagement to higher organisational performance, managers have been slow to act with the result that engagement scores in the UK are still relatively low. Regular surveys suggest that less than a quarter of workers are fully engaged and a significant number are actually disengaged.
Whilst this may be because most organisations are only just really starting to get to grips with engagement and what it means for performance it also reflects the failure of many managers to understand that it is their own behaviour and attitudes that has the most significant impact on engagement outcomes.
So what does lie ahead for engagement? It’s likely that we will see more transactional engagement with individuals willing to display the outside demeanour of engagement without really establishing any deep emotional connection to their work or employer. In other words they are willing to go along with the notion of engagement as long as it suits them and if they think that is what will achieve rewards in employment such as performance bonuses or simply keeping their job, but if a better deal appears they will quickly jump ship.
We are also likely to see people engaged at different levels with different aspects of their job as they focus in on what they need to do to remain in employment. So we may see individuals more willing to embrace change or be more flexible if their also believe this will make them more employable. However they may actually resist change if they are over engaged with certain aspects of their job. For example our latest research on sustainable performance found that employees who are deeply engaged with their customers may actually resist change if they think it will result in a worse deal for them.
This also means that we may actually see engagement scores going up over the year despite the doom and gloom. However this may not be quite the cause for celebration unless managers can really understand what this means and challenge their own behaviour and actions to ensure they understand the true nature of engagement and what they need to do to translate it into high performance outcomes.
If they can do that then 2011 may be a year of opportunity after all!
I would agree with the view that fully engaged staff can cause issues, mostly because the level of perceived personal ownership of the role can change to the degree that it makes the concept of being directed by anyone else an unreasonable request, regardless of whether it results in a worse deal or not. There is such a fine balance between a highly engaged person performing well, and a highly engaged person performing in a slightly misdirected manner. Ultimately, to tackle the latter is extremely difficult to do without causing enormous upset to the individual, and to those around them, leading to organisations (in my experience) allowing misdirected performance to continue as the alternative of an entire department quickly becoming negative and disengaged quite a frightful thought.
Thats an interesting concept, and surely some sort of an answer to this issue is to ensure that any process which is put in place to look to qualify what Engagement within an organisation looks like and should be, should also in part look to ensure that the other 'bits and bobs' are in place, such as strong management performance and good structure which allow employees to know where they fit in the organisation and culture.
Angela any thoughts?
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