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Angela Baron's blog

Is engagement always good?

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Employee engagement is the holy grail of business or so you would think seeing that the topic seems to permeate everything written on HR at the moment.   Not surprising since all the evidence points to engagement being the path to success through extra employee effort and performance, manifesting itself in happier customers, better products and ultimately higher profits.

But is engagement always good?  Is it always with the employer or the organisation?  Actually “what” employees engage with has been relatively neglected in the extensive literature on the subject.  When we did our Shaping the Future research it became increasingly evident that employees engage with all manner of things at work and can actually be highly engaged and motivated to put in extra effort whilst being pretty ambivalent about their organisation generally. 

For instance we found employees heavily committed to their team and their customers and performing really well yet expressing very little engagement with the wider business.  We also found others highly committed to their profession and the tasks they were completing but disengaged from the management process.  Others expressed higher engagement with certain aspects of their job than others, particularly those they felt unnecessary or having an adverse effect on customer service.
 
We identified this phenomenon as “locus of engagement” and concluded that if organisations want to capture real value from their employees they need to understand exactly what it is that presses their buttons.  They shouldn’t just rely on engagement scores but really need to understand what lies behind them to make sure people are engaged with the right things.  We also found that over- attachment to particular aspects of the job might make individuals reluctant to embrace change and hence actually inhibit sustainable performance.

Happily for us the researchers from Kingston Business School collecting data from their engagement consortium have backed us up with evidence from their data which shed more light on this phenomenon.  We are going to discuss all this further at an Engagement Forum meeting on 11 May.

Attend the Engagement Forum event on 11 May

 

 

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2 comments

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Anonymous
Mac
11 May 2011 at 11:55

Hi Angela. I believe engagement to be absolutely essential. So much so that it's staggering that we even have to mention it. A bit like saying we need air to breathe.

Engagement of self is also critically important. Indeed, engagement of whole markets and purpose also. Here is a post I wrote recently on this subject:

http://clientonomy.com/credo

Without engagement we have little motivation. Without motivation we have someone simply going through the motions. Not a recipe for success.

Regards, Mac.

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