The Hindu Business Line : Trivialisation of employee engagement

"Well, you see, earlier we used to cut cakes and celebrate birthdays in our department. Now that we have grown large, HR has put a process. So, I get these coupons for my birthday. I can come and select the cake I want and then go home and celebrate!"

Another employee engagement initiative bites the dust.

The good news is that there is enough empirical evidence to suggest that engaged employees help organisations enhance their productivity and profitability. The bad news is that there is more than enough empirical evidence to suggest that we live in a world filled with an increasing number of disengaged employees! Naturally, organisations are desperate to get started and make some progress.

What we see happening however is half-hearted and amateurish attempts at increasing employee engagement. I think we have ended up trivialising employee engagement.

So, is employee engagement a department, a role, a set of activities or a state of being?

Engaged employees are seen to be "Productive members of an organisation who are psychologically committed to a role in the organisation in which they use their talents."

"They are supposed to speak positively about the organisation to co-workers, potential employees and customers, demonstrate an intense desire to be part of the organisation, and exert extra efforts and take on work that contributes to employer success."

It is supposed to be "a state of emotional and intellectual involvement that workers have in an organisation."

The key ingredients of an engaged employee seem to be:

Tenure with the organisation

Display of emotional involvement in what he does

Doing more than what is expected

Displaying pride in the place he work

So, what is wrong with the current approaches of organisations in securing employee engagement?

The fallacies

I see three fundamental fallacies in some of the current approaches to securing employee engagement.

Activity trap

The first is to do with seeing engagement as a set of activities we do to people rather than as the process of helping the employees achieve a desired state of being.

We fail to realise that it is the employee who decides to demonstrate engagement and that the drivers of engagement are a lot more intrinsic than we have made it out to be.

We have not even managed to connect

The second is to do with the fact that many HR practitioners are confused between "engaging" with their employees and "engagement". To me, engaging with employees is about establishing a connect, a relationship and a bond.

This is essentially an employee relations process. A lot of what large organisations are struggling with is to do with just trying to "connect" or "engage" with their employees, leave along achieve "engagement" which is the much more complex process of securing commitment and dedication.

Having inadvertently severed every possible touch point with our employees through use of automation, and outsourcing we are now using expensive and often disengaged HR professionals to engage with our employees. This is a huge fallacy.

Attempting to achieve employee engagement without even being able to "connect" or "engage" is like trying to drive a car without tyres.

On the other hand, undertaking hordes of activities that merely secure "connect" and believing that you have achieved engagement is equally futile. It is like confusing the tyres for the car!

Market-orientation from the organisation and engagement from the employee

Organisations of today are under pressure to redefine their employee value propositions and implement policies and practices which end up creating a market oriented relationship with their employees.

This could include the very nature of the employment arrangement, the onus for career development, the investment in training and the orientation of reward systems.

Having done this, organisations however continue to expect their employees to go out of the way and demonstrate discretionary effort.

Understanding this organisational predicament and accepting this reality will obviously call for a very high level of maturity among the workforce — something that is missing in great measure. HR professionals also find it hard to live with this contradiction.

The way forward

The historical motivation theories as well as the modern engagement models clearly tell us what employee engagement is all about. It is time to draw on this knowledge and do some real work.

The first step to engagement is to do with organisation design, job design and a supportive environment to succeed. Organisations that get this right certainly secure employee engagement.

The second step would be to re-establish "connect" with employees. This will call for CEOs who share this passion and believe in real connect.

We will then need to go back in time and recreate and re-deploy some of the good old welfare officers who will genuinely demonstrate concern for employee welfare.

The third area of focus should be in enhancing the maturity of young employees so that they are able to experience control over their destinies and take charge of it. Mature employees are engaged employees.

Of course, before all this happens, business leaders need to first enhance the engagement levels of the HR folk. If HR attrition in organisations is any indication, it is a cause for worry.

Beyond the opportunities and the money, I see the sense of disappointment at not being able to make impact as the primary reason for this attrition.

As long as HR professionals behave the same way as the other employees do, HR cannot drive the engagement agenda. So, to commence the journey of employee engagement, HR engagement might actually be a good place to start!

(The author is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and processes for organisations across diverse industries. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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