Employee Engagement – Not all Song n’ Dance

A few days back, I came across this graphic which shows Engagement of Employees as blocks of a house. Being in the Real Estate sector, this obviously aroused my curiosity.

What is interesting is that the foundation of employee engagement is the Organizational Culture and the Values being espoused at the workplace. This in turn shapes the job / organizational content for an employee. This content might include everything from the nature of the job, the work conditions, the associated rewards, the perceived value of the job, the attitude of the management towards the role, the person, and expectations along with a feeling of contributing to the success of the organization. All these factors in place, one can expect a great attitude from each employee, thereby leading to what is fancily called Organizational Citizenship.

However, this is a long list of expectations to be fulfilled, especially in the millennial workforce where the average job tenure is starting to be counted in months rather than years.  Hence, HR managers of today have to focus on what is most relevant to the workforce and what will have maximum impact in the shortest time.

Now what’s relevant might differ from one employee to another. Here the HR team has to do some legwork in identifying areas of concern / impact for employees to show to employees that the organization cares. I’ve seen an organization where the average age of the workforce was below 30 and they tweaked the compensation structure to maximize the take-home for the younger lot. The relatively senior ones were still given the option to safeguard or maximize their retirals. Small change, but high impact.

Some obvious quick-wins visible in the graphic:

·     Communication – I have seen examples of leaders / top management who go out of the way to make sure that the employees stay ahead of the rumor mills. Employees love such leaders. It gives the impression that the top management is accessible and human and makes the employees feel involved in the longer term vision.

·    Happy Workplace – As  Jack Welch famously said a happy workplace gives us happy customers, leading to better cashflows. Small things like impromptu public recognition meetings, go a long way in sustaining the morale of employees. Elaborate song n’ dance routines are effective if it is ensured that the involvement is from the larger workforce, and not restricted to the HR / Marketing teams. The process is more important than the end result.

·     Flexibility – Treating employees as humans. The line between ‘work’ and ‘life has become blurred. So practice it both ways. Not only work time encroaching into ‘family’ time. Give some flexibility in letting it work the other way. And see the results for yourself.

These in no way should take one away from the fact that the biggest X factor in employee engagement is the immediate manager. Most other factors impacting this metric are the responsibility of the immediate manger. Hence, a more longer-term ongoing imperative is training managers to become human and treat their team members as humans. The message has to be that in the longer term, only the creative and agile organizations will survive. And creativity is fostered in a positive environment only. So trust the team and treat them like you would want to be treated yourself.

Engage your critical employees..

I came across this very interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly focusing on engaging critical employees in the organization. It speaks about mapping the probability of an employee leaving the organization vs. the difficulty in replacing him/her. Essentially, it talks of a matrix that looks somewhat like this:

So what this is saying is that an employee falling in the red zone has a higher probability of leaving the organization (based on factors such as market demand, salary trends, family situation etc.) and it will also be very difficult to replace him / her.

We tried to implement this in our organization but came across some roadblocks. We found that somehow the criticality of the role that was being played by our employee was getting missed out. We wanted to get in the job role aspect rather than only focusing on the person. This was because we were not sure of skills being the only differentiating factor. We tweaked the matrix as follows:

This gave us an idea of how important the person was to us with regard to the work that he was performing and his/her Replaceability. The definitions for the boxes in the matrix were tweaked to build in the probability of the person leaving and the difficulty in replacing him/her.

This is a great tool to help your line managers engage in discussions and help them understand each of their subordinates in a deeper manner. This gives great insights into identifying the motivational anchors of the team and these can then be clubbed together to identify themes on engagement. In this particular case, this matrix was used for succession planning in the organization to identify and keep a ready pipeline for the ‘red box’ positions / persons. 

Employee Satisfaction vs. Engagement vs. Commitment

This started with an innocent question I was asked in office.

”What is the difference between an Employee Satisfaction Survey, an Employee Engagement Survey, and an Employee Commitment Survey”

While most HR consultants/HR practitioners use these terms interchangeably, I ventured to dwell on the difference between them. Let us think of the difference between these from three perspectives:

a) If we go by definition: Looking at the pure definitions (Source: Dictionary.com),

Commit: to bind or obligate, as by pledge or assurance;
Engage: To gain over; to win and attach;
Satisfy: to fulfill the desires, expectations, needs, or demands of (a person, the mind, etc.);

So looking at the definition, it looks like the HR managers might have to fulfill the basic needs of the employee first, what we know very well as hygiene factors. These might range from something as basic as the seating area of the employee, the compensation being offered, or transport to and from the office.

Once the employee is fairly satisfied with his working conditions, the next step for an HR manager would be to try to win over and convince the employee that the organization cares for him/her beyond the work environment. These could range from outbound programs for a relatively younger workforce to bringing in the families of the employees for various engagement programs and other work-life balance initiatives.

Employee commitment can be garnered only when the satisfaction and engagement measures are backed by strong career growth measures, a feeling of trust and constant development in the personality of the employee.


b) From the Employees’ perspective:

I have seen very few employees who are “satisfied” with the compensation they are getting. While other “hygiene” factors might be taken for granted, a typical employee is satisfied only when the right engagement measures are put in place.

In terms of commitment, there is a school of thought that says that a lot of it is intrinsic. However, I have seen a number of employees who are highly committed in the initial few days in an organization. But they lose steam over time simply because the other factors (those essential for satisfaction and engagement) are not in place. So while I agree to some extent that commitment comes from within, it has to be backed by other factors and constant reinforcement for it to remain on track.




c) From the Employers’ perspective:

As far as the organization is concerned, the first step is to segment the population of employees and try to identify what would satisfy and what would engage which group of employees.

For the critical set of employees, the organization would want to identify a clear gradation of measures moving from satisfaction to engagement to commitment. For others, depending on the budgetary constraints, they may decide on identifying the key measures to be taken.




So we see that the 3 terms are different and have different meanings for the employee, the employer and even the dictionary. Let us not club the 3 and project them all in the sane vein!!