The Confusion Surrounding Employee Engagement

“Employee Engagement” as a term (and now culture) has been around a long time. Before that it was called “Employee Satisfaction.”  Not to oversimplify it, but employee satisfaction had little or no connection to performance.  With major changes in industry and more emphasis on service, there began a more pronounced link between HR and the “service-profit” chain and Employee Engagement was born. 

We googled “employee engagement” in preparation for this post and were rewarded with over 83 million answers.  HR consulting firms, training consultants, research companies, statistical analysis firms and even the award industry each define it in relation to their own revenue.  Is it any wonder why executives seem to be a little chagrined by the entire subject?  A simple concept it isn’t.  From 1996 to 2012, nearly 25 million employees in almost 3 million workgroups from 195 countries have completed Gallup's Q12®survey…the father of the statistics used in the design of how best to measure EE. This does everything except answer the one question everyone wanted to know…why.

You can readily see how things became confusing when the major HR consulting firms jumped onto the employee-engagement fray with their own, branded, proprietary, employee-engagement surveys, also based on statistical analysis. Even the academic community is confused by the term “employee engagement” because it was developed by consulting firms outside of the normal channels of academic research. 

The award industry hangs their hat on seemingly general concurrence that employee recognition helps promote employee satisfaction, which in turn is an important fundamental of employee engagement.  This was reinforced by the Conference Board and the Harvard Business School with a meta-analysis that compared the main employee-engagement approaches side-by-side.  

This meta-analysis concluded that “employee engagement” boils down to an emotional and intellectual connection between employees and their employers that results in improved performance.  

This was reconfirmed by two academic researchers, Nitin Nohria, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and Paul Lawrence, an organizational-behavior pioneer, in their books “Driven,” and “Driven to Lead.” These books built a new 4-drive motivational model of Employee Motivation.  This model created the emotional connection discovered by the meta-analysis…when these universal drives are satisfied; employees experience emotional pleasure and feel engaged.  Employee recognition helps to drive that emotional pleasure.

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