“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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