Onwards and upwards
Employee engagement has evolved from what some may say was a fad to a relevant and viable link to an organisation’s performance. Dilys Robinson, principal research fellow with the Institute for Employment Studies, considers its future
Employee engagement has staying power. It has become embedded to such an extent that many employee attitude surveys are now termed ‘engagement surveys’, and organisations now have individuals with job titles such as ‘engagement manager.’ It is hard to believe that, just five years ago, it was a new concept – one that was being promoted by consultancies and survey houses despite a lack of research – and vulnerable to being dismissed as a fad. Perhaps now the time has come for stocktake, and an opportunity to consider how engagement should move forward.
Where are we now?
Although they vary in their emphasis, two things are clear. Firstly, engagement is something that is personal to the individual employee, and secondly, engaged employees bring benefits to their organisations.
Employee engagement levels are usually measured via the employee attitude survey, which means that the opportunity to take the temperature of the whole organisation normally arises only once a year. Some organisations also use pulse surveys, which gather the views of a sample of employees at intervals throughout the year.
Just as there is no single definition of engagement, there is also no way of measuring engagement that is accepted by all. Most engagement indicators are made up of several attitudinal statements, sometimes combined with the responses to other questions about, for example, intentions to stay with the organisation. The chosen indicator is likely to depend on a variety of things: whether the organisation wishes to benchmark its results with others; the amount of space within the questionnaire that can be given to engagement statements; and the extent to which there is a desire to include statements or questions about things that are unique to the organisation, often using particular terminology (‘I live by the Bloggs On Board values’).
Given that engagement is widely believed to have a beneficial impact on individual, team and organisational performance, it is not surprising that there is a desire to identify the drivers of engagement. Some engagement models are based on the premise that ‘fixing’ certain things – such as communication, pay and benefits, performance review – will automatically lead to higher engagement levels. More sophisticated methods usually involve analysing employee survey data in depth, and building a statistical model to identify those aspects of organisational life that have the most impact on engagement.
It should be possible to segment the employee population and identify different drivers for different groups: younger and older employees; professionals, managers and support staff; long servers and recent recruits; customer-facing and backroom employees. This segmentation allows engagement initiatives to be tailored to particular groups – much more likely to be effective, but also much harder work than the ‘one size fits all’ approach of the simple engagement model.
Research into employee engagement and its drivers has grown, and there is a mounting body of evidence on the engagement – performance link. A selection of the evidence is contained in the Box. Much of the evidence demonstrates a correlation rather than a causative link. This means it is possible that engagement leads to higher performance, but it is equally possible that working in a high-performing organisation causes people to be more highly engaged. In practice it is likely that a ‘virtuous circle’ is in operation, meaning that raised engagement levels lead to better performance, which in turn cases engagement levels to rise even higher.
Where are we going?
Although the evidence suggests there are no easy answers to raising engagement levels, there are some increasingly
clear messages.
- Engagement levels vary between different employee groups.
- Personal characteristics (age, ethnicity) and job characteristics (role, location, level) play a part. For example, the youngest and oldest age groups in the organisation often have the highest engagement levels.
- Bad experiences at work – such as not having an appraisal or a personal development plan, having an accident, and being harassed – all have a denting effect on engagement.
- Engagement tends to decrease with length of service, until people have been in post long-term.
- Professionals and craftspeople tend to owe their engagement to their profession/craft rather than their organisation.
One issue of particular concern for the immediate future is anxieties about the current state of the economy due to the credit squeeze, predicted rise in inflation, and falling house prices.
Engagement seems, to some extent, to be infectious: highly engaged people encourage their colleagues to be more enthusiastic, particularly when the news about the organisation’s performance is good. What, then, is the outlook for engagement when times are not so good? Will a dip in organisational performance bring about a lowering of engagement levels, especially if some employees are feeling the pinch financially? We may see the focus shift over the next year or two. Instead of trying to raise engagement levels, some organisations may have to work even harder just to maintain their existing levels.
It will be interesting to see if organisations with high engagement levels are more resilient, and better equipped to weather the storm, than those that start from a lower base.
A second, related, issue is the role of the line manager in relation to engagement. Our engagement research has identified the two biggest engagement drivers as being job satisfaction (notably satisfaction with the levels of autonomy in the job), and a sense of feeling valued by, and involved with, the organisation. Further investigation reveals that the line manager is an important sub-driver, a driver of the drivers, and a powerful influence on engagement.
What does this mean for organisations? It implies that much more attention should be paid to training line managers for their role, and to supporting them in their posts. Perhaps, as well as (or even instead of) expensive management development schemes for high fliers, organisations should invest heavily in first line management and supervisory training programmes. A further message is that managers need good quality HR support, to help them access and interpret policies and procedures consistently and fairly.
The Institute for Employment Studies is soon to launch its ‘engaging manager’ research, which will explore the characteristics and behaviours of managers who inspire their teams to perform well and return high engagement scores.
The next few months will be an important period for engagement as the economic climate becomes more challenging and managers will need to react well to these challenges, to keep their businesses competitive, and employee motivation high.