Employee Engagement: Beyond the Buzzword

A question I have asked multiple times to myself in my quest of understanding the workplace a little better - What is Employee Engagement... really?

It will be easier to start with what employee engagement is not, so that it clears the way for what it actually is.

• Events
• Games
• Decor competitions
• Christmas & Diwali parties

These things could be seen as one of the levels of the game, but many mistake it as the game itself. This is a common myth people carry, especially the ones who have seen HR only from the outside. 

It is important to understand that “employee engagement” is a connection that’s innate & personal and not just an activity that the HR Team conducts. 

There are a lot of layers to the whole gamut of Employee Engagement. Essentially, employee engagement is the degree to which an employee feels connected to their work and their workplace. HR can bring in targeted interventions depending on different levels of this connection employees have in the different areas of their workplace. So when it comes to HR driving Employee Engagement, it is about creating an ecosystem that allows the employee to thrive and feel engaged. 

However, it is not just one person or a department that is accountable for how connected the employees stay at work. It is the whole system working in tandem for that to happen. Employees can simply be engaged because:

A. Their workplace gives them enough opportunities that align with their career aspirations;  

B. They feel valued by their managers and teammates; and 

C. They feel proud to be associated with the Company’s business and have a good relationship with the other coworkers overall

But unfortunately, not all employees today get all of these. Now of course, those who get none will leave the soonest, but more often than not, the presence of at least one of the three factors may form a reason for them to stay. 

It also depends on the subjectivity of the person in terms of their intrinsic values and motivators that make one of these reasons good enough for them to willingly continue with the Organisation.

Let us understand this through the pictorial representation below:

The above Quadrants (Q) capture the roadways HR can take leading to a higher level of engagement. 

Encapuslating these roadways for easy recollection:

Q 1: Recognition & Value Focus
Q 2: Growth path & leadership development initiatives
Q 3: Building and enhancing connections (with personal pursuits, overall Organization, and the fellow colleagues)
Q 4: Guidance, Mentorship and Career Conversations

Many people, including the HR Professionals, consider only a few of these as employee engagement and the others as L&D, Performance Management System (PMS), etc. The reason is because of the way it has been packaged. By compartmentalising Employee Engagement into specific activites like employee surveys, events, hobby clubs, recognitions, etc., we miss that the whole point of engagement is much deeper than that. The advent of Talent Management as a separate function of HR removes this barrier as it embraces all the real aspects of employee engagement under its wings.

In fact, Gallup research shows the top drivers of engagement are not parties or perks, but:

- Having opportunities to learn and grow.
- Feeling that your job is important.
- Having a manager who provides regular feedback and cares about your development.

At this stage it is clear that HR initiatives provide platforms and strategies at an Organisational level, and educates the Managers & Leaders to leverage them effectively. Having said that, these initiatives may still not work if the individual team members do not feel psychologically safe at work. This is dependent on their daily experiences and how they feel about failures. It may sound like a personal issue, but a lot of this feeling depends on the space a manager provides - a space to grow, a space to share mistakes or errors without feeling guilty or anxious. I cannot express enough how much a Manager’s behaviour influences an individual’s experience of the workplace. Moreover, the same "happy place" can just as easily become a place that “breaks them down”. We will cover this in detail in another article.

So what’s next after we have these offerings in place? Well, we measure it!

There are several methods adopted by the Organizations to measure employee engagement, and will can delve into it in another article. 

A career in HR comes with its own set of challenges, but also fun. It’s all about widening your perspectives and asking Why you are doing What you are doing.. Because until now, you probably thought that Diwali parties & Decor competitions were the only ways HR drives engagement.