Employee Engagement
We identify pragmatic actions and priorities that will directly and positively influence the level of work engagement for a client organisation.
What is engagement?
The concept of employees being personally engaged in their work is intuitively appealing. If employees can genuinely be encouraged to invest more of their energies into their role performance, it offers dual benefit: increased well-being for employees while organisational benefits arise from the likes of increased customer satisfaction, greater customer commitment, increased productivity and ultimately, increased profitability. It creates more productive, resilient organisations and establishes a platform for growth.
How do we help?
Our approach enables organisations to realise these benefits by focusing effort on those aspects of human resource management that directly and positively influence engagement. This is achieved via a holistic approach that not only determines the drivers of engagement, but segments the organisation’s workforce according to the various classifications of activation. Thus, management actions are able to be tailored to support and develop teams according to their dominate profile.
What is our approach?
Our approach is holistic in that it considers not only engagement, but the various states of employee activation. Outputs are therefore comprehensive in that they provide pragmatic and actionable information for both managing the employee resource, and prioritising actions that will generate greater engagement.
The framework that we have developed is strongly influenced by an extensive review of academic literature which defines engagement as 'work engagement'. The concept is described as "a positive fulfilling work related state of mind that is characterised by vigour, dedication and absorption". While this psychological view of engagement is narrow, we simultaneously consider employee behaviours and how well these are aligned with overarching organisational goals.
We also recognise that employees may be engaged but not in the highly energised and enthusiastic state that we immediately think of, but due to being a workaholic. Similarly, others may be merely satisfied with their work and not engaged at all, or not be engaged due to work stress and job demands. An important component to our approach is that we not only assess the proportion of employees who are engaged, but we measure the proportion lying within each of the segments.
What are the engagement segments?
Our approach is holistic in that it considers not only engagement, but the various states of employee activation. Outputs are therefore comprehensive in that they provide pragmatic and actionable information for both managing the employee resource, and prioritising actions that will generate greater engagement.
The framework that we have developed is strongly influenced by an extensive review of academic literature which defines engagement as 'work engagement'. The concept is described as "a positive fulfilling work related state of mind that is characterised by vigour, dedication and absorption". While this psychological view of engagement is narrow, we simultaneously consider employee behaviours and how well these are aligned with overarching organisational goals.
We also recognise that employees may be engaged but not in the highly energised and enthusiastic state that we immediately think of, but due to being a workaholic. Similarly, others may be merely satisfied with their work and not engaged at all, or not be engaged due to work stress and job demands. An important component to our approach is that we not only assess the proportion of employees who are engaged, but we measure the proportion lying within each of the segments.
The relevance of segmenting employees is that each state requires somewhat different management styles and strategies to move employees into a more appropriate state of higher activation. Once the dominant engagement profile for any given team has been identified, it is possible to tailor management activities that support and develop staff.
What are the drivers of engagement?
Once measured, work engagement is able to be explained using a job resources - demand model which we expand to include the sub-level drivers.
Additionally, our model includes measurement of the psychological conditions that must exist in order to engender engagement; that the work is meaningful, there is psychological safety and availability. The model is customised for each client organisation, but follows the concept presented in the illustrative framework below:
The relative weight of each driver can be derived through statistical modelling, thereby ensuring organisations not only focus on areas of relatively poor performance, but on those areas with the biggest impact on engagement. In the illustrative example, the attributes include the calculated impact scores (weights). This analysis is then presented using a strategy matrix to illustrate potential actions for managing engagement.
How do we bring the analysis together?
Combining the calculated impact weights with actual performance measures enables us to assess the various opportunities to improve engagement, and how these opportunities should be prioritised.
Attributes that have a high impact but low performance evaluations represent the areas where management would achieve the greatest return on its investment to deliver improvements.
As well as structured data, we also collect additional data via verbatim responses to support root cause analysis.
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