Employee engagement - With what?

Stephen Billing's post Leadership and Management Matter, Not Engagement Scores is the fourth in a series that he's 'penned' on what he sees as the ''cult of engagement''. In it, he summarises his main points as follows:

• high employee engagement does not cause high productivity
• engagement is becoming a cult and wise leaders will not pay much attention to it
• leaders should concentrate on business results and employee engagement is not a business result, it is an input.

The goal of raising employee engagement has become one of the 'taken-for-granteds' of organizational management - fuelled in large part by the ready availability of a multitude of questionnaires and surveys that purport to be able to measure it. But, as Billing argues, does this really make sense?

What is employee engagement?

To begin with, what do we mean by employee engagement? Patricia Soldati asks - and attempts to answer - this question in an article on the Management-Issues website. The diversity of comments that her post received, though, confirms that there are multiple definitions and little agreement on the perceived factors involved in achieving it - whatever 'it' is. So, I guess 'you pays your money and takes your choice'. Often literally!

Causal link?

Most managers would (probably?) agree that there is a correlation between employees' mental and emotional states and organizational performance.  However, the fact that there is a correlation between the two doesn't of itself say anything about causation.

For some, the link is simple. High morale and engaged employees lead to improved business performance. This is the core rationale for the employee engagement agenda. Others, though, argue the opposite. For them, successful business performance is the cause of high morale and employee engagement; not the other way around.

Although Billing similarly argues (here) that correlation is not the same thing as causation, in a further post, he goes some way towards adopting the latter position:

''Concrete progress towards business success stimulates and excites people to keep going in that direction. As they achieve business results, engagement will rise.''

So, in terms of cause and effect, the extent and direction of any link between engagement and performance is, at best, unclear.  Irrespective of this, though, the complex social dynamics of organizations mean that there are simply (!) too many variables at play in any particular situation to be able to predict what outcomes will actually emerge.

Despite this, the 'engagement industry' continues to exert a powerful influence on managers' views of what constitutes so-called "best practice" in organizational leadership. Billing's posts therefore provide a welcome challenge to what has become established (and often unquestioned) 'wisdom' in this area. 

Engagement with what?

So, if the basic logic of the ''employee engagement agenda'' is flawed, what implications does this have for leadership practice?

In Informal Coalitions I talked about ''disembodied" culture change programmes. By this I meant the tendency of most conventional change strategies to treat culture as a separate building block of performance, which can be attended to independently of the structural aspects of the change process and everyday management action.  I think there is a danger of ''employee engagement'' becoming similarly disembodied from the everyday experience of organizational practice and performance.

Treating engagement (however defined) as something that exists separately from specific, local activities, goals and performance is of doubtful value. Instead, the 'real' engagement task for leaders is twofold:

• Helping individuals to make sense of everyday events and emerging challenges in the context of their local interactions; and, in the light of this, to take action in ways that contribute to the achievement of local organizational objectives.
• Doing so in ways that also resonate with individuals' own aspirations and personal agendas.

Employee engagement, in any meaningful sense, is therefore individual-, relationship-, issue-, and context-specific. It is a matter of:

• orientation  - leading to positive rather than negative perceptions, interpretations and evaluations of specific organizational challenges; and
• action - resulting in active rather than passive responses to them.

When talking about strengths in The Effective Executive, Drucker argues that there is no such thing as 'a good man'. "Good for what? is the question."  A similar logic applies to employee engagement.  There is no such thing as 'an engaged workforce'.  Engaged with what? is the question.

__________

Related posts:

Mobilizing commitment - The motive, means and opportunity to excel

Is it WISE to be SMART?

Comments

[Stephen Billing]

Hi Chris, I am struck by your description of how culture is viewed as disembodied from interaction, and the similarity of this with the way employee engagement is also seen as disembodied from human relating. Ralph Stacey, who was the supervisor of my doctoral thesis, would call this reification of culture and employee engagement - treating them as things that exist outside of human relating. I have written more on this in my latest blog post at http://www.changingorganisations.com/2008/10/disembodied-employee-engagement/

I think your blog is very interesting and we have a lot in common, as we are the only two people I am aware of who are blogging about change and organisations from a point of view that is informed by reflective thinking about complexity.
Thanks also for linking to me.
Cheers, Stephen

[Chris Rodgers]

Thanks, Stephen.

I have been a fan of Ralph Stacey’s work for many years. I have seen this develop from some early, ahead-of-the-curve thinking about the implications of chaos and complexity for organizational dynamics, to his latest - now firmly established - view of organizations as complex responsive processes. I conceived of my notion of informal coalitions in the mid-late 1990s, which was at roughly the same time that Stacey was making his move away from thinking about organizations in terms of complex adaptive systems. I was fortunate enough to attend a day-long workshop that he ran around 1998, at which he shared his emerging thinking on the important role that conversation played in organizational dynamics. This resonated strongly with my own developing view of organizations as dynamic networks of conversations.

Although I tend to use slightly different terms when talking about the dynamics of organizations and the leadership of change, I feel that my views are strongly aligned with those put forward by Stacey and the growing school of like-minded thinkers who have passed through Hertfordshire’s Complexity and Management Centre. I had already deduced from your blog that you are a member of that community. Sadly, I’m not!

In case you’ve not come across it yet, I’ve written one post in which I draw a distinction between my view of one aspect of organizational dynamics and that articulated by Stacey (as I understand it). This concerns the process by which global patterns of assumptions emerge from local interactions. If you’re interested, you can find this towards the end of the following post: http://informalcoalitions.typepad.com/informal_coalitions/2007/12/the-dynamics-of.html. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

In the meantime, I shall take a look at your latest post. I haven’t come across others blogging in this ‘space’ either.

Best regards, Chris

[Stephen Billing]

Hi Chris, Yes, I have read all your posts related to Stacey and his colleagues, and you definitely have a lot in common with the complex responsive processes way of thinking. You may have attended one of the annual conferences run by the Complexity and Management Centre at Hertfordshire University - usually run in May or June.

They are open to anyone and are a great experience of an event that is organised from a complex responsive processes point of view.
Information about the 2008 event held in June can be found here... http://www.herts.ac.uk/fms/documents/schools/business/CMC-june.doc
Regards, Stephen

[Chris Rodgers]

Hi Stephen,

Five or six years ago, I attended a number of excellent sessions at UoH: Patricia Shaw on Changing Conversations in Organizations; Jose Fonseca on Complexity and Innovation; and Philip Streatfield on The Paradox of Control. But I wasn't aware that there was an annual conference based on the Centre's work. I shall look out for next year's!

Cheers,

Chris