Job engagement not the same as organizational engagement
When it comes to employee engagement, organizations risk having failed initiatives because they oversimplify the concept, according to a report.
Employers routinely conflate the concept of job engagement with organizational engagement, said Megan Edwards, author of Bridging the Gap: An Evidence-Based Approach to Employee Engagement.
So HR strategies designed to boost engagement may not have the desired effect because employers fail to understand employees could be highly engaged with their job, but not with their company — and vice versa.
“It’s just how things have become popularized within the HR sphere,” said Edwards, research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton, U.K. “Funnily enough, the academic literature looks and focuses pretty heavily on job engagement… but less so on organizational engagement. But it seems it’s vice versa with the practitioners, where people are keen to see how people engage with the organization but don’t look at the job.”
People can be engaged with one and not the other, she said.
“If you’re reporting low organizational engagement scores, that doesn’t mean you don’t have any engagement in the organization. So it’s about using both to supplement one another.”
There’s so many different definitions out there around engagement, said Arlene Keis, CEO of go2HR in Vancouver.
“It’s an emotional commitment — people could be really into their jobs, but could care less about the company, or they just love the company but they hate what they’re doing,” she said.
“Definitely there are challenges around engagement, particularly because employers are not realizing that the game has changed significantly… labour shortages and staff recruitment and retention is way, way different than it was in years past, and it’s not going away anytime soon, so it requires a wholesale shift in their paradigm in terms of how they recruit, retain, motivate and lead their staff.”
Different drivers
Drivers of job engagement include job characteristics (such as the variety of work tasks, the opportunity to use different skills, the degree of autonomy, and feedback mechanisms), along with value congruence (the extent to which the values and behaviours expected by an employer align with those of the individual) and leadership style (including line manager support), said Bridging the Gap.
“(Employers) realize these things are important on a grander scale but probably have less of an understanding about how they play specifically into job engagement,” said Edwards.
“Even though most organizations are looking at organizational engagement, there’s more research around job engagement, so we’ve got a better understanding of the drivers… and they focus very much around things you might expect — job characteristics, the resources you have to be able to do your job, but also the type of tasks you are doing.”
Drivers of organizational engagement include procedural justice (the perceived fairness of the processes and procedures in a workplace), shared vision (the positive emotions employees feel about their employer’s outlook for the future and commitment to reach that goal) and shared mood (how employees feel about their work and the organization), said the report.
Drivers of both job and organizational engagement include perceived organizational support (such as fair operational and HR practices, and low levels of organizational politics) and workplace relationships (including clear, regular communications and genuine emotion during interactions).
It’s about using a combination of both, said Edwards, “making sure you are finding out internally what your issues are, what’s going on, but also what’s working well. We have a tendency to focus on the negative, but (it’s about) what’s working well and how you can maximize that, but also using that data in conjunction with academic research and evidence to then craft a strategy which use the drivers that come out of the research, but also that focus on what’s going on in your organization. So, it might be people feel a big disconnect between the values they have and what the organization has, or it might be people don’t feel challenged in their job, and then you can use those potential problem areas with the research to craft the strategy.”
And managers are often forgotten when it comes to their part in employee engagement, she said.
“The important role line managers play is really nurturing the relationships with people on the ground who are actually the ones that are reporting these low levels of engagement, and those line managers are quite often overlooked.”
While there is a place for a formal survey, especially at large organizations, to get a pulse on engagement, the connection between front-line managers and their employees is important, said Arun Subramanian, director of industry HR development at go2HR.
“Communication between the front-line manager and the front-line employees or other employees probably has a better chance of success in terms of understanding what employees want.”
