Employees are responsible for it, too
We talk about employee engagement. A lot. We measure it, predict it and help companies improve it. As a feedback and analytics company, people reach out to us to help them discover how they can improve business results by ensuring that employees are at optimal engagement. Our experience has yielded a some key findings, including:
- Companies deploy employee engagement surveys that often measure job satisfaction, not engagement.
- Most Everyone — from the marketplace to employees, managers and leaders in organizations — assume that engagement is solely the company’s responsibility.
Most Traditional Employee Engagement Surveys Aren’t Actually Measuring Engagement
Asking questions to measure if your employees are happy doesn’t also measure engagement. It measures only job satisfaction. That could be a helpful metric considering that job satisfaction has links to certain business outcomes. However, in the current business environment for most companies, enabling employees to do their best work is more of a burning platform than happiness. Someone may love their job, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to high performance or direct business results.
So What Is Engagement?
At Talmetrix, we believe that engagement is about more than just happiness with your job or an intent to stay at the company. Engagement predicts performance. We recently developed a new definition of engagement which includes two sets of factors:
Three attributes: vitality, immersion and dedication (See White Paper)
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Three intrinsic measures: optimism, self-efficacy and accountability.
Those last three are fully controlled by the employee!
Employees’ Are Responsible for…
Engagement is a partnership between the company and its employees. The company brings certain aspects and the employee must match that with their own intrinsic factors.
Optimism
Every day at work brings different uncertainty and challenges, no matter your role. Those employees who are optimistic, or disposed to take a favorable view of situations, will approach work differently than the pessimist (those disposed to take an unfavorable view of situations).
The optimist will be more effective and experience better results, even in the midst of challenges. The pessimist may not be able to overcome adversity – or take longer to do so.
Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief in oneself to complete a given task. It looks like confidence. When giving someone a challenging task or project, those with self-efficacy can start and complete the work without checking in with others to see if they are doing it right. They can also more effectively:
- Think critically about how to get a task done
- Perform consistently
- Practice positive self-talk
- Not let things keep them down
- Have a level of autonomy and look for learning opportunities, innovation and improvements on their own
There are differences in levels of self-efficacy. Therefore, it is essential that leaders have insights to understand these differences in order to coach and develop their teams.
Accountability
An accountable employee takes responsibility for the things in their purview. Whether success or failure, they have some level of personal accountability. Someone with high accountability thinks:
“I succeeded! That was due to my hard work.”
“I failed! I need to look at what I could have done better to produce better results.”
Someone with low personal accountability, will blame failures on not being given proper instruction, enough time, or any other excuse that is someone else’s fault.
Engagement Is a Two-Way Street
In summary, companies must understand this important factor of engagement and provide opportunities for employees to take ownership for how they approach their work and the mindset in which they work. Creating an engagement culture that fosters accountability, self-efficacy, and optimism will help increase engagement and performance.
360 Feedback and/or Manager Effectiveness surveys are a great way for organizations to not only reinforce accountability, but also facilitate the development of managers and leaders to be more effective at enabling engagement and performance. If employees who are highly engaged are surrounded by those who aren’t, and accountability measures aren’t in place, it will eventually erode the engagement and job satisfaction.
Contact us to learn more about how to measure your engagement culture, and create an engagement partnership between your employees, managers, and leaders.
