Comments on Talent and Social Business: Employee Engagement or Motivation?

"Q12 framework by The Gallup Organization can be p...

2006-10-10T05:52:00.000+05:30

"Q12 framework by The Gallup Organization can be perfectly used to measure the engagement levels of employees within the organization"

You can't be serious? '...can be perfectly used to measure engagement'. How on earth can 12 items be argued to surmise 'engagement' across all contexts for all employees? It's a nonsense. These 12 items have been plucked from a climate measure (employees perceptions of their work environment) and a label applied to fit with management need to latch onto the latest buzzword (the Gallup survey has been around a lot longer than the 'engagement' term - why the name change in recent years?). If engagement is the cognitive-emotional-behavioural aspect of peoples' reaction to their work environment, then aggregating 12 climate perception items hardly taps into reactions. For that you need to actually assess the consequence of climate perceptions, not the perception itself. I wish people wouldn't get sucked so easily into the marketing spin provided by a large consulting firm. Maybe practitioners and consultants need to engage themselves more with educating themselves before allocating an inordinate amount of money to the Gallup bottom line.

Dubs - I might partially defer on this...as far as...

2006-01-28T16:47:00.000+05:30

Dubs - I might partially defer on this...as far as my knowledge goes...engagement is a situation which integrates the situation of "emotional attachment" as Terry said with that of managers and employees in the organization. Engagement, in organizational context is the emotional attachment of the employees with the organization (not quantified to one hour of their personal lives), its goals, mission, management etc. Whereas satisfaction would be the measure of functional controllables.

Q12 framework by The Gallup Organization can be perfectly used to measure the engagement levels of employees within the organization. Or if required more, maybe you would like to go through "First Break all the Rules", a best-seller.

Gautam:

I agree that there is confusion ove...

2005-12-09T12:28:00.000+05:30

Gautam:

I agree that there is confusion over the term. I unfortunately also agree that this is one of those very annoying buzzwords. However, let me try to define it (or at least give my definition).

Engagement is the state of an employee when s/he decides to give an employer an hour of discretionary time. Remove all motivators such as incentive compensation, deadlines, upcoming performance reviews and such. An employee is engaged when they willingly give up an hour of personal time to provide the employer with added value.

Why would someone do this? Employees do this without additional rewards because they are provided with some form of personal fulfillment by their job. I could ask a similar question to you and I about why we blog. We both spend many hours doing it for no tangible reward. However, it is meaningful to each of us in some way.

The trick is how to formulate your HR strategies to increase the number of engaged employees an organization has. You are correct in saying that compensation is a recruitment tool, but less often a retention tool. For engagement, you need good workforce planning, career development, and an honest finger on the pulse of what drives your employees. A difficult task that can never be done to 100% perfection.

BTW - I have moved to systematicHR.com

-Dubs

"Engagement" is the hot management buzzword right ...

2005-12-09T03:28:00.000+05:30

"Engagement" is the hot management buzzword right now.

But I agree that there is a fuzziness to the term.

In the realm of marital relations, engagement means that two people have made a solemn commitment to each other, based on love, and symbolized by the giving of rings, that they intend to seal in matrimony.

Translating this into the organizational realm is giving me a headache.

Terry

However non commital and vague "engagement" may so...

2005-12-08T11:05:00.000+05:30