Employee engagement
Dilys Robinson and Sue Hayday  Which employee attitudes are most critical for performance and have most impact on the bottom line? For much of the past 80 years it has been accepted that employee satisfaction was a key objective of organisations as, it was inferred, this logically influences job performance. However, ‘satisfied’ employees do not necessarily perform to the best of their abilities. Personal satisfaction is an internal emotion that need not relate in any direct way to organisational outcomes. Another dimension is surely vital to motivate employees to ‘go the extra mile’.
Research conducted for the Sears Roebuck Company in the USA and by IES in the UK in the late nineties, identified this extra factor as ‘employee commitment’. This had a stronger role acting through its greater link to customer satisfaction than employee satisfaction. IES research demonstrated that commitment had double the impact of employee satisfaction on customer future spending plans in the stores of a major retail chain.
So was employee commitment the end of the search for the key driver of employee performance? The argument has moved on yet again. In the past couple of years, the term ‘employee engagement’ has increasingly come to the fore and been discussed as a major determinant of employee performance. At IES, after extensive searches, we have been unable to find a clear definition of this form of engagement. Until this concept is defined, it is impossible to pinpoint its true significance and identify which organisational practices promote it.
Our thinking at the moment is that engagement is a combination of the organisational-facing aspects of commitment, organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and motivation.
Locating Employee Engagement
Source: IES
We have developed a series of statements covering these three concepts, which can be used in attitude surveys. These assess which combination of the facets of commitment, OCB and motivation best measure the form of engagement that has the greatest impact on employee behaviour. Initial results from surveys being conducted in the NHS are very encouraging.
For further information, please contact Dilys Robinson.
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