Hundreds of human resource consulting firms tout the benefits of employee engagement leading to higher levels of productivity, profitability and lower turnover rates. Gallup has done extensive research with thousands of work groups outlining the conditions that create a highly engaged workforce and they have tied these conditions to superior business performance outcomes. While there is much anecdotal evidence to link engagement to business results, the term “employee engagement” remains an elusive concept. Academic researchers have just recently begun to conceptualize the term and there is not a great deal of empirical research that has been conducted to date to determine a consistent interpretation of the meaning of employee engagement. Is engagement a state of mind that changes regularly depending on the situation? Is it a trait characterized by an enthusiastic personality? Is it a certain range of behaviours? How can we hope to improve engagement within organizations if we are not certain of the mechanisms that contribute and detract from it?

One of the closest things we have to operationalizing Gallup’s research on engagement is William Kahn’s theory for personal engagement. Kahn is Yale educated and an Associate Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at Boston University’s School of Management. According to Kahn, engagement is multidimensional; employees can be emotionally, cognitively or physically engaged. For organizations, the two most important are emotional and cognitive. To be emotionally engaged is to form positive and meaningful connections with others (i.e. co-workers, bosses etc.). Being cognitively engaged refers to those who are acutely aware of their mission and role in their work environment. Kahn goes on to explain that people either employ and express, or withdraw and defend their preferred selves based on their experiences at work. He suggests there are three psychological conditions that can influence people’s internal work motivations to either engage or disengage at work: meaningfulness, safety, and availability. Workers ask themselves:

  1. How meaningful is it for me to bring myself into this performance?
  2. How safe is it to do so?
  3. How available am I to do so? (Do I have the energy to put into this?)

Now let’s explore how we can apply this information to improve the engagement of employees.

Meaningfulness:

I recently attended a Positive Business Summit at the University of Pennsylvania, where we explored the conditions of positive work environments. One of the main things that emerged is that people are looking for greater meaning at work. Indeed, our national surveys at Whydidyougo.com also confirm that people who feel their work is important report higher levels of job satisfaction. Work does not necessarily have to be virtuously tied to any one cause, it just needs to be meaningful for the person who is performing the task. There are two simple ways to improve meaning at work:

  1. Understand the personal values of each of your employees. This is what Kahn refers to as emotional engagement. If you can help your employees align corporate values with personal values, you are on your way to engaging their hearts at work.
  2. Communicate the vision of the organization regularly. When people know how their role fits into the bigger picture, it makes their daily tasks more meaningful.

Safety:

People want to know that if they fully engage at work it will be safe to do so. Psychological safety is all about social environments that create nonthreatening social situations in which to engage. When environments are fraught with blaming, backstabbing and backroom gossip, people are not safe to be themselves and spend an inordinate amount of time protecting their self-image. According to Jane Dutton, author of Energize your workplace: How to create and sustain high-quality connections at work, there are three strategies for energizing your workforce through high quality social connections:

  1. Respectful engagement: This includes being present when you communicate by minimizing distractions when talking to employees, expressing genuine interest when communicating with employees, and empathic active listening.
  2. Task enabling: These are ways of interacting that facilitate your employee’s successful performance, like teaching, designing job tasks for higher rates of success, and advocating for employees.
  3. Trusting: The way we talk to employees can convey that we implicitly trust them and trust in their abilities. We can do this by sharing valuable information with employees and giving away some level of control. We can also do this by disclosing something of ourselves – information that makes us vulnerable in some way. Finally, never demean others as this is a surefire way to eliminate trust.

Availability:

Psychological availability is associated with distractions that preoccupy people, leaving them with fewer resources with which to engage in tasks at work. Much research in neuroscience now indicates that when we are stressed, we have less brain resources to devote to important work tasks. According to Barbara Fredrickson, a leading researcher on the topic of positive emotions and author of Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive, negative emotions narrow our focus while positive emotions broaden our outlook and allow us to explore more in our environment. If engagement is an exertion of energy, then it makes sense that when we are positive, we feel like doing more things. In fact, one sign of depression is our inability to even get out of bed. Here are two ways to improve positivity in the workplace:

  1. Check your positivity ratio. According to Fredrickson, in order for work groups to thrive, you should have six positive interactions for every negative interaction at work. By criticizing less and focusing more on constructive feedback, you can significantly increase this positivity ratio. One example is a solutions-focused approach to problem solving that has two people spending more time on how to solve the problem rather than figuring out who to blame for the problem.
  2. Many weekly meetings begin with what is going wrong and how to strategize on how to improve things. Why not start each week with what is going right and how to do more of that? Imagine how much more energized you will be emerging from that meeting!

While this is a start, there is still much to learn about employee engagement. Luckily, researchers of Positive Psychology are heavily engaged in the study of what engages people in life and work. I look forward to learning more about what they have to offer us consultants who just want people to be happier at work.

Louisa Jewell is a co-founder of www.WhyDidYouGo.com, a consulting and coaching firm specializing in employee engagement and retention. Their vision is to improve happiness at work, one workplace at a time. For more information about positive management practices in the workplace contact Louisa at louisa@whydidyougo.com.

Louisa also co-hosts a weekly radio show called CareerBuzz on CIUT.FM. Listen to one of Louisa’s latest radio shows, called Inspiring a Fully Engaged Workforce! at www.whydidyougo.com/broadcasts.asp.