OPINION: Take the journey to find the magic pill to engagement
While there's no one action that can give you instant understanding of employee engagement, the quest to find it is well worth making.
Karen Horn, senior vice president, internal communication at Washington Mutual
As communicators, most of us have sought ways to show the value of what we contribute. In our effort to prove strategic value, we look for ways to demonstrate that our work has contributed to the business's bottom line.
Being "satisfied" isn't enough
We adopted the new title of organizational communication, developed scorecards and helped our organizations with becoming an "employer of choice". All of these helped us reach out into process thinking, measurement and surveying. We began to look for relationships between what we do and tangible business results.
Then we moved on to employee "satisfaction", but we were soon arguing that being "satisfied" just isn't enough and that what's needed is employee "engagement".
We know our work helps employees understand the connection between what they do and the business goals. We also know we can help people feel their contributions matter. The concept is actually quite simple. But the work isn't.
Engagement is more than just measurement
Like many professions today, the training, experience and expectations for communicators are broad. Employee
engagement can take us into new and exciting areas that may not have been part of our training:
Business leaders who already understand the value in what we do are the ones I want to work for.
- surveying and statistics, process improvement;
- Six Sigma methodology;
- diversity; and
- "events as experiences".
However, the lure – and the danger – is to become too involved in any of them and to lose focus on the goal.
While it's important for us to have measures, I've come to believe that business leaders who already understand the value in what we do are the ones I want to work for. Those who don't value communication probably won't be persuaded by any metric.
Employee engagement is more than a name
Over the past few years, I've seen several heads of internal communication change the names of their teams to "employee engagement". That's great where there's a genuine effort to connect divergent activities into ...
Extract taken from Melcrum's Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement report, out now.
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