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development and workforce training in the community through
professional growth and development programs, networking
opportunities, and training services and resources.
Thanks to Kris Kristensen from the Emerge Leadership Group in Boise, Idaho for his excellent presentation to ASTDINW on July 19, 2010 entitled:
Please use this forum for any discussion of Kris' presentation as well as all future ASTD presentations. Would anyone like to launch our new Blog with a discussion of Kris' presentation? Just enter your comment in the space provided below.
Maximizing Employee Contribution:
Understanding the Critical Missing Link to Employee Engagement
Please use this forum for any discussion of Kris' presentation as well as all future ASTD presentations. Would anyone like to launch our new Blog with a discussion of Kris' presentation? Just enter your comment in the space provided below.
Engagement is elusive.
ReplyDeleteWhile we all know what it means… or at least, how it feels, we have a very hard time trying to explain it to others in a demonstrable way. We all know what it feels like when we are working on something challenging that is so interesting and captivating that we utilize our full effort. How rewarding when we succeed! We value these types of experiences. Most of us would like more of them, more often. We call these, "engaged experiences."
Organizations too, people having engaged experiences. To be successful, perhaps even to survive, organizations need people to go the extra mile, to do more with less, and to do things better than before. Engagement matters now, more than ever. It matters so much that organizations pay vast sums of money to find and build this engagement.
However, organizations need to determine the R.O.I. of the dollars spent on engagement building. And this is the rub! In spite of our intuitive sense of this engagement, coming up with a solid operational definition of engagement is like nailing Jello to a tree; as soon as you try to pin it down, it slips away. Indeed, there are just as many operational definitions of engagement as there are people trying measure it. There are just as many vendors of engagement as there are people measuring… Caveat emptor!
Regardless of the fragmented world of engagement, several things seem to be clear:
* Organizations care about engagement.
* An individual’s manager matters a lot to his/her engagement.
* 0Individuals will modify behavior when appropriately rewarded.
* Rewards mean different things to different people.
These all make sense. However, the question of the individual’s human-agency is almost never addressed.
Let me explain. I'm a Psychologist by training. That means, in graduate school, we learned various principles of Psychology, including the "laws" of behavior: When rewarded appropriately, organisms will respond accordingly. Simply go to Sea World to see this in action.
As students we verified this theory. One ways to verify it was by obtaining baby chicks, only a few days old, and training them to peck at spots in a cage, simply by the appropriate introduction of bird seed. It works marvelously! You can get chickens to peck at spots!
However, every once in a while, a chick would come into the laboratory that simply refused to peck right. What do we do? Toss out the theory? No. We "destroy" the offender, and change our "law" to a probability: “There is a 99% probability you can get chickens to peck right.
What about people? How do we get them to "peck" at the appropriate spots? How do we get them engaged at work?
Managers and others may hold many of the rewards. But individuals’ human-agency must be factored. We must find ways to invite individuals to take personal responsibility for their engagement.
This is where the ZONE Model of Engagement(™) help. By appropriately identifying the Zeal or passions (Z) that individuals have, connect those to the need the Organization has (O), utilizing and building the individual's Network of relationships (N), and applying and developing the individual's skills and Expertise (E), we can invite those individuals to be more engaged in their work.
We will never get all people to be engaged all the time in all they day. To quote a movie, "Anyone who tells you differently is selling you something." While we will never achieve 100% engagement with 100% of our people, we must try! This is the call of the HR professional and of managers and leaders in all organizations. Only by having a good strategy in hand (like the ZONE Model of Engagement), and careful and thoughtful invitations, will we make the engagement headway every organization desires.