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The 4 Es of Engagement
Highlights
Employee engagement is key to company performance, leading to positive effects such as higher productivity, improved work quality, and decreased job turnover. According to the Gallup research team, “A job has the potential to be at the heart of a great life, but only if its holder is engaged at work.”
Employee engagement is key to company performance, leading to positive effects such as higher productivity, improved work quality, and decreased job turnover. According to the Gallup research team, “A job has the potential to be at the heart of a great life, but only if its holder is engaged at work.”
Employees today are looking for more than just a 9-to-5 job. They want to be involved in their work, enthusiastic about the organization they work for, and committed to their fellow workers. Unfortunately, engagement can be a tricky thing measure, making it easy to overlook employees’ opinions, behaviors, and concerns.
It is, however, an important piece of the performance puzzle, as disengaged employees are more likely to leave their jobs, or only do the bare minimum to get by.
What is the problem?
Lack of engagement costs hundreds of billions. Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” report from June 2013 reported the baleful effect of the non-engaged workforce:
“The vast majority of U.S. workers, 70%, are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ at work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplace and are less likely to be productive. Actively disengaged employees alone cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity, and are more likely than engaged employees to steal from their companies, negatively influence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away.”
In their book, The Power of Thanks, authors Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine unpack engagement into four component parts: enablement, energy, empowerment and encouragement. They argue that each of these four conditions is necessary to have truly engaged employees. Let’s look at them briefly:
The 4 Es of Employee Engagement:
1. Enablement: Enablement is a subjective experience because the employee sees himself in a context. For example, for an auditor if he has a desktop calculator he works better as he can type out accurate calculations without having to look at the specialized keyboard. If his boss says, “You have a calculator on the computer, just use that.” But that’s not how the employee works best—he has to type out the numbers along the top of his large computer keyboard. That might only make a few seconds of difference in efficiency and occasional inaccuracy, but it makes a big difference in his comfort and sense of efficacy.
2. Encouragement is another of those human factors that go far in making an engaged workforce. At its simplest, encouragement costs practically nothing—a word, a bit of recognition, a gesture of appreciation or gratitude—yet it literally “gives courage” to an employee to act again, to go beyond the minimum, to break out of the sterile job requirements, to take risks, and to make the extra effort that defines engagement in the first place.
Thanks, appreciation, gratitude, recognition, well-being, and engagement are qualities of a healthy and well-functioning workplace. Every business leader can want the results that derive from these competitive advantages over lesser workplaces, but not every business leader succeeds in creating them.
3. Empowerment: Empowerment transfers the power to achieve results from the manager to the employee. Once enabled with the right resources, an employee must be empowered to take responsibility, to make decisions, and to act with those resources. Empowerment is the foundation of accountability— that is, delivering on commitments. Engaged and productive employees are by definition empowered to achieve results.
4. Energy is also a subjective experience affected by work context. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy note that when organizations demand higher performance from their employees, those workers typically put in more hours at work. Schwartz and McCarthy say this is the wrong focus. Instead, the authors recommend that companies support a focus on managing each employee’s physical, emotional, and spiritual energy. Their case studies show employees who manage energy well demonstrate significant improvements in performance.
As rightly said by Doug Conant, to win in the marketplace one must first win in the workplace and hence let’s hope that manager’s follow these 4E’s to win in the workplace.
By Dr A Jagan Mohan Reddy
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