A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
People Lab is an Employee Engagement C o n s u l t a n c y, d e l i v e r i n g t o c l i e n t s w o r ldw ide. We believe that happy peo ple make workplaces better for everyone – employees, customers, businesses and s o c i e t y. Fancy a chat about employee engagement? Call Emma today on 07595465515, or send your messages to info@peoplelab.co.uk.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement – What is it?.............p 3-4 What is Transactional Engagement?..............p 5 What is Transformational Engagement?.........p 6 Does it matter?..........................................p 7 – 9 What does an engaged person do?................p 10 Further Reading: What do people want from their
jobs?........................................................p 11 - 15 Fancy a chat?...........................................p 16
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is a process by which people become personally implicated in the success of a business. Although studies have identified a range of common engagement drivers across organisations, it is too simplistic to say that it is always the same. Engagement is very personal; it differs from person
to person.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Transactional engagement is defined by a reactive set of transactions aimed at improving engagement, often in response to survey results. Engagement is seen as a separate add on activity, and not integral to the business strategy and culture. Often engagement is seen as a ‘Tick box’ exercise that happens once a year in response to survey results, and once action planning is complete engagement is “done” for another a year.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Transformational engagement however, is integrated into the business strategy and culture. It is proactive, with employee insight, ideas, and opinion regularly sought, harnessed, and acted upon. A survey is not necessarily required to understand how employees feel about the organisation, or to drive action focused on improving engagement because this already happens as part of the business focus, culture, and leadership style. A natural desire to improve engagement exists within the business.
In reality these two types of approach to engagement are not discrete, more often organisations sit somewhere between the two.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
There is now a whole host of evidence to demonstrate that engagement impacts performance. The piece of evidence on the following page was published in the Harvard Business review in 1998, and demonstrated for the first time the link between employee attitudes, customer experience and company
performance:
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Watson Wyatt research also found that engagement is a lead indictor, not a lag indicator of a company’s financial performance. They found that the correlation between
engagement and subsequent financial performance (one year later) was twice as large as the correlation between engagement and the prior year’s financial performance. These are just a couple of examples of the growing body of evidence that finally proves that engagement does matter.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
• Go beyond the normal demands of the job • Help others with heavy workloads • Volunteer for extra duties • Look for ways to perform the job more effectively • Create a higher level of customer satisfaction • Feel fulfilled in their work • Have greater sense of well-being and better health • Are proud of the work they do
Engagement benefits employees, businesses and their customers.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Do they want just a higher salary? Or do they want security, good relationships with co-workers, opportunities for growth and advancement – or something else altogether?
This is an important question, because it's at the root of motivation, the art of engaging with members of your team in such a way that they give their very best performance.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
The psychologist Fredrick Herzberg asked the same question in the 1950s and 60s as a means of understanding employee satisfaction. He set out to determine the effect of attitude on motivation, by asking people to describe situations where they felt really good, and really bad, about their jobs. What he found was that people who felt good about their jobs gave very different responses from the people who felt bad. These results form the basis of Herzberg's MotivationHygiene Theory (sometimes known as Herzberg's Two
Factor Theory.) Published in his famous article "One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees", the conclusions he drew were extraordinarily influential, and still form the bedrock of good motivational practice nearly half a century later.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Herzberg's findings revealed that certain characteristics of a job are consistently related to job satisfaction, while different factors are associated with job dissatisfaction. These are:
Factors for Satisfaction
Factors for Dissatisfaction
Achievement
Company Policies
Recognition
Supervision
The work itself
Relationship with Supervisor and Peers
Responsibility
Work conditions
Advancement
Salary
Growth
Status Security
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
The conclusion he drew is that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not opposites. 
The opposite of Satisfaction is No Satisfaction.

The opposite of Dissatisfaction is No Dissatisfaction.
Remedying the causes of dissatisfaction will not create satisfaction. Nor will adding the factors of job satisfaction eliminate job dissatisfaction. If you have a hostile work environment, giving someone a promotion will not make him or her satisfied. If you create a healthy work environment but do not provide members of your team with any of the satisfaction factors, the work they're doing will still not be satisfying.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
According to Herzberg, the factors leading to job satisfaction are "separate and distinct from those that lead to job dissatisfaction�. Therefore, if you set about eliminating dissatisfying job factors you may create peace, but not necessarily enhance performance. This placates your workforce instead of actually motivating them to improve performance. The characteristics associated with job dissatisfaction are called hygiene factors. When these have been adequate, people will not be dissatisfied, nor will they be satisfied. If you want to motivate your team, you then have to focus on satisfaction factors like achievement, recognition, and responsibility.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
If you’d like to talk about employee engagement in your organisation, call us today on
0 1 4 2 4 2 0 5 4 1 1 . A l t e r n a t i v e l y, drop us an email on info@peoplelab.co.uk and we’ll get right back to you.
A Rough Guide to Employee Engagement
Š People Lab, 2013
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