Define engagement

- So one day, your boss calls you into his office and says he wants you to do a better job of engaging your team members. You walk away from that conversation asking yourself what does that mean? Think about the word engagement for a minute. What pops into your head? I'm sure you can remember a time when you really enjoyed your work. I've bet on that day, time just flew by or maybe you can remember just the opposite when you dreaded the day kept watching the clock and prayed for it to be over. A professor at Boston University, William Kahn kicked off the conversation about workplace engagement in a 1990 journal article. He defined engaged people as mentally, physically and emotionally involved in their work. Now, of course there are other definitions too. Wikipedia says an engaged employee is someone who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests and that's certainly a mouthful. Personally, I define engagement as the story we tell ourselves about the experience called work. I use the word story because two employees with identical work experiences can have two different levels of engagement. My engagement, your engagement and their engagement has as much to do with how we feel in a situation as it does anything else. I want you to understand that engagement is both a combination of a person's general nature as well as the experience or environment which they find themselves in, nature and nurture. Of course, different workplaces had different engagement drivers. Engagement working at a coal mine differs from engagement working at an IT company. Engaging for a 20-year-old is different than an engagement for a 60-year-old. In 2000, Gallup began using their enormous survey resources to track worldwide engagement numbers. Using 12 questions they focus on three aspects of engagement, an employees emotional attachment to the company, the employees level of commitment to the company and their motivation to supply discretionary effort at work. And I have to tell you it's not a pretty picture. In every Gallup survey since 2000 only one third of all employees are considered to be engaged. That means two out of three people go to work every day simply to collect a paycheck and many hate their jobs. For these people, work is a life training affair. According to Gallup, there's a direct relationship between engagement scores and several different aspects of a company including customer ratings, profitability, productivity and turnover. Motivated by the insights drawn from engagement surveys, business leaders now look to engagement as a way to increase employee productivity and the value of their brands. That's why your boss asked you to improve the engagement on your team. No matter how you define it, engagement is always going to be a combination of how you feel about a situation and your work environment, nature and nurture. Given these learning points, I want you to think about this. What does engagement mean to you and how can you help improve it where you work?