Employee Engagement

Hearts and Minds

A common employee engagement model recognizes two types of engagement that drive employees to put in extra discretionary effort, rational and emotional.

Emotional Engagement (the Heart): how employees feel about the company and their associated worth. It is influenced heavily by company branding, the corporate mission, and the individual’s relationship with their manager and peers.

Rational Engagement (the Mind): how employees view their work. It is influenced by the clarity of roles, being empowered, having the required tools and resources, and professional development.

Engagement as a Process

What might an engagement process look like if you are trying to engage both the hearts and minds of your employees? Fundamentally, it comes down to clarity and communication, executed at all levels, from the Executive Team through HR and down to individual managers. A generic process might look like this:

	Process	Detail	Engages
1.1	Manage Culture and Values	What is important to the organization, both in and away from the office? What principles guide our decisions?
1.2	Manage Organizational Strategy	Where is the organization going, and what does success looks like? Most likely an annual process with routine status updates. Best practice is to map to individual goals back to the overall strategy.
1.3	Manage Operating Models	High-level organizational structures, communicating key responsibilities, and how your customers and partners integrate into your business. Multiple perspectives are used as needed, including functional, process, business unit, product, and geography.
1.4	Manage Scorecards	How do we measure our progress against our strategy, customer satisfaction, costs, and the market? How are we measuring engagement?
1.5	Manage Org Charts and Job Roles	Operating models tell you how the organization operates, and then org charts and job roles define this down to the individual level.
1.6	Manage Communications	How often and in what format do we communicate to our organization? What is our practice for keeping employees informed and engaged via messaging and, ideally, dialog?
1.7	Manage Manager Capability	What development and accountability are we putting in place to ensure our values are cascaded consistently to everyone in the organization?

How Process Management Facilitates Engagement

Process best practices help people to understand their job, what success looks like, and how to achieve it. Implemented correctly, process management drives increases in rational engagement.

1. Expectation Clarity and Guides
   Mid to senior-level jobs will often be expected to identify and make improvements to their function. Unfortunately, making “improvements” is a vague requirement, and because of this, it is sometimes viewed as an unreasonable expectation. Process management has, fortunately, defined frameworks and guides for process improvement to make it prescribed rather than open-ended.
2. Employee Empowerment
   A key tenant of operational excellence is defining the processes of your organization, appropriately documenting them, developing resultant customer metrics through Voice of Customer exercises, and measuring process performance. These promote empowerment because the more people understand their environment and what success looks like, within and outside their specific role, the more comfortable they will feel to work through issues, manage exceptions, and ensure customer satisfaction.
3. Tools for Success
   Process management can feel like overhead or extra work. Providing simple, easy to use tools can remove that perceived burden and make the work feel more productive.
4. Professional Development
   Process training is valued by many organizations. Basic job board searches return thousands of jobs related to process, and indirectly there are countless job descriptions with specific process techniques listed as “nice to have.”

   “But why would I want to skill up my employees so they can get jobs elsewhere?”

   Top organizations have top employees, and top employees care about their development and job growth. A fear-based approach rarely benefits an organization in the long term. By giving your employees business-relevant tools and training, you are showing them that you value their capability and believe they can contribute more to the company. Yes, you may lose some employees, but that’s natural and not because you’ve skilled them up.