The Human Side of Employee Engagement
Bruce Temkin
Human experience visionary, dynamic keynote speaker and executive advisor who helps organizations better understand and cater to human beings in ways that drive success and improve humanity
As you probably know, Temkin Group spends a lot of time researching and writing about employee engagement. It’s one of our Four CX Core Competencies and a critical component of a customer-centric culture.
While our research typically focuses on the work environment that drives employee engagement, that’s only one part of the picture. To fully understand employee engagement, it’s important to look deeper at the people who are our employees. Why? Because employee engagement is driven by two things: Human Attitudes & Work Environment.
What do I mean by “Human Attitudes?” Your employees are people who have a set of feelings and beliefs that they bring with them to work. These underlying attributes may have absolutely nothing to do with their work. Here’s some data that looks at the level of employee engagement based on two sets of attitudes, the degree to which people feel happy, and the degree to which they feel loved and appreciated. (Note: we used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index to assess the level of engagement).
As you can see, people who are typically happy and those who feel loved and appreciated are significantly more engaged employees than other people. While their work may contribute to these feelings, it’s more likely that they feel this way because of their underlying perspectives and as a result of what’s going on in the rest of their lives.
The first implication of this insight is that you need to do a better job of recruiting and screening for people who are more likely to be engaged. This data shows that more positive people tend to be more engaged employees. So look for those people when you are hiring.
Another implication is that organizations need to deal with the underlying attitudes of their employees. In addition to applying traditional employee engagement strategies, you need to help employees develop more positive attitudes. There’s a lot of good resources to tap into from the Positive Psychology movement.
I’m joining other members of our team at the bi-annual World Congress of Positive Psychology in Montreal in July where we explore this focus on employee engagement in more detail. After the previous congress, we published this table connecting positive psychology to customer experience (including employee engagement):
The bottom line: Employee engagement requires human engagement.
Client-focused Org Designer Sportin' HCD Skills | Innovator | Unicorn
7 年A colleague and I were just talking about this very issue this morning: the need to explore the human factors associated with driving employee engagement and employee experiences. Tough to drive employee engagement merely with business components alone. Theory X and Theory Y!
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Human Centred Design & Self-Actualisation
7 年I loved the elements of the positive psychology Bruce. Thanks for sharing
Subject Matter Expert, President @ Medical Tourism Training, Inc. | Medical Tourism, Wellness, Health Travel
7 年Thank you for sharing this information on a very important topic especially in healthcare where research shows that teams with disengaged employees tend to have higher rates of medical errors. Those are errors that can have immediate consequences for patients who receive inferior care or worse. In terms of the rewards tactics in the PPI chart, it seems that the positive reinforcement should be based on data or other measurable behaviors. Otherwise, managers can engage in rewarding the "teacher's pets" instead of recognizing team members who may be disengaging because of favoritism in the work place. It then becomes a vicious cycle with those same employees becoming even more disengaged when the favoritism is reinforced.