What's the difference between employee engagement and employee alignment?
Lindsay Uittenbogaard
Founder at Mirror Mirror? - Actionable Insights, Tailored to Teams
Employee engagement has been deeply embedded into organizations for decades. It is a multi-billion dollar industry with engagement-related job titles, qualifications, consultancies, surveys, awards, you name it. But employee engagement has lost a lot of credibility and influence over recent years.
Why's that?
About employee engagement
Put simply, employee engagement activities became a 'bit much' and didn't change with the rest of the world. Driven by the need to reach as many people as efficiently as possible, the whole thing turned into a PR-machine in the 80's and in many organizations today, an updated, more polished techie-version of the same machine is still running. The key objective is to 'get' people to think or do something. And there's not much discussion.
The definition of employee engagement, according to a consultancy I shall not name is:
"... about improving the work environment and culture to encourage employees to be more dedicated to company goals and values."
Sounds like a nice way of saying that 'people have to think and do what is set out for them to think and do'. And it's true of course. A leader / leaders have agreed on a strategy and hired a communicator / communicators to share / tell people what it is about.
While in the past this might have been welcomed as 'clear guidance', today it is unimaginative and condescending. While top leaders still need to communicate an overall strategy or general direction, they can no longer see how that relates to each geography / function / team, and what strategy implementation should best look like.
That's because the contexts in which organizations operate now move so fast that many top leaders are unable to keep up. They rely on inputs and decision making from people 'doing the work'; from people who can see what's happening and what's needed. Indeed, the area of diversity, equity and inclusion has gained significant traction of late not just because it's competitive and 'fair to people' in the war for talent, but because including different perspectives is good for weighing up options when you come back round to strategy implementation.
But it's not just unimaginative and condescending, it's also noisy. Employee communicators are busy publishing content about things like aspired values, stories about how leaders are modelling those; and recognition articles about how certain employees have bought into it all, as if it was some kind of religion.
OK, maybe I'm a tad cynical, but I think employees today can be forgiven for being disengaged by engagement. According to Gallup's employee engagement indicator, just 21% of employees in 2021 were classed as 'engaged'.
It's such a shame because there is a need for the kind of engagement Gallup is talking about in competitive, high-performing organizations:
"Engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in both their work and workplace."
About employee alignment
The area of employee alignment is generally misunderstood and the value of it is under-recognized. In a nutshell, it is the extent of shared understanding between people about how the strategy relates to their work and how they implement it. For this, people do need a clear strategic frame, but the rest is co-creation.
It's not the same as enterprise alignment, where the aim is to match up parts of the organization: the strategy, purpose, systems, capability, and architecture.
Employee alignment (which includes leaders) is both a state and a process that works best where people share tangible goals: in teams.
It is based on the fundamental premise that meaning is created between people through language (the basis of Social Constructivism Theory) This is unlike knowledge, where certain information or ideas are 'told' and absorbed on an individual level.
The state of employee alignment is an outcome of shared meaning that leads to more effective group decisions and actions.
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The process of employee alignment is dialogue-based and reliant on the use of learning behaviours, such as listening, inquiry, openness, and respect. These behaviours are at the heart of a team's capability to align.
The outcomes of employee alignment are more effective decisions and actions.
Managing employee alignment is facilitative, providing employees with:
According to research published recently in HBR, the gap between perceived and actual alignment to the strategy is 59%. And that doesn't even look at the extent of alignment between people about collective strategy implementation. With all the work we've been doing in this area since 2016, I'd say that figure getting worse for three reasons:
If employee communications are any indicator of how leaders are expecting people to make sense of things, perhaps it's time to look at things differently.
Getting back to centre
It is clear that there is a need to 'engage' employees so that they are aware of the strategy, able to support it, and willing to do that with some enthusiasm.
The question is, how can employees possibly be engaged (like that) if they are not first aligned?
You need both, where:
Of course, there's a 2 x 2 matrix about that :)
Lindsay Uittenbogaard is the Founder and CEO of Mirror Mirror, provider of insights and frameworks that support team and organization and alignment.