Building a high engagement culture

Dr Elissa Farrow
January 29, 2013

In this series, Elissa Farrow charts the importance of high engagement for your project team and how that engagement translates into project success down the line.

To me, employee engagement is all about solid commitment, leading to greater work effort and staff retention. In organisations I have worked in, engagement covers both the emotional and the rational commitment levels.

Emotional engagement relates to the meaning people personally receive from their organisation or their manager, for example enjoyment or inspiration and so on. Rational engagement focuses on how an organisation keeps the best interests of people in focus and how they are rewarded, for example financially or developmentally etc.

Best practice research suggests that employees stay with their organisation when they believe it is in their self- interest, but are more ‘effective’ in delivery when they believe in the value of their role in an organisation. It has been suggested that emotional engagement is four times more valuable than rational engagement in driving employee effort.

The Corporate Leadership Council in 2004 (CLC 2004) outlined 25 levers of engagement cut across three categories:

  1. Day-to-day work;
  2. Organisational culture; and
  3. Manager characteristics.

So we can target these levers of engagement in our change management processes, I will outline the these over my next three blog posts: stay tuned.

Author avatar
Dr Elissa Farrow
Dr Elissa Farrow is a founder and lead consultant for About Your Transition and has extensive experience in strategic organisational adaptation design, facilitation and delivery. Elissa has supported organisations to define positive futures and then successfully transform to bring lasting benefits. She has proven adaptive capacity and can successfully transfer her skills to different contexts. In 2022, Elissa was awarded her doctorate through the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her published research explores organisations of the future and how they will need to adapt to the evolving field of artificial intelligence. Elissa is an experienced board director and thought leader in her field, having won a number of awards for her research and for her contributions to Women in Project Management.
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