Building a high engagement culture

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.