Employee engagement

I attended an event about employee engagement that AIM research together with the Chartered management Institute and Institute of Business Consulting organised. See http://www.managers.org.uk/eecm.

Employee engagement and communication from the boardroom to the shop floor and back, is half relevant to my research because it's about a specific aspect of engagement - that between employees and managers.

The panel experiences were interesting and from incredibly good presenters, the sort that speak, rather than read their PowerPoint bullet points to you.

Speakers were:

• Robin Field-Smith, who was an army Deputy Director and a police Inspector
• David McLeod, who is a Non Executive Director of the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Justice he is also an academic
• John Bigos, the Managing Director who transformed Duck Tours. Today the business is turning over in excess of £1 million and attracting over 100,000 passengers a year.
• Stephen Martin, the undercover boss
  

McLeod pointed out that it used to be that when a manager said, "Jump!" an employee asked only, "How high?" whereas now, the new, younger employee asks, "Why?" He says there's a paradigm shift that means people now have different values, and expect a different culture, and so management must adapt to this because it's no longer a command and control environment. He also compared two levels:

• transactional - the old way
  
• transformational- a way of doing business that requires a mindset that starts with respect and value. I understand that - engagement requires respect and valuing each others' values.

John Bigos had lessons about people all pulling together. Imagine that rope with a team of people tugging in the same direction, away from whatever problem they faced. Although he was a comparatively inexperienced speaker who would benefit from a speakers club like Toastmasters, he had content to his speech that inspired emulation if you were a business owner, and a wish to try his Duck tours, just to see how his employees would react to you.

But it's Stephen Martin I envy. What a superb opportunity for research! From what he said, and the way he presented it, he and his company benefited lots. It was the contact with workers on the ground that he prized. I'd like some other bosses to have that prize. Our Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean here at the OU can't do that with our associate lecturers though, because the ALs work at home, out of sight, at all times, like Sundays and bank holidays, the same times that the OU students study. I guess our VC doesn't work Sundays and bank holidays, and he's very recognisable, so couldn't go undercover.

My ramblings have gone from the academic interest in employee engagement to a personal interest in my teaching experiences with the OU. May be my research will be relevant beyond academic interest in employee engagement to a wider understanding of engagement.

Engagement & value

What kinds of engagement improve value?

My colleague asked me what I mean by value. Value on a project is

• finishing it near time,
• near budget,
• achieving all or most of the original objectives.

Engagement adds value if it improves those outcomes or helps them.

I assume that when people do engage, that effective engagement increases the effectiveness of projects. But some engagement isn't necessary. It's the wrong kind of value adding activity. It's inappropriate. Appropriate engagement strategies are most valuable.

My thesis is original in that ..

IN what way is my thesis original? I will count the ways:

1. quality of engagement is little researched
2. engagement is a waffly term, an undefined concept used muchly with little agreed understanding of the term
3. people have not looked closely at how consultants and clients work so closely together that the relationship could be called engaged
4. people have written about organisational collaboration in the public sector but not about engagement
5. UK government sees value in social capital and my work seeks to find engagement through the use of social capital. This approach is original.

Discussion of research

We are due our PhD students day, when we have discussions around the table with ten minutes for each student to present their work to each other and to academics. Occasionally, academics have little to contribute but are still interested. See last year's discussion here.

Today, with no round table pressure I had the luck to discuss my research with a senior academic in IT, who works in the OU and has researched IT using social capital. He read the paper I'd sent to EURAM, and my OUBS web page, and then he asked me useful questions, like

• what's the difference between social capital and trust?
  
• what is capital?
• what is engagement?
  
• what is quality of engagement?
• why IT?
• why the public sector?
• where's the value arise from engagement?
  

He suggested relevant literature, including, Habermas. Habermas is not where I would have gone, but apparently he described four forms of communication:

• instructive
• strategic
• discursive
• co-ordinative (not Habermas's term)

I could use Habermas's forms as ways of analysing engagement along a spectrum. See the theory of communicative action.

Another interesting point he made is that there is an IS Professor Dunleavy at LSE who has researched and written on macro level IT systems in national public sectors. He's found that IT projects are governed by national interest in building capacity of an IT industry in a global market place. If a nation, such as UK or Japan has an IT industry then it is more loath to pull out of failing public IT projects than countries like Holland that doesn't have an IT industry to contribute to the economy.

May the PhD day turn out as useful.

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I suspect the Professor Dunleavy is the Patrick Dunleavy who wrote that really useful text on Authoring a Phd : How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation that I mentioned here.

Knowledge creation

Marwick quotes Nonaka

"the key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilisation and conversion of tacit knowledge".

For example, a particular contractor would learn much from Internet sources or the local BCS. He would share this knowledge in a two page document that other team members could then work with and expand to a 15 page report. The contractor mobilised knowledge.

Nonaka has a matrix of four forms of knowledge conversion. One form is tacit to tacit knowledge conversion, which is socialisation and can be done in meetings and discussion between people sharing a common culture. "Thus tacit knowledge sharing is connected to ideas of communities and collaboration, Marwick argues. So far okay, but I'd argue that you need more than collaboration. Collaboration is where people have to work together. Collaboration is about groups of people, organised groups of people who've agreed to work together. You can have such groups in a meeting but they don't engage because engagement is different from collaboration. It's more personal and involves respect for what other individuals have to say, and what their experience is. If engagement is lacking then the tacit knowledge won't get shared. For example, consider a project that runs over time, perhaps because resources for testing are not available. One group, the users, tell another group, those allocating resources that there'll be a problem, but without engagement between the two groups, the words will go unheard. There's a lack of client-client engagement.

Of course this could all be hogwash if you don't believe Nonaka. I see Gourley has critiqued his work [1].

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Marwick, A. D. (2001) 'Knowledge management technology', IBM systems journal, 40 (4). 994
[1]

Knowledge Management Technology

I have a [1] paper by Marwick about knowledge management technology. It's interesting now that I have some case studies because I can see where it applies. For example, Marwick writes

"explicit knowledge is represented by some artifact" (p814)

Explicit knowledge gets kept in documents, project documentation, service requests, opening and closing project documents, programme plan on a wall, minutes and agendas. All these contain information that a team shares between its members.

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[1] Thanks to Shailey Minocha who drew my attention to it.
Marwick, A. D. (2001) 'Knowledge management technology', IBM systems journal, 40 (4). 994

Employee Engagement at BAM

I've been to a symposium on
Employee Engagement: The links to performance across cultures and generations
with 3 fascinating presentations on engagement, but using one definition (Schaufeli) and not going into various constructions of engagement.

1. looked at work engagement using Schaufelli's definition: "a positive work-related state of fulfillment that is characterized by vigor,dedication, and absorption." This study used on-line questionnaires (over 190 Dutch principals and 190 teachers) to rate performance quoting Demerouti 2001 that engagement leads to better performance, client satisfaction and engaged colleagues. The more personal resources there are, the more people can engage - something similar to the concept of psychological capital.
   Results suggest
   
   • job resources are related to work engagement "because they enhance employees' resiliency and self-efficacy beliefs"
   • An engaged and productive leader enhances engagement.
   • Work engagement is positively related to performance.
   Practical implications for empowerment of job resources, empowerment of personal resources, role of engaged leader - is this the first study that brings together leadership and engagement? (Despoina Xanthopoulou from Erasmus University, Netherlands. See http://www.c4ob.nl/)
   
2. looked at the cross-cultural nature of employee engagement, getting 13 companies across the world to design and execute the study. They concluded "the engagement level of the sampled population was very consistent across the globe with four universal drivers: variety & challenge of the work, interpersonal relationship with immediate manager, shared values with company, career growth opportunities. (John Gibbons, The Conference Board).
   
3. looked at work engagement differences in new generation employees and employees from prior generations. (Jim Westerman, Appalachian State), suggesting that the new generation is less engaged.
   

But they assume engagement is real and measurable, whereas I'm tending more to a construction of engagement being something similar to collaboration. In that sense, research that explores engagement as collaboration is needed. Perhaps that sort of engagement does link to performance.

The discussion did include the thought that engagement needs a landmark paper that sets it out coherently.
Problems

• confusing the drivers of engagement with the concept of engagement, so you cannot relate engagement to performance. You confuse the outcomes.
  
• Engagement is not satisfaction nor organisational commitment and engagement can change over time even within a day, but longitudinal research on it doesn't exist.
  
• Stability of engagement - if an engaged employee works with others they become engaged, so how stable is the concept? Studies in Finland suggest it is stable depending on how you measure it.
• Contagious: engagement crosses over from one employee to another. The study showed the more engaged trainees were, the more engaged the trainees became, therefor e look for this in the UK public sector IT projects.
• Wall Street Journal concludes that perhaps engagement may not improve performance, but since consultancies are selling their brands of engagement, research that finds engagement is useless would not get published. That doesn't augur well for my research.

People recommended Luthan's work on psychological capital.

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Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B. and Salanova, M. (2006) 'The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study', Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66 (4), pp. 701-716. 835