Seven Dimensions of Employee Engagement
Over the course of the next seven blog posts, I’ll be explaining the Seven Dimensions of Employee Engagement as featured in my new book The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
- Build on strengths that strengths that strengthen others. People who identified and then used their strengths (values, skills, personal traits) in new and creative ways experienced an increased sense of well-being. A variety of lists can help us identify our personal strengths. Then how can you develop creative ways to use them to strengthen others, contributing to your sense of meaning?
- Determine the directions that matter most to you. Four purposes that capture a lot of what motivates us are Achievement, Insight, Connection, and Empowerment. What is the balance among these motivations that feels most meaningful to you? How can a good work team find the right balance to meet its strategic objectives?
- Build high-relating teams as well as high-performing teams. People who have a best friend at work are seven times as likely to be highly satisfied with their job and twice as likely to be satisfied with their pay. Investing in good relationships at work pays off in a sense of personal meaning, as well as being good for business. We identify four crucial skills for building positive relationships: bids, managing proximity, managing the emotions around problem-solving, and making repairs.
- Create a positive work environment. Cynical work environments abound, and we can often pick up on a company’s culture within a few minutes of entering a work space. We’ve identified many elements of a positive culture, including humility, openness, unselfishness, positive routines, and accountability. What characteristics matter most to you, and how can you build them into the culture of your work setting?
- Get engaged with challenges that you enjoy. The right level of challenge helps us navigate between excessive stress and boredom. But the type of challenge is also important. Understand what outcomes matter to you. Create a clear line of sight between what you do and what care about. Then be clear about the work conditions that appeal to you.
- Develop personal resilience and learning. Ask people about a highly meaningful time at work and many will refer to using their skills to overcome a significant challenge or learn something new. We need to be take certain risks to learn and succeed, and that means sometimes we will fail. What are the skills of resilience and learning that you can develop so that blame and shame do not keep you from important growth?
- Cultivate civility and delight. People don’t generally put delight at the top of their list of contributors to meaning at work. But often the difference between an intolerable job and a tolerable one is a tiny moment of feeling appreciated, noticing something beautiful, getting a kick out of a shared joke, or having a moment of playfulness. These are the icing on the cake of meaningful that, though small, can be cultivated.
Check back next week for the first detailed post!
Dave —
Thrilled to have you aboard for this series of posts! You’re thoughts on this topic are extremely well respected and I look forward to reading about each of the dimensions.
That was good reading! Employee engagement involves the same basic principles, which have been worded differently by a number of people. The points mentioned in this blog are similar to what Vineet Nayar has said in his book ‘Employees First, Customers Second’. There, employee engagement is looked at more as a catalyst that will help the company reach its goals, and get higher customer satisfaction. He has explained a concept here called ‘Destroying the office of the CEO’, in which he discusses fostering an entrepreneurial mindset and decentralizing decision-making, which would in turn unlock the potential of the employees. All this goes hand in hand with the points you’ve mentioned- i.e. challenges, a positive work environment and developing learning. And ultimately, that’s how organizations win!