Employee Engagement: Nothing “Professional” About It – Everything’s “Personal”

A comprehensive study on employee engagement, done by Dale Carnegie, shows a whopping $11 Billion is lost annually in the US alone due to employee turnover.

It’s a no brainer that people leave a company if they are not engaged with it. Extrapolating the same thought, the best employers are those which have the highest employee engagement. A very detailed analysis done by Aon Hewitt in the report titled 2015 Trends in Global Employee Engagement shows that the best employers have close to 100% more Total Shareholder Return (TSR) than those with average employee engagement. A similar study done by Dale Carnegie shows companies with engaged employees in the US outperform those without by more than 200%.

Various surveys done by the likes of Gallup, Dale Carnegie, Aon Hewitt point to a very dim fact that close to 80% of employees globally (75% in the US) are not fully engaged. What could then amaze anyone is why don’t the companies do something to improve on their employee engagement, given the fact that that alone would improve their bottom-line. The simple answer to this is that very few people understand the real meaning of employee engagement.

“Employee Engagement” has perhaps become one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in the corporate world.  A very basic test will show how disconnected we all have become from the original tenets of Employee Engagement.

How many times have you heard your manager saying, “Don’t mix your personal and professional life,” or “Don’t bring your hobbies and passion to office,” or “You can do anything outside, but when in office, you should forget everything else…”?

Chances are that, we all have heard these many times, and we all feel this very strongly, somewhere deep in our mind, that we shouldn’t bring our personal “self” in office and that we should become a different “self” – call it the professional “self” – the moment we step inside the four walls of the office. And that’s the biggest blunder we all commit. That’s why close to 80% of us haven’t been ever engaged properly at office.

If this may sound radical or ridiculous, let us hear from the horse’s mouth, from Dr. William Kahn, professor of Organizational Behavior at the Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and the one who has coined the term “Employee Engagement”. In the context of organizations and the various “roles” the employees “play” in them, Professor Kahn introduced the term “Personal Engagement” in his seminal paper Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work, published in the Academy of Management Journal in December 1990. Professor Kahn defined Personal Engagement as the “harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.”

Twenty-seven years after he had first introduced Personal Engagement, Professor Kahn has recently lamented in an interview given to David Zinger, an author and acclaimed engagement speaker and coach, that now “the industry focus is on how leaders can get people to work harder and with more energy on behalf of their organizations, with less focus on whether people are bringing their best, cherished selves into that work.”

What Professor Kahn means is that if an organization expects an employee to put her best at work, it should create an atmosphere for her where she can safely bring her best “self” at work. If she is passionate about music, she can’t leave aside the music at home. She should feel psychologically safe in bringing her musical self to office too. Only then would she find real meaning and value at work. Only then would she be completely available, in mind and body, for the work in office, because no part of her would be preoccupied outside with anything else. Only then should she engage all her energies – physical, cognitive (logical) and emotional – to her work. That’s why Kahn stresses on Psychological Meaningfulness, Psychological Safety and Psychological Availability as the three main aspects of engagement.

When asked by David Zinger why he chose the word “engagement”, Professor Kahn said, “I liked the various meanings of the word, starting with the notion that people could “betroth” themselves to their work, that liminal period after commitment and before marriage. And engagement also refers to vehicles – to engage the clutch of a car, to power an engine – which also appealed to me as a guiding metaphor about how people brought their energies into their work.”

When people bring their energies to their work, we see better performance. Kevin Kruse, the author of the bestselling book Employee Engagement 2.0, extends this line of thought in an article in Forbes and introduces the concept of Engagement-Profit Chain: “Engaged Employees lead to à Higher Service, quality, and productivity, which leads to à Higher Customer Satisfaction, which leads to à Increased Sales (repeat business and referrals), which leads to à Higher […] Profit, which leads to à Higher […] Returns (i.e., stock price).” The same has been ratified in various surveys too.

What Professor Kahn introduced as a theory, Google has converted that into law through the findings of its Aristotle Project, intended to find the best team at work. Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and the paper’s senior editor of live journalism, discusses about it in his book Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business. “What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google,” he says in his book, “is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe”, ….”

How much Google has implemented the findings is a matter of conjecture. But the fact that Google remains, till date, one of the most innovative and best performing companies does point to something in these lines.

Let us go little deeper into the psychological aspects of Employee Engagement and try to see the continuity of the thoughts that finally led to it.

When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;” little did he realize that few centuries later his thoughts would be the premise of what eventually crystallized into Employee Engagement. In the context that everyone eventually plays a “role” whenever she does anything, either at office or home or elsewhere, Sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the concept of “Role Embracement” in a paper titled Role Distance in 1961.

To explain what he meant by “role”, Goffman used the analogy of how a toddler, a small kid and a grown-up kid would react to when brought to a Merry Go Round game in a park. Here the “role” in question is that of someone who’s participating in the Merry Go Round game.

The toddler is initially attracted to the game, but is too small to even climb on to the platform. She makes a few futile efforts to climb, but soon starts crying, feeling dejected. Her mother must take her away. Whenever she’s brought to the park again, she sees the game and starts crying immediately, realizing very well that it’s beyond her capabilities. She can never play the “role” of someone who happily participates in the game. Goffman defines her condition as that of Role Distance.

The grown-up kid is capable of perfectly playing the role, but she finds the game too childish and hence looks down upon it. Subconsciously, she has already created a picture of an “Ideal Self”, or something she should be like – not necessarily something she’s already like – and the picture she has in mind doesn’t match with someone enjoying the Merry Go Round game. Her condition is also that of Role Distance.

But the small kid, who’s neither too small like the toddler to climb on, nor too big like the grown-up kid to look down upon, not only enjoys it, but also puts all her energies to remain seated properly – or rather perfectly – on the horse back, learn to maneuver better, master new techniques to balance herself without holding on to anything with her hands, waive at her mother more vigorously every time she passes her by. She happily demonstrates more of her skills as a perfect Merry-Go-Rounder. She’s excited because she realizes that she’s very much like the picture of an Ideal Merry-Go-Rounder she has in her mind. She returns home and doesn’t stop talking about how much fun she has had at the park. She goes to the school and talks about it to her friends and teachers. She insists anyone who hasn’t yet rode the Merry Go Round go the park immediately. Her mother wonders at her active engagement and spontaneous involvement with Merry Go Round. Goffman says, hers is a case of Role Embracement, where the role player, the kid in this case, herself has become her “Ideal Self”, the ideal Merry-Go-Rounder.

Goffman divided Role Embracement in three parts. The first part is the initial attraction or attachment for the role; the second part is the demonstration of the capacities for performing it; and the third is the active engagement and spontaneous involvement in it.

Role Embracement also happens when someone is deeply in love. Theodor Reik, a student of Freud and a prolific writer himself, explains the various stages of falling in love very simplistically in his book Love & Lust. He says a girl is first attracted to a boy only when she’s envious of him, because he may possess certain qualities from her “Ideal Self” – Ego Ideal in psychological parlance –, the self she wants to become, the self she dreams of. The initial attachment is a result of an envious attraction. In the context of love, she “plays” the role of a lover.

In the next phase, she demonstrates the best of her capabilities as a lover, by wooing her boy, striving to present herself in the best possible way and yearning to know everything about him. If the subject of love is not a boy, but something like music or writing or sports, the lover demonstrates her capabilities as a lover by mastering the subject. In the book Symbolic Interactionist Takes on Music, the editors use Goffman’s concepts of Role Embracement to explain why the ardent fans often go out of the way to know tidbits and anecdotes, no matter how insignificant or nondescript, about the celebrities they idolize. A die-hard Beatles fan would love to demonstrate her knowledge of every song sung by the Beatles. In this stage of love, the lover takes pride in everything she does for her beloved. She feels her love is adding value and meaningfulness to her life. She feels she is at ease and psychologically safe with her love. She feels she is available to her beloved with her complete own self, without any pretention, deceit and fear.

The third and the last stage of love, where the girl unites with her beloved, physically, cognitively (logically) and emotionally, has been celebrated by the poets since ages. “Two bodies and one soul” is perhaps one of the most popular and simplistic ways of expressing this stage of love, which Theodor Reik refers to as the “fusion of two personalities” and “fading away of boundary lines between two individuals”. This is the culminating point in Role Embracement, where the girl, playing the role of a lover, realizes that her true self and that of her beloveds are the same, that there is only One Self, not two. At this point in true love, the girl is convinced that she has become him. Spiritually, at a much higher plane though, this – the realization of that One Self, which the Mandoukya Upanishad, an ancient Indian text about spirituality and universal wisdom, refers to as eka-aatma-pratyaya – is the point of attaining salvation, becoming the Buddha.

When Role Embracement happens, the role player raises above all tension, fear and anxiety – neither she’s perturbed in failure, nor she’s excited in success. Such a state is referred to in Bhagavad Gita, another ancient Indian text, as sthita-pragya, unmoved in wisdom. There’s no question of separation either, because the “role” and the “player” are no longer two different entities that can be separated any more. Doubtless, such a scenario is most congenial for the role player to engage all her energies into the role.

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein – all had embraced the roles they played. Professional failures and financial disasters could never stop Mozart from engaging his best energies into composing the most beautiful music in the world. Nothing would have stopped the other three too, even if they hadn’t been successful in their lifetimes. All of them were deeply in love with the roles they played, the work they did. Mozart had Himself become Music, Shakespeare Literature and Newton and Einstein Science.

In the context of organizational roles and Employee Engagement, the crux of Role Embracement – eka-aatma-pratyaya, the realization of that One Self – is nothing but bringing in that One Self of the employee completely to work.

An organization must provide the meaningfulness and safety to an employee and only then the latter can ensure the availability of her real self completely for the organization, thus enabling the engagement of all her energies – physical, cognitive and emotional – in her work. As the real self can be One, the very premise of keeping the “personal” self at home just ruins everything.

So effectively, what we are talking about is a spiritual organization. Glenn Rifkin, coauthor of Radical Marketing and The CEO Chronicles and a contributor for New York Times and Harvard Business Review, rightly points out, in an article titled Finding Meaning at Work, that “a movement toward finding spirituality and fulfillment at work is quietly coming to life”. He makes a very interesting observation while trying to find a reason behind such a trend. The lookout for fulfillment and meaningfulness, he says, has been always there in the society. Till a few years ago (as recent as fifty years), an individual would derive meaningfulness from their involvement in four types of communities: the extended family comprising parents and grandparents; the civic community comprising political groups, Rotary Clubs etc; churches and finally the work place. Evidently the impact of the first three communities have diminished significantly in the recent times. “That leaves the workplace as the core of many people’s lives.” What it means is that the workplaces should deliver the responsibilities of the erstwhile churches.

It’s no surprise then, that the Southwest Airlines’ chief executive, Herb Kelleher, talks about the role of a spiritual force within the company. While commenting on the powerful bond between his company and its workers, Mr. Kelleher told the Fortune magazine that his airline had “a patina of spirituality”. It’s no wonder that Southwest features very high in Employee Engagement. It has also been the only American airlines to remain profitable over a long time, with the most on-time arrival, most passengers per employee and least employees per aircraft. As pointed out in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Southwest is a good case study that validates the theory that better employee engagement leads to better company performance.

Now that we’ve seen how spirituality is at the center of both Goffman’s Role Embracement and Kahn’s Personal Engagement at Work, we can relate the concepts better in reality. Put across simplistically, it can be summarized that Kahn states the three prerequisites – (1) Psychological Meaningfulness, (2) Psychological Safety and (3) Psychological Availability – for Employee Engagement and Goffman states the three visible outcomes of it – (1) attachment to the role; (2) demonstration of the skills and capabilities to perform the role; and finally, (3) active engagement and spontaneous involvement unleashing all the energies – physical, cognitive and emotional – to the work.

As in the case of Goffman’s Merry Go Round example, Employee Engagement starts with the role itself, which shouldn’t be either too tough (as in the case of the toddlers) or too easy (as in the case of the grown-up kids). The employee should have the right skills to deliver a role. Non-optimal utilization of skills leads to Role Distance, the other name of disaster. The perks and benefits and the other commercial aspects of a role are just needed for the initial attraction or attachment. Next it falls entirely upon the leadership to make an employee feel the value and meaningfulness in the role.

A simple anecdote speaks all about meaningfulness. John F Kennedy, during a visit to The NASA Space Center in 1962, stopped by a janitor and said, “I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” Prompt came the answer from the janitor, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Very few employees would feel so meaningful and valued at work.

Next comes the feeling of safety, which gives the employee the courage to bring her real self to office. Yesterday at an old-friends’ meet, I met Kirishnendu Majumdar, my school mate and friend of more than 30 years. Presently the SVP & Product at InMobi, he is an avid biker. He was passionately talking about how it’s like while cruising down the hilly slopes at 60kmph, nothing other than just the two wheels of the bike and the winding black road in his mind; how it’s like living just for one paddle at a time; how it’s like rediscovering yourself again and again through new challenges – all of which sounded metaphorical in the context of his work too. What was heartening to hear was that his CEO, Naveen Tiwari, is also a passionate biker and that they have a bikers’ group in InMobi that often goes on biking sojourns.

I used the example of biking as a metaphor, but it can be music and writing, as in my case, or anything else – photography, adventure sports, marathons, cooking, cross country driving. A employee should feel at home in office. She shouldn’t feel awkward to bring in the passionate part of her in office. I can’t even think of a work place where I can’t talk about my music and writing to anyone. The moment I would feel that people at work are skeptic about it, or perhaps they think it as a distraction for my professional involvement, I would immediately become a disengaged employee, even though I may not quit.

Once an employee finds the real meaning in her work, and feels at ease in being her real self, without any pretense and fear, her entire self would be available in office; she won’t be preoccupied with anything else outside. That’s when the Role Embracement would happen, and she would first put all energies to master her work and demonstrate her capabilities and capacities to deliver her part of the work in the role she’s given, very much like the small kid – neither the toddler nor the grownup kid – in the Merry Go Round example. Next, she would do exactly what the kid did too – influence others and create positive vibes about the role and the organization. She would be then actively engaged and spontaneously involved.

Further Read: Q^12® Meta-Analysis, published by Gallup, for the tangible and measurable parameters to assess Employee Engagement.