A Zinger Employee Engagement rant.
Don’t drive me and don’t put me on the bus!
It has become commonplace to talk about drivers of employee engagement. Abhishek on Mumbler wrote a nice summary on What Drives Employee Engagement.
Here is the common list from the Conference Board’s work:
- Trust and integrity – how well managers communicate and ‘walk the talk’.
- Nature of the job –Is it mentally stimulating day-to-day?
- Line of sight between employee performance and company performance – Does the employee understand how their work contributes to the company’s performance?
- Career Growth opportunities –Are there future opportunities for growth?
- Pride about the company – How much self-esteem does the employee feel by being associated with their company?
- Coworkers/team members – significantly influence one’s level of engagement
- Employee development – Is the company making an effort to develop the employee’s skills?
- Relationship with one’s manager – Does the employee value his or her relationship with his or her manager?
I think it is helpful to have a number of factors to examine to determine how organizations can foster and enhance employee engagement.
Here is my mini rant: Don’t call them drivers!
The meaning of a driver is:
- the operator of a motor vehicle
- someone who drives animals that pull a vehicle
- a golfer who hits the golf ball with a driver
- a golf club (a wood) with a near vertical face that is used for hitting long shots from the tee
- one who drives something, in any sense of the verb to drive;
- driving – having the power of driving or impelling; “a driving personal ambition”; “the driving force was his innate enthusiasm”; “an impulsive force”
- driving – the act of controlling and steering the movement of a vehicle or animal
- driving – acting with vigor; “responsibility turned the spoiled playboy into a driving young executive”
I don’t want to jump on the employee engagement bus.
I don’t want to be driven around my organization and my work.
I want to get behind the wheel and drive my own work.
Drivers make me think we are putting too much in the hands of the organization.
Perhaps we fuel the vehicle, help to navigate, etc. — but let the employee drive their own engagement.
Could it be that the very use of this term actually lower levels of engagement?
Nice rant, David. Feel better now? 😉
Terry
Great point David. But what do you call them?
Val,
What a nice questions to ask. It is okay to rant but we should have an alternative.
I hope this sounds robust enough and sincere.
I call them invitations.
We invite others though our actions and initiatives to engage.
We respect their choices.
And of course, if they fail to engage or disengage others we may even invite them to change or leave the organization.
Don’t know if that makes sense in type but it does in my head and heart.
David
Thanks for citing my blog post, David!
David, I feel the same way when managers talk about “driving” results. The dominant/admired/modeled management profile, at least in the US for many years has been the High D, the driver. Many crimes have been committed in the name of “driving” results and given that we continue to address engagement from the outcomes rather than the sources, (think looking the wrong way through a telescope) it is no wonder we continue to address engagement like something that can be controlled. Rant on!
Mike:
Well said about the telescope vision. The occasional rant feels good for the soul and soles of the feet to keep moving.
David
Having a rant based on nothing more than semantics drives me up the wall 😉
Sorry David – couldn’t resist it. Only joking of course!
But then again, given your prediction in your excellent ‘2020 Vision’ piece just 5 days after this post, that over the next decade “The search for the single holy grail definition of employee engagement will be abandoned…..” it is somewhat ironic that here you appear to be embarking on a similar quest to re-define another piece of common employee engagement parlance, which let’s face it, we all know what it means.
I do think we get a bit too hung up on words and definitions for our own good sometimes, when really our collective creativity and energy should be addressing strategies and actions.
I enjoyed the rant immensely, thanks!
Jon
Jon,
Walt Whitman said it better than I ever could: “Do I contradict myself, very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” And if I keep engaging in eating like I am I will get larger.
David
Very nice David – not come across that one before.
Quite by chance, not long after writing the above comment I was reading Air Malta’s in-flight magazine and had to smile when I saw an article on the evolution of music. The opening paragraph very helpfully informed the readers that music “is an art form with the medium of sound based around vibrations”.
Arrrrgghhhhh! Music is music for God’s sake! Some things just don’t need to be defined like that do they? Rant over 😉
Jon