Professor Paul Sparrow Centre for

Performance-led HR

The Engage With What Challenge

EfS Guru Group

Introduction: A Slide A Minute

• Engagement debate is at a critical juncture – more nuanced but also more polarised debate

• “I want to testify” problem – each have to lay cards on the table on how we view and define engagement…are you in my gang? NOT GOING TO REPLAY ACADEMIC CRITIQUES OF SCALES ETC

• For me, engagement IF used as an umbrella concept to capture a range of social processes has value – mainly in legitimising and gaining entry for HR to a range of issues.. two sided deal at work, centrality of employee behaviour to many performance outcomes, the need for trust, fairness etc

• But hard questions, need to tone down some performance claims, and be more insightful in others

1 Trust me, I’m an HR Business Partner!

Systematic Review

• Critical and comprehensive synthesis, selection and appraisal of the best available research

• 48623 articles in January 2010, reduced to 646 studies in practitioner and academic journals from 1970-2010 – abstracts reviewed

• Majority present survey results/advice/viewpoint of HR experts• Only 81 evidence-base studies, only 35 of these based on any reasonable

measurement of impacts• Down to 11 studies that test it under controlled conditions• Based on two popular tools, UWES by Schaufeli et al. (2002) and the Q12

by Gallup

2 Umbrella Concept For A Range Of Antecedents, Bonds, Consequences (2010)

If going to measure, need a medical diagnosis model

3. What Academics Fail To Say…The Kaleidoscope Problem

Inputs become Outcomes, Outcomes become inputs, only higher-level constructs - eg. justice, voice, trust – have utility?

4. Move a Step back: Measure the Performance belief

• To make the construct of “engagement” more applied we need to move a step back and establish a construct that “causes” employees to be engaged.

• Engagement should be treated simply as an outcome that follows from relevant prior beliefs. Direct your measurement at the “Performance Belief”:

• “a shared belief of a team that it has the required ability, resources, goal clarity and leadership attributes to achieve the desired performance outcomes.”

• Performance Belief is the cause, being Engaged to Perform might be one of the effects • As a strategic function, HR should be most concerned about how it gets employees to

believe in the vision of performance the organization offers. • In shifting attention to how “engagement” is managed, it becomes clear that what you

measure also has to change!

5. Engagement for what? Does the technology export across sectors?

Engagement as Internal Marketing, employee advocacy

Engagement as healthy

deal at work - Process

Improvement

Engagement as predictive of Service

and Organizational Performance

6. So, I Want To Testify

• Engagement – Performance: Can show some “linkage” between “engagement” and bottom-line measures of performance – but reverse causation via proximate, intermediate & distal outcomes

• If start with the desired end performance, would not automatically always point to engagement as starting point: complex recipes needed to create organizational performance and engagement

• Engagement can be managed at individual level, but in many performance contexts engagement only really works at a collective level, and interventions that turn on an individual not the same as the ones that create a sense of collective belief

7. Engagement predicts performance, but is complex…Don’t devalue the currency

• Sometimes being in a good performing unit makes you engaged, not the other way round. Reverse causation

• Sometimes performance effects only kick in at extreme levels of engagement

• Sometimes engagement works through intermediate outcomes• Sometimes engagement only works when it creates a collective capability• Employee Segments: Different types of employee respond differently to

the same conditions• Engagement levels co-vary with lots of other things: relatively new to the

organisation, young, gender, hours of work and pay patterns, country they work in, work for a core or a more peripheral organisational unit etc

8. Performance recipe for InnovationWhither engagement?

• WHAT TYPE OF INNOVATION: From research, through impact, regional impact, teaching delivery, teaching markets

• Structural and incentive system development • Expansion of management skills • Competence destruction and reconfiguration of career systems • Understanding skill formation strategies and long-term organisational

capability • Subsequent HR solutions around selection, team management,

leadership etc

9. Or Service-profit chain thinking:Whither engagement ?

Complex service models that bring together a range performance factors:

Internal service qualityCustomer expectationsOrganizational image

Brand propositionPerceived product or service quality

External service valueCustomer satisfaction

Customer loyaltyCustomer advocacy

Service models embedded within a firm’s organizational capabilities and business approach

12. It’s Engagement, But Not As We Know It…

The Power of Good Data

15. Anyway, We Are Redefining the Contours of Fairness?

• Questions of fairness more complex• Redistributing costs and responsibilities

between between markets, states, organisations and individuals

• Many issues (eg. pension provision, questions of reward, careers across different age groups, global sourcing of work, social mobility etc)

• They have impacts across generational groups and across different internal employee segments

16. Conclusions for the way the engagement debate might develop

• Use a basket of antecedents, bonds, conditions – include work engagement if you wish ! – it is a “linguistic device”

• Return engagement analysis to where it belongs – as part of strategic workforce planning – looking at the collective aspects of engagement

• Analyse the different performance recipes – very likely unique to firms let alone sectors

• Move away from over-egging the engagement scales – different attitudes predict different performance outcomes

• Engage not because we must but because we should…

Time to move on, ask the tougher questions, clear

out the rubbish, but not get too hung up on debating

our navel

Thank You!