Nearly every employer and manager wants to identify engaged employees. But some managers fall into the trap of only recognizing their social, extroverted employees as engaged. This can result in quieter, yet loyal employees being overlooked and underutilized.
If you picture engaged employees, you may have a vision of employees jumping for joy as they run around an office buzzing with activity and full of energy. But, this is a trap.
Activity doesn’t equal results. People rushing around and phones ringing means little in terms of actual positive outcomes for either employees or customers.
Engagement is complex. At a basic level, it can be defined as the individual’s sense of purpose and focused energy towards achieving organizational goals.
More specifically, engagement can be defined as an individual’s sense of purpose and focused energy, evident to others in the display of personal initiative, adaptability, effort and persistence directed toward organizational goals
But, what does an engaged employee look like?
The Four Types of Employee Engagement
There are two aspects to engagement: external and internal engagement. An employee can be internally and emotionally engaged, but have a reserved personality such that others fail to accurately gauge the employee’s level of engagement. It’s important to look for clues when assessing how engaged an employee is at work.
Did you know?
Employee engagement is cognitive, emotional, and physical.
Cognitive Employee Engagement
Cognitive Engagement defines the degree or extent the employee is able to focus on her work. Their ability to stave off distractions from the task on hand is derived from individual involvement in the job and individual motivation.
Managers can mistake quiet employees as being disengaged if they don’t realize that the ability to focus and get a job done is an important aspect of engagement. The quiet employee focused on a specific task is often thought of as less engaged than the charismatic employee telling jokes and laughing.
But, in some cases, the quiet, focused employee is very highly engaged. Cognitive engagement results in great performance and productivity.
See how Thanks provides the tool to recognize and encourage employees
Emotional Engagement
Emotional Engagement defines the extent to which the employee enjoys their work. This is the state when employees feel like they are in the zone. They have a feeling of belonging to the company and to their team. They feel aligned with the goals and purpose of the organization.
Emotionally engaged employees feel greater loyalty to their employer and team members. They are more likely to develop or display other aspects of engagement such as behavioral or cognitive engagement.
Both cognitive and emotional engagement are largely internal. This makes it easier for managers to miss. When employees have a high level of engagement, it’s often called being in “the zone.”
The zone represents the internal energy that drives the employee to deliver outcomes beyond the ordinary. This usually happens when three things occur.
- A clarity of goals
- A sense of urgency about the goal
- The person is putting in focused effort at achieving those goals
States like the zone, also known as “the flow,” are not normal. In reality they represent brief periods of intense focus that come along once occasionally
But, engagement isn’t only internal. Engaged employees naturally display behavior traits that make them stand apart from the crowd.
Physical Engagement
Employees physically engaged show outward signs of engagement that are easy to identify.
Physical engagement manifests itself as the extent to which the employee is willing to ‘go the extra mile’ for their customers, colleagues, and themselves. Engaged employees perform outside their job description to help customers, colleagues, and to solve problems.
They invest in their own performance improvement through new skills to perform better. They don’t need goals defined in their annual reviews. They set goals on their own because they want to.
Advocating Engagement
Advocacy is the behavior shown by employees who are so engaged that they actively promote the organization, its products, and services to their friends and family.
They refer others when job openings open up, they talk positively about the organization at home and among friends. This leads to a positive feedback loop that helps the company do better, leading to more engagement.
Both physical and advocacy engagement represent behavioral energy – it is visible. But, not always to managers. Employees can be advocates to friends and family yet quiet at work.
Employees who are engaged will solve problems proactively, not restricted by job descriptions, and expand their thinking to match new demands. They persist in the face of obstacles while adapting to change.
Conclusion
Managers who take the time to identify and understand the various forms of employee engagement find engaged employees across all personality types. This takes greater skills of observation, but is worth the extra effort.
It will provide the framework from which they can encourage and build greater engagement of more employees.
Thanks provides the technology for employees to encourage, build, and connect across teams. This improves advocacy and provides avenues of behavioral engagement for all personality types. Through Thanks you can recognize your employees both publicly, but also quietly and individually, according to their own personal preferences and styles.
References
- The essential guide to Employee Engagement, Sarah Cook
- Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice, and Competitive Advantage, William H. Macey, Benjamin Schneider, Karen M. Barbera, Scott A. Young
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition. Thanks is a subsidiary of OC Tanner.