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I donât know how to describe it â I just feel alive. I feel energized, excited, stimulated, almost on edge, and yet I can focus as if nothing else exists. When Iâm engaged, I feel connected and feel like Iâm doing something that matters; Iâm making a difference, even if in a small way. Itâs a choice, really, to be that âintoâ my job â I wasnât always this way and Iâm not always 100% in this mode.
â Interview 45
Employee engagement, also referred to as job or work engagement, is a widely discussed topic in both practice and academe. Engagement is frequently described as a motivational state associated with several positive and desirable consequences for organizations, such as high levels of job performance and positive attitudes like job satisfaction. Employee engagement is about investing oneself at work, being authentic in the job, and delivering oneâs work performance with passion, persistence, enthusiasm, and energy. As I will review in Chapter 2, there are several different definitions for engagement at work; one of them, however, is not student engagement. Student engagement refers to a pattern of behaviors and emotions associated with students, in particular (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). For example, studentsâ participation in class, affective reactions to their instructors and peers, level of effort in learning, and feeling of connection with peers and school are all part of the student engagement construct. In this book, when I refer to engagement, I am talking about employee engagement at work.
Make no mistake: employee engagement is a challenging concept to describe and study because there are many approaches to explaining what engagement at work is (see Chapter 2). Engagement seems to manifest itself in many ways across industries, defying initial attempts to box it into a single and simple definition. Thus, despite the recent explosion in research articles and books offering definitions of engagement, many authors still refer to engagement in terms of what it looks like (e.g., high performance) as opposed to what it is.
Most of the reasons shared in practice about why you should care about engagement continue to revolve around disengagement. In the early 2000s, the Gallup Organization (2002, 2013a, 2013b) reported upward of $355 billion lost annual revenue in the United States, all due to unengaged workers. In their 2017 report on the American workplace, Gallup (2017a) revised the loss to between $483 billion and $605 billion annually. Also in the 2000s, they reported that 87% of employees across 142 countries were disengaged. In 2017, using data they collected across 155 countries between 2014 and 2016, Gallup (2017b) revised their previous report and stated that 85% of employees were disengaged, of which about 18% were actively disengaged (described as resentful and undermining work efforts; p. 23). The costs of disengaged employees are not unique to the United States. Disengaged workers reportedly cost the British economy between ÂŁ37.2 billion and ÂŁ38.9 billion per year (roughly $58.8 to $61.5 billion; Flade, 2003). Kenexa Research Institute reported in 2009 that an analysis of 64 organizations revealed engaged employees were responsible for twice the annual net income of their unengaged contemporaries. On one of SHRMâs (Society for Human Resource Managementâs) web pages, they note that Molson Coors reported unengaged employees suffered more safety and lost-time incidents than did engaged employees in just 1 year, adding up to about $1.7 million for the company that year (see SHRM, n.d.). According to these combined reports (and many others I did not cite here), having disengaged employees results in enormous financial losses, which is the key reason why you should care about engagement.1 There are exceptions to the disengagement reason for caring about engagement. For instance, the Dale Carnegie Organization (2007) suggested managers should care about engagement because engaged employees are productive, and high-engagement workplaces attract people who want to work hard for the organization. Glassdoor says they care about engagement because engaged employees drive business success (Clark, 2018).
