Canadian HR Reporter Weekly

September 26, 2018 Published weekly by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. CUSTOMER SERVICE Tel: (416) 609-3800 (Toronto) (800) 387-5164 (outside Toronto) Fax: (416) 298-5106 customersupport.legaltaxcanada@tr.com www.thomsonreuters.ca One Corporate Plaza 2075 Kennedy Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1T 3V4 Director, Media Solutions, Canada: Karen Lorimer Publisher/Editor-in-Chief: Todd Humber todd.humber@thomsonreuters.com (416) 298-5196 Editor/Supervisor: Sarah Dobson sarah.dobson@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-7896 News Editor: Marcel Vander Wier marcel.vanderwier@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-7837 Sales Manager: Paul Burton paul.burton@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9928 Circulation Co-ordinator: Keith Fulford keith.fulford@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9585 Art Director: Dave Escuadro david.escuadro@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9358 ©2018 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher (Thomson Reuters, Media Solutions, Canada). Engagement initiatives oversimplifying concept: Report Job engagement not the same as organizational engagement BY SARAH DOBSON When it comes to employee engagement, organi- zations risk having failed initiatives because they oversimplify the concept, according to a report. Employers routinely conflate the concept of job engagement with organizational engagement, said Megan Edwards, author of Bridging the Gap: An Ev- idence-Based Approach to Employee Engagement. So, HR strategies designed to boost engagement may not have the desired effect because employ- ers fail to understand employees could be highly engaged with their job, but not with their company — and vice versa. "It's just how things have become popularized within the HR sphere," said Edwards, research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton, U.K. "Funnily enough, the academic literature looks and focuses pretty heavily on job engagement… but less so on organizational engagement. But it seems it's vice versa with the practitioners, where people are keen to see how people engage with the orga- nization but don't look at the job." People can be engaged with one and not the other, she said. "If you're reporting low organizational engage- ment scores, that doesn't mean you don't have any engagement in the organization. So it's about using both to supplement one another." ere's so many different definitions out there around engagement, said Arlene Keis, CEO of go2HR in Vancouver. "It's an emotional commitment — people could be really into their jobs, but could care less about the company, or they just love the company but they hate what they're doing," she said. "Definitely there are challenges around engage- ment, particularly because employers are not re- alizing that the game has changed significantly… labour shortages and staff recruitment and reten- tion is way, way different than it was in years past, and it's not going away anytime soon, so it requires a wholesale shift in their paradigm in terms of how they recruit, retain, motivate and lead their staff." Different drivers Drivers of job engagement include job characteris- tics (such as the variety of work tasks, the opportu- nity to use different skills, the degree of autonomy, and feedback mechanisms), along with value con- gruence (the extent to which the values and behav- iours expected by an employer align with those of the individual) and leadership style (including line manager support), said Bridging the Gap. "(Employers) realize these things are important on a grander scale but probably have less of an un- derstanding about how they play specifically into job engagement," said Edwards. "Even though most organizations are looking at organizational engagement, there's more research around job engagement, so we've got a better un- derstanding of the drivers… and they focus very much around things you might expect — job char- acteristics, the resources you have to be able to do your job, but also the type of tasks you are doing." Drivers of organizational engagement include procedural justice (the perceived fairness of the processes and procedures in a workplace), shared vision (the positive emotions employees feel about their employer's outlook for the future and com- mitment to reach that goal) and shared mood (how employees feel about their work and the organiza- tion), said the report. Drivers of both job and organizational engage- ment include perceived organizational support (such as fair operational and HR practices, and low levels of organizational politics) and workplace relationships (including clear, regular communi- cations and genuine emotion during interactions). It's about using a combination, said Edwards, "making sure you are finding out internally what your issues are, what's going on, but also what's working well. We have a tendency to focus on the negative, but (it's about) what's working well and how you can maximize that, but also using that data in conjunction with academic research and evidence to then craft a strategy which use the drivers that come out of the research, but also that focus on what's going on in your organization. So, it might be people feel a big disconnect between the values they have and what the organization has, or it might be people don't feel challenged in their job — and then you can use those potential problem areas with the research to craft the strategy." And managers are often forgotten when it comes to their part in employee engagement, she said. "e important role line managers play is re- ally nurturing the relationships with people on the ground who are actually the ones that are report- ing these low levels of engagement, and those line managers are quite often overlooked." While there is a place for a formal survey, es- pecially at large organizations, to get a pulse on engagement, the connection between front-line managers and their employees is important, said Arun Subramanian, director of industry HR devel- opment at go2HR. "Communication between the front-line manag- er and the front-line employees or other employees probably has a better chance of success in terms of understanding what employees want."

• Cover