Engagement? It’s all about hearts and minds

One of the leading thinkers about engagement, Wilmar Schaufeli, (ironically someone who’s not well known to UK practitioners) wrote recently:‍

Modern organizations need employees who are able and willing to invest in their jobs psychologically. And this is exactly what work engagement is all about. No wonder that companies became interested in engagement at a time of profound changes in the world of work

‍In the same paper he quotes Dave Ulrich in his 1997 book, Human Resource Champions.

Employee contribution (is) a critical business issue because in trying to produce more output with less employee input, companies have no choice but to try to engage not only the body, but also the mind and the soul of every employee

If that was true back then, it’s much more so today. And yet little is known about how to make it happen. There are successes of course. We can all think of organisations where employees are like missionaries. Yet they are in a small minority. Most businesses have yet to discover how to get employees to bring their whole being to work. In our blogs we try to fill this gap. The blogs are organised into four themes i.e.

• What engagement is and why it’s important
• Diagnosing current levels of engagement and the role of the engagement survey
• interpreting the findings and building strategies for drawing people in to the organisation
• How to keep it going – maintaining and building even higher levels of engagement once it’s there

_{Schaulfeli W B (2013) ‘What is engagement?’ In C. Truss, K. Alfes, R. Delbridge, A. Shantz, & E. Soane (Eds.), Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice. London: Routledge}