Employee Engagement: Who Has What at Stake?

What is Employee Engagement?   Dave Logan, co-author of one of my leadership favorite books, Tribal Leadership, recently told me the term employee engagement is passé, the desirable state — and the state enjoyed at poster companies such as Zappos — is employee passion.  Well, he probably used a different term that I interpreted as employee passion.

Here’s what I see.  Employee engagement is employees working in an organization in a way that an owner would work, with something at stake in the future success of the organization and a sense of worth that comes from contributing to something greater than their own self-interest.

So when managing the philosophy of human resources in your organization, what are the principles that would garner either engagement or optimally passion for people doing their job?

We are currently putting in new flooring, and two guys are downstairs as I write this blog chatting away in another language as they set the tiles that we will live with for many years to come.  Are they artisans designing my future environment, attending to whether the tiles look good in that configuration?  Or are they talking about their evening, a good steak, their children and just making a dollar?

If you are working from the triple bottom line — profits, people, and planet — your employees’ attitudes matter.  If you want employees to be responsible for the bottom line then they have to have a stake in the results the company produces, and that does not mean your job is to make them HAPPY.  Rick Tate of Impact Achievement Group recently wrote an article pointing out that it is productive employees who have great morale, yet many performance reviews reflect a belief that great morale leads to productivity.   Happy is a result of productivity, not an access to it.

You are responsible for their experience of productivity in many ways, one of them is what you measure.  “A” players like to be measured, and “A” teams like to be measured.  If you are measuring what matters they know it, you know it, and you will have engaged employees.

How do you measure employee engagement (or better yet, passion)?  I welcome your stories!