KnowledgeBrief’s members were joined this month by Dr Wilson Wong, CIPD, to look at how employees evaluate their employment deal over time, and what approaches organisations can take to engage employees.
Engagement is an organisational imperative but it requires careful articulation. Organisational values are important to the employee and play a pivotal role in employee engagement, but engagement needs to be salient to employees – if not, it will fail.
Dr Wong’s Deal Framework provides a tool to reflect on the ‘deal’ that exists between the employee and their employer, and how their relationship is forged, sustained and re-balanced. It provides a stark reminder that although organisations can frame their strategy and values, the individual is key in the engagement process.
There are three key phases to the deal:
- Balancing the deal: A new employee enters the organisation. He or she then scans the organisation’s values and decides whether they match with his or her own values. The majority of employees are in a ‘honeymoon phase’ and are highly satisfied with their deal.
- Sustaining the deal: The employee will stay if these values don’t impinge on their own identity and sense of worth. If so, the employee will remain satisfied and trust the organisation to keep its promise.
- Rebalancing the deal: Sometimes the deal falters when values or needs become incongruent – or the deal is breached (unethical behaviours). The employee constantly monitors these infractions and may look for opportunities outside the organisation – unless managers take remedial action.
For each stage of the deal, employees’ values manifest at four levels: individual, relationship with line manager, relationship with co-workers, and relationship with the organisation.
Organisations need to think about building and sustaining employee engagement, and developing congruence between individual and organisational values. Participants, including City of London, Discovery Communications, Ernst & Young, and Gloucestershire CCG, identified a number of actions they could take to improve their organisation’s performance, including:
- Observing the quality of the conversations around values taking place, and how these values are perceived by the employee
- Identifying what matters to the employee and ensuring that their contribution is recognised, in order to build a good foundation for supporting innovation and creativity
- Recognising that line managers are key to engaging employees and sustaining a healthy deal.
Next, this group will be discussing how to Use technology to drive employee productivity, creativity and innovation: Avoid the ‘dark side’ of pervasive IT. For more information and to join, please contact us.