Shaping the Future: Locus of Engagement

The fourth of 8 "key themes" for driving sustainable organisational performance identified in the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) report "Sustainable Organisational Performance: What Really Makes the Difference" is something they call "Locus of Engagement."

This is not a phrase that you use commonly so let us take a moment to see what it means. The report explains it by saying, "People can be engaged at different levels and with various aspects of the organisation or the work and their engagement can be transactional or emotional in nature." It thus continues, "For sustainable performance it is important to understand how, and with what, employees are engaged."

This appears to be a useful insight. However, you can judge better from the examples they give:-

• Employees can be engaged with more than one locus at a time; 
• Employees locus of engagement is not static;
• Employees' locus of engagement may not translate to engagement with the organisation; 
• The line manager has a critical role, affecting engagement at different levels;
• Leader behaviour also affects employee engagement; 
• Too much engagement with a particular locus can be a blocker to change;
• Perceptions of organisational injustice can be a performance blocker;
• The nature of engagement can be transactional or emotional. 

Oh dear! There are some useful points there but once again there are some glaringly obvious statements that dilute the impact. I mean how obvious is the fact that "perceptions of injustice can affect performance?" It is perhaps worth emphasising, however, that it is perceptions. The injustice does not have to be real; it just has to be perceived. So perception is everything if you are trying to create employee engagement.

Certainly an increased awareness that employee engagement is multi-faceted is useful; not least because it tells you that there can be no pat answers or single solutions. And of course it helps you to remember this. But even so, there is little here to really help you actually shape the future.

It is increasingly apparent that the problem with this report is that it is rooted in the traditional management practices of the past. As such it perpetuates the idea of a top-down solution to creating employee engagement. Consequently, it actually suggests little that will help you shape the future.

It is certainly unlikely that there is any single solution to this employee engagement issue, but a pre-requisite is to look for a structure that moves you away from the traditional command-and-control approaches to management. And one of the best places you can start looking is the principles of organisational democracy as identified by Worldblu.

The biggest challenge to employee engagement is creating a mechanism to embed it that is independent of personality and this gives you a good basis, especially if you reinforce it with the Zealise method of accounting for people and creating employee ownership. This at least gives you a platform for addressing all the loci. (And just for the record, loci is the plural of locus and not a term to describe insane people!)