In this episode, Jenni defines and compares employee engagement, employee experience and internal communication and how they’re intrinsically linked. She explains why aligning each element is important and that ignoring them leads to organisational chaos.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
The MacLeod Report: Engaging for Success by David MacLeod & Nita Clarke
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
The Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers and Drive Results by Tracy Maylett & Matthew Wride
The Employee Experience Advantage by Jacob Morgan
Engaging for Success: Four Enablers by David MacLeod & Nita Clarke
The Field Model episode of the Redefining Comms with Jenni Field podcast
The Social Dilemma on Netflix
The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley
Redefining Comms blog about the Hierarchy of Needs: A Theory of Human Motivation by Abraham Maslow
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about employee engagement, employee experience, and internal communication and the importance of alignment of all of these three elements for creating an efficient organisation. So, in the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about the definitions of each of these, why they are important in the organisation, and how ignoring them leads us to chaos. I’m then going to share the one thing that you need to think about when it comes to the alignment of all three to create an efficient and engaging organisation.
So how do we define all three of them?
So, let’s start with employee engagement. And the definition I’m going to use here is from McLeod and Clark in 2009, and their definition is that employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able, at the same time, to enhance their own sense of wellbeing.
For the definition of internal communication, I’m going to use my definition, which is that internal communication is everything that gets said and shared inside an organisation as a function. Its role is to curate, enable, and advise on best practice for organisations to communicate effectively, efficiently, and in an engaging way.
And for the definitions of employee experience, I want to share a couple with you here. The first is from Maillet and Ride, and their definition is that employee experience is creating an operating environment that inspires your people to do great things. And one is from Jacob Morgan, where he says that the employee experience is designing an organisation where people want to show up by focusing on the cultural, technological, and physical environments.
Now, understandably, the employee experience and engagement definitions focus on the individual and their wellbeing more than communication. So they’re not just about communication, which is why the three terms need to be distinguished from each other, and we all need to understand their differences. Now, they’re all intrinsically linked, but internal communication also needs to fulfil its basic purpose of communicating with those in the organisation before it can go on to winning hearts and minds. Now I’ll always remember a conversation I had with an HR director who was my boss many years ago, and we were doing a campaign to make some changes in the organisation from memory it was a campaign linked to helping people with engagement in the organisation. So I wanted to measure this by looking at the turnover of staff, I always also wanted to look at people’s sickness levels, those kind of fairly standard HR measures. And at the time they said to me, you can’t measure your campaign against these sort of KPIs or these objectives because it’s not just communication that’s going to have an impact here. Everything has a role to play, and that’s the thing that’s important for us to remember here, is that all of these are intrinsically linked, and that’s important because we can’t look at each of them in isolation. The employee experience for me is that. Start to end point with an organisation, it’s the minute you have an engagement with that organisation through a recruitment process to when you leave. It’s that whole experience and you want to make sure people are engaged throughout that experience. And to do that, you want to communicate effectively, efficiently, and in an engaging way. So it’s important for us to be mindful of how the three are linked together, but also how different they are and how they require different skill sets inside organisations. Now I want to talk a little bit about McLeod and Clark because they did some work not only in defining employee engagement, but also in talking about four main enablers for engagement.
Now, these four have been used quite a lot. It’s through their work that’s called Engaging for Success, and we’ll put some information in the show notes for you to have a read on these, that these four enablers are important if you’re looking at ways to avoid chaos in your organisation. But I also want to talk a little bit about the weighting of these four, because I have some views on how equally weighted they are.
Enablers
So the four different enablers are, number one, a strong strategic narrative. Number two, engaging managers who focus their people and treat them as individuals. Number three is providing employees with a voice throughout the organisation that’s there to reinforce and challenge views. And number four is making sure that there is organisational integrity. That values are implicit and they’re not just plastered on the wall for people to read. Now, I say that there’s some, you know, question mark for me over the weighting of these four, purely based on my own experience. So I’ve worked in organisations where we’ve had a really strong strategic narrative. It was very clear as to why we were doing what we were doing, but we had very low provision for employees to have a voice. Now, there wasn’t a high level of turnover during that time. People were very engaged in the organisation and people wanted to deliver against what the organisation was trying to do. In comparison, I’ve worked in another organisation where there was a very weak strategic narrative. There wasn’t one that was easy for people to hold onto. However, there was a strong provision for employee voice, but there was somewhat of a revolving door in that organisation of people leaving, which has led me to the conclusion that there isn’t equal weight across all four of these. And if you’ve listened to one of my previous episodes where I talk about the field model, I talk about the fact that to fix chaos in organisations for the long term there has to be a strategy, there has to be clarity around that strategy and that purpose understood in the organisation. So, for me, a strong strategic narrative is always going to be the most important of those different enablers. Now it’s important that we look at all the aspects around internal communication and employee engagement together. I’ve already said that they need to be intrinsically linked, that they are all interlinked together, and these enablers are a good foundation to understand how we can really think about the experience of employees, their engagement and how they are communicated with. But there is more complexity to engagement and in our desire to simplify things, which we do as human beings, we like to generalise and we like to make things simple there is complexity to engagement. You know, it needs more research into how it’s measured. How do you know someone’s really engaged in the organisation? What does that look like for you culturally? What does that look like? Is it really long hours? Because I think we are not working in a society or a world that is the measure and might have been a measure many years ago.
So engagement, experience and internal communication are all different things, different definitions and different things to think about. They all have a role to play in your organisation to help you thrive and succeed, and it’s important for us to know that when we are looking at any kind of chaos or going through any kind of change or actually trying to achieve any kind of goal, because these three different elements are hugely important for the success of an organisation. Now, there’s one thing we need to remember though, when it comes to the alignment of all three of these, and it’s the one thing that I’ll often see that might be creating the chaos in the organisation.
Now I’m going to come back to a book called The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgeley. It’s a book I talk about a lot because I was reading it when I was doing my research for the mental resilience work that we do. And in his book, he shares a story of his swim around the UK. So, Ross Edgeley swam round the whole of the UK it’s a great book to read to make you realize how much you can actually do, uh, and uh, when you are trying to push yourself further and whatever it might be Ross is always in my head where I think, you know, he swam around the UK, you can just get on and do this. So, it is a great story but there’s one bit in particular that I always share and talk about when it comes to the alignment of these three areas, because he talks about this moment where Skywriters took to the air to write a hundred days and a love heart in the sky as he hit the milestone of a hundred days of swimming. And he talks about how wonderful the intention was behind that skywriting moment, how he could see that they were doing something to really celebrate his achievement of a hundred days. And he says in the book that he didn’t want to be ungrateful at all because he understood the intention, but actually what he wanted was bread. He just wanted some bread. He didn’t really mind what kind of bread it could have been white, brown, granary, any kind. He wanted bread. As he talks about this, he does reference Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. And if you’re not familiar with that, I’ll pop some links in the show notes for you as well. What’s interesting when you then map this experience that Ross had with that hierarchy of needs, we can see that the skywriting is what’s called an esteem need. So it’s designed to celebrate him his accomplishment is quite high up on our needs basis, uh, in terms of what we need to, to sort of function and, and we need to be able to be human beings. He absolutely was right. They had the right intentions. It was a hundred days. It was a milestone. We need to celebrate this but actually for him, he was much further down the pyramid. He was at the bottom of the pyramid where we are in real physiological needs, or it’s about food, shelter, warmth, and rest. That’s what he needed. He didn’t need the celebration, the self-esteem, the pat on the back. He needed some of those basic things. And in organisations, this is sometimes where we create our own chaos for ourselves.
So when we are thinking about these different three areas of employee experience, employee engagement, and internal communication. The alignment of these three have to be aligned to how people are feeling and what’s being experienced across the organisation. Now, we often look at how to adapt internal communication channels to drive engagement or the broader implications of a business strategy and how it impacts teams, and we need to think about some of that long-term stuff and how we do that, but how people are feeling at the moment. Because to truly engage a workforce, we have to understand them, and we have to acknowledge where people are at and how they’re feeling based on the change that’s going on around them. You know, I talk a lot about the fact that we have relationships at work and that relationships are built on great communication. And if your organisation is going through significant change, you might want to celebrate some of that change. It might be really great change that’s allowing you to drive forward but you might not have some of the basics in place. You might not have policies and procedures in place where people know what their job descriptions are, or you might not have things in place where people know how to work with the changes from the pandemic. Now, if you haven’t watched Social Dilemma, which is a documentary film on Netflix. It’s a really good programme around understanding social media. I reference it here because there’s a really nice quote from it from Randy Fernando, who’s the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, because he’s talking about how our brains haven’t really changed. And I mention it here because Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, however much people will say it’s out of date and it may need to change. There are some fundamental things in that pyramid about how we work and how we function as human beings. And this quote from Randy Fernando, basically says that from the 1960s to today, processing power technology has gone up by about a trillion times. Nothing else that we have has improved at anything near that rate. He says that cars are roughly twice as fast and almost everything else really is kind of negligible. But most importantly, our human are physiology. Our brains haven’t evolved at all. And that’s really important when we are looking at employee experience, employee engagement, and internal communication, because those three things are so interlinked, but they are also so interlinked with our need to be human. So if there’s one thing to consider to avoid that chaos in your organisation, when you are looking at these things. Is that alignment to what’s going on, on the ground, on the front line with your teams and making sure that you are tuned into that and that you are doing things that are enabling people to feel psychologically safe, but also enabling them to feel engaged and efficient and productive, and that they are enjoying those aspects of work.
Now, as I always say, please do keep in touch with me. I always enjoy the conversations I have outside of the podcast, and I’d love to continue this conversation.
In my next episode, I’m going to be talking about culture and leadership. I want to explore the different styles of leadership and how that impacts organisational culture. Thank you for listening. Details are in the show notes of everything I’ve mentioned today. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking. I’d love to stay in touch.
