cover feature
LEADING ORGANIZATIONS TAKE A
MORE HOLISTIC VIEW TO SET THE
STAGE FOR BETTER ENGAGEMENT
By Melissa Campeau
You’ve probably come across articles in the past year with
titles like, “Let’s Stop Talking About Engagement” and
“Why Your Engagement Strategy Doesn’t Work.” On the
other hand, you’ve likely seen surveys that suggest worker
engagement levels in Canada fall somewhere between middling
and dismal.
What gives? Why the push to stop talking about engagement
when we know it’s a necessary element of a healthy organization,
and we also know there’s ample room for improvement?
Beyond the headlines, what’s really happening is a shift in the
way organizations think about the subject. More and more, lead-ing
companies are stepping back to consider the entire employee
experience – a holistic view that goes well beyond daily duties,
office walls and business hours. And they’re getting more personal,
too, tapping into what makes each person tick, not in an effort
to hammer more productivity from employees, but to ensure a
healthier working space with ample room to grow.
In many ways, it’s an idea that’s tipping conventional engage-ment
thinking on its head.
“In the past, engagement would be driven by the management
perspective and was seen as synonymous with high performance,”
said Jose Tolovi Neto, managing partner at Great Place to Work
Canada. “Newer approaches are changing all that, placing the
employee at the centre and seeing the workplace through the
employee’s eyes. To put it in marketing terms, we are moving from
a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ strategy. We create the environment that allows
the employee to experience a great workplace, then the high per-formance
comes as a consequence of that.”
With technology and increasing flexibility around how and
where employees get their work done, the boundaries between the
professional and the personal are more and more blurred. It makes
sense, then, that organizations are giving greater thought to how
they can positively impact the whole of their employees’ lives.
“We used to think about engagement in terms of finding ways
to fire up people’s intrinsic motivation around specific tasks,” said
Steven Fitzgerald, president of Habanero Consulting Group.
“Now, we think about engaging the whole person and helping
them live great lives, not just great work lives. As an organization,
we want to help people experience that high intrinsic motivation,
high passion, high fulfillment in all aspects of their lives, through
the lens of their professional lives.”
HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ MARCH 2018 ❚ 17
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