Engaging behaviour

I've written a column for Thursday's Financial Times looking at employee engagement. It's an odd word, engagement, when used as human resources people use it, to describe discretionary behaviour among employees or what I would call goodwill.

My dictionary doesn't give any such definition. As I said in the column, if you asked most people what it involved to be engaged, they would tell you that it meant either committing yourself to marriage or sitting on the toilet.

The thing is that human resources consultants just can't get enough engagement right now because it's turned out to be a good money earner. Companies all want engaged employers ready, in management parlance, to "run the extra mile."

I haven't seen many postmen running extra miles recently. In fact I have never seen them running. I don't believe that most people get up on a morning thinking "I can't wait to get in to the office so that I can get on with making money for my bosses and the company shareholders."

But a lot of people go to work wanting to give of their best. The problem is that when they get there they are confronted with so many obstacles, often created by unreasonable management demands such as "drop what you're doing and do this," that stress levels begin to increase and people simply become pissed off or what HR people would call "disengaged."

Engagement is not a quality that needs to be created. It's something that's natural, like curiosity in children. But just as school stifles curiosity so the workplace often stifles the goodwill of employees.

The answer is to ensure that people, including managers, know exactly what is expected of them and for the owners and heads of companies to get real about the human capacity for work instead of constantly upping targets and demanding ever greater efficiencies.

No wonder increasing numbers of young people are turning their backs on big company careers opting instead to join start ups or create their own little businesses. Sure, they will miss out on management training but much of this today is about management conformity. There's nothing like learning from your own mistakes. I do all the time.