Is there a presumption in the employee engagement rhetoric that we Organisational Development Practitioners should be designing interventions within our organisations to ensure that people are highly engaged? That employees should be applying all of their discretionary effort to drive productivity improvements, reduce costs, improve efficiencies and profits? The reality is at any one time, this is not possible because:
A person’s experience of work and hence their engagement levels follow a predictable pattern called the Engagement Life Cycle. According to that life cycle there will be ebbs and flows in the level of engagement; and a person’s underlying commitment to a role and organisation will vary over time.
Charles Handy wrote about the Sigmoid Curve or “S” curve as it is more popularly known, to describe the life-cycle of products and organisations. The same pattern will occur with engagement levels within a role with higher engagement as a person is attracted to the organisation. Then engagement will drop as expectations are adjusted to reality. For those that survive that phase, engagement will increase to a peak as confidence, connections and capability increase. It is inevitable however, just like the law of entropy that engagement levels will fall over time as people become bored and frustrated with the challenges of the role and then withdraw discretionary effort.
What organisations can do is manage engagement levels according to the dynamic nature of careers. Strategies can be adopted to allow more maximum revitalisation of capability, experiences and contexts through flexible approaches to role design, career mobility, work practices and management attitudes.
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