Comms and Engagement are often conflated with each other – sometimes even within a single job title – but they have very different purposes when it comes to supporting your teams and their impact on the business.
Communication is about exchanging information between people or groups, whilst Engagement is about psychological identification and psychological meaningfulness; our level of involvement, commitment, and connection [1].
In short, if your people don’t know what’s happening in the business, you have a communications problem. If your people don’t care what’s happening in the business, you have an engagement problem.
If adviser engagement feels low or is reflected in annual employee surveys, there might be a tendency to focus on engagement itself. This might be through approaches including fun days, incentives, and activities that are intended to increase general happiness. But this is likely to be a short-term fix at best, if the causes of disengagement are not considered.
Instead, consider the connection and involvement of advisers to the business strategy, direction and goals.
- Is it explicit how each individual can contribute towards these, as well as what and why they can contribute?
- How do their roles relate to others, and is there opportunity for co-creation?
- Do our communications provide context tailored to each audience?
- Do our recognition programmes encourage connection and involvement, or do they only encourage a specific KPI result?
Following this approach and focusing on the influencers of connection and involvement is not only more effective, it is more cost-effective, efficient and sustainable versus attempting to focus solely on the output of engagement [2].
References:
- [1] Pech, R., & Slade, B. (2006). Employee disengagement: is there evidence of a growing problem?. Handbook of Business Strategy, 7(1), 21-25.
- [2] Anitha, J. (2014). Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management, 63(3), 308-323.
