Big Business Buzz Builds about Employee Engagement, but Expert Tells Firms to Focus on Culture, Human Capital, Bottom-line Results

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- What's the big deal about employee engagement? And what ever happened to employee morale and employee satisfaction? What does any of this have to do with companies fulfilling their business objectives?

Good questions all around, especially if you travel among the ranks of today's business leaders, human resources professionals or organizational- development gurus.

"The 'buzz' about employee engagement is important," said Daniel Denison, founding partner of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Denison Consulting. "Intuitively, most managers know that it's better to have engaged employees."

Denison says many companies rush to conduct employee-engagement surveys, because they believe engagement is the right path for getting the most out of their employees and boosting business outcomes.

"But, measuring employee engagement alone is not enough," he said. "Employees can be happy, satisfied and engaged, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are succeeding in supporting the business goals of the organization. In fact, many companies with very happy employees have failed to deliver results."

Denison is a Professor of Management and Organization at the International Institute of Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is considered to be a leading expert in organizational culture, and its link to business results. The company he helped to create more than a decade ago - Denison Consulting - is a global provider of organizational- improvement tools and services.

According to Denison, employee engagement typically is defined as "the extent to which people feel a sense of physical, cognitive and emotional attachment to their work."

Research has shown that employees who feel engaged in their jobs tend to work harder and longer, take more pride in their work, and are less likely to quit vs. those who feel less engaged. "But, the research also shows that employee engagement and satisfaction may be more a result of good performance than a cause," Denison says.

"If you're concerned about business outcomes, it makes a lot more sense to measure and manage the organization as a system," he said. "Those factors give leaders far more leverage and are far more likely to be a cause of organizational performance than just employee engagement alone. An organization's culture includes employee involvement and employee engagement, but also includes how the organization adapts to the business environment, focuses on its customers, implements a strategy, and builds global coordination."

Denison and his colleagues have created employee surveys for diagnosing organizational culture and leadership, and predicting bottom-line business results. These tools include the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and the Denison Leadership Development Survey.

Both survey instruments are based on decades of scientific study. In the research, organizational culture was defined, measured quantitatively, and linked to bottom-line business performance, such as sales growth, quality, and customer satisfaction. A profitability benchmark database -- with 888 organizations -- allows companies to compare themselves with successful organizations from around the world.

Four general traits - mission, consistency, involvement and adaptability - are the key elements of the Denison organizational culture model. Both the culture survey and the leadership survey provide useful insights about organizational performance.

Denison Consulting -- which also operates international offices in Shanghai, China and Zurich, Switzerland -- has served more than 4,000 clients. They include such high-profile organizations as Domino's Pizza, Henkel, Hitachi, Merck & Co. Inc., and Pulte Homes. More than 100 of the clients served by Denison are listed on the Fortune 500.