Multi Dimensional Employee Engagement

This blog is about my journey of self discovery of a few blind spots I had, and people who helped me in this. The beautiful stories of Vani, Roopa and Rahul.

The questions I asked myself about these three employees was: Is 100 per cent of the employee working for us or is it only 20 per cent as is true in most companies.

When I launched into this self discovery, I found brilliant stories behind these three so-called ordinary employees. I discovered that they had so much to offer to the company and we were actually leveraging very little.

They had entrepreneurship to offer, they had a spirit of enterprise to offer, they had ideas on CSR. Their background was so interesting. But we were consuming or engaging with them only on one dimension whereas they could be engaged with the company on at least five dimensions.

And that journey of discovery of these three stories which I will share with you over the next three weeks led me to one conclusion: Why are all our companies so obsessed with measuring employee satisfaction when they should be measuring how many dimensions of people like Vani, Roopa and Rahul are really engaged with the company.

Employee satisfaction, employee enthusiasm and employee passion can only be created if multiple dimensions of these people are engaged. That’s because people, human beings, have multiple interests and not uni-dimensional interests.

That journey of self discovery led me to believe that we should actually create organization structures which are spheres in concentric circles so that a person can engage within an organization on multiple dimensions. And with that engagement across multiple dimensions you can engage the employee more, but most importantly, the company would get more from the employee than it gets today.

So I will share with you the brilliant stories of three employees. When you look at these three stories, the question you need to ask yourself is: Are there employees in your company who have stories like this, which you do not know because you are not engaging the full employee? Are you actually engaging only 20% per cent because you look at him or her in one dimension as I used to do only a few weeks back?