Last week I welcomed a new cohort of students to my Strategic Internal Communication course with the Public Relations Institute of Ireland. We spent our first session defining what internal communication is and how it differs from employee engagement.
And I noticed something curious during our discussion: there seemed to be a lot of confusion around the word "engagement".
When we talked about engagement in the class, I observed two different definitions at play:
Some students understood employee engagement to mean employees engaging with content, in other words employees consuming or interacting with company communications. In this definition, you're looking at engagement by asking questions like: Are they reading our newsletters? Watching our videos? Commenting on our intranet posts? Taking action after receiving messages? This is about employees engaging with content. Let's call this content engagement.
And other students understood employee engagement more broadly, seeing it as the amount of psychological and emotional commitment employees have to an organisation. About how motivated, committed and invested employees feel in their work and the company’s success. This is about employees engaging with the company. Let's call this employee engagement.
And it was so interesting to observe this discussion and consider how definitions can vary so much and how tricky it is to use a word like "engagement" for such fundamentally different ideas. No wonder people get confused.
So let's clear up content engagement vs employee engagement and I'll show you why it matters.
It impacts how you are seen
Understanding the difference between employees engaging with content vs having employees engaged with the company isn’t just academic semantics (although I do a enjoy a bit of that to be fair). This confusion has real implications for how we position our role and how we are seen in the company.
For example, if your stakeholders think employee engagement is just about getting people to read your emails, they’ll see you as a tactical communicator focused on open rates and click-through stats. They'll ask you things like "how many people watched that video" instead of "did we achieve objective XYZ because of that video?"
I once worked in a company where my boss thought that employee engagement meant employee happiness. Her emphasis was on parties, free lunches, cupcakes, table quizzes. All good fun of course but does any of this make a difference to how motivated and commited an employee is? Will this kind of thing override having a toxic boss, having a crap salary or having a laptop that takes 10 minutes to boot up in the morning?
If your stakeholders understand that employee engagement is a complex organisational outcome that requires strategic thinking about alignment, culture and business goals, then that positions you very differently, doesn’t it?
Understanding employee engagement in a broader sense also makes sure that the employee engagement scores don't fall squarely on your shoulders as an internal comms professional. There are a lot of ingredients required for employee engagement and effective communication is just one of those ingredients.
Here's some definitions you can take away
- Content engagement is an activity. Employees read, click, watch, respond. It’s immediate and observable.
- Employee engagement is an outcome. It's how employees feel about their work and organisation. It’s psychological and long-term.
You can have great content engagement (everyone reads your stuff) but still have disengaged employees planning to quit (maybe they hate their boss and no amount of communication from you will fix that).
The bottom line
When someone asks about “engagement” in your organisation, make sure you know which type they mean. Are they talking about getting employees to engage with content or are they talking about creating engaged employees?
Both matter. Both are part of what we do. But they’re different beasts entirely.
Internal communication plays a vital role in employee engagement by helping create shared understanding, alignment around goals and meaningful connections between individual work and organisational purpose. But we can’t carry the burden of employee engagement alone because that requires a much broader organisational effort.
If you've never had a conversation with your boss about their understanding of 'engagement' or 'employee engagement' then this is an invitation for you to do that in your next 1:1 meeting. Do they understand it the same way that you do?
Thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
PS I never in a million years thought I'd be able to use a gif from the movie Office Space in my work. I can't tell you how happy this made me today.
PPS If you've never watched Office Space... there's your homework.
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