I recently attended a “Leadership Briefing” presentation, organized by Leadership Fairfax, which featured two stimulating Towers Watson consultants, Max Caldwell and Jennifer Meder.
The latest TW research is revealing that to generate a climate where your employees contribute at a consistently a high level of their capacity, you need more that just “engagement.” You must add into the mix enablement (a better term for what used to be called empowerment), and employee well-being. Here, very briefly, is what constitutes each element of what they call “the 3 E’s”:
Engagement – employee commitment, both rational and emotional, to contributing discretionary (i.e. more than mere “satisfactory” performance requires) effort to their job.
Enablement – provision of the tools and resources necessary for employees to be able to perform in their job. Along with items such as technology and budgets, this includes skill training, appropriate authority to decide and act, and access to necessary information, etc.
Employee Well-Being – a state of emotional and physical wellness, along with the belief that senior management genuinely cares about them. Forces that reduce well-being include too high a level of stress and burnout, psychologically toxic work groups or supervision, and poor habits around exercise, nutrition, and getting enough sleep.
This makes more sense to me than just stopping at engagement. An employee who has the will to perform close to his or her potential still needs to be properly equipped and be in a well state to deliver that level of performance.
And the boss can have an impact on all three “E’s.”
