What Good Project Managers Know About Employee Engagement

 

A colleague recently sent me two articles on employee engagement. The first article was from Forbes magazine with the provocative title – “The End of ‘Employee Engagement?’” You often see these types of articles whenever a new management method or trend is perceived to be nearing its end. The author used the alleged decline of total quality management to argue that the same pattern is happening to employee engagement. The hype; the overnight rise of a consulting industry; the lack of immediate, significant results; and the eventual disillusionment. Gartner Research famously calls this the “Hype Cycle.”

The second article comes from a regular contributor to the Association for Talent Development’s website. This author disputes the Forbes article by pointing out the elephant in the room – the 70% of the workforce that still reports being disengaged. Instead of bemoaning the fact that employee engagement has become a check-the-box activity, Kevin Sheridan calls for a renewed effort to hold managers and leaders accountable. For the organizations that did the work, TQM was a transformative success. So can employee engagement; if the organizations put effort into it. 

In my research, I have seen a link between good organizational health and robust employee engagement. A healthy organization rallies the employees around a common purpose; provides the employees with the tools, training, and support to accomplish the common purpose; and continues to build capacity for sustained performance. I’ve also noticed a trend that the healthier organizations also seemed to be the ones that are more accomplished at project management. In full disclosure, I do not have actual empirical evidence for a link between project management and organizational health. Even so, there is something in my preliminary analysis that calls for further study. 

According to much of the engagement research, highly-engaged employees share three characteristics.  

1. employees who have a clear sense of purpose about their work
2. employees receive frequent feedback on their efforts
3. employees can see how the customers will use the products/services created from the employee’s work.

Highly engaged employees are also given much autonomy and are encouraged to master their skills. This sounds like how project teams routinely operate. Also, good project managers practice servant leadership and frequently communicate with their teams.  Another example of how common project management practices are inherently built for employee engagement.

So, let me ask you: do you think that good project management is inherently good employee engagement? That training functional managers and senior managers in project management could increase the managers’ employee engagement skills? That project-based organizations are healthier and have better employee engagement than functional and matrix organizations?