What does an employee want today?
Currently, the importance to have employee engagement between the leadership and employees in an organization is as important as it was for people to have democracy in a tyranny. The brave employees at Ballarat who were unfairly taxed when digging for gold would understand this. In 1854 they declared ‘that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he/she is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny’. So let’s first have a look in the mirror of the past to have a better reflection of our present.
It seems that internal communication in an organization is a natural corollary of the times we live in. Isn’t it obvious that people embraced and struggled for democratic values and religious principles because it gave their lives a meaning and ameliorated them? Change comes at a gradual progress – Christianity triumphed over the old pagan gods because it preached to the people, especially the poor and slaves in the Roman empire, who formed the majority, that all men are created equal, and that there is a paradise after death for the people of good will. Since the life of a slave or poor person was meaningless, a better, eternal life, after death became the most popular notion to aspire to in the land, until it reached its stagnation period in the Middle Ages, where the majority had a meaningless and cruel life again.
The Renaissance saw amongst others the rise of the individual. This started a long process which would be the beginning of the end for that hated arm of the Church – the Inquisition and others who blocked progress, cut people’s tongues and if ‘necessary’ burnt the ‘heretics’ at the stake. Many got in the way of the individual’s development; kings, fascists, nazis, communists, opportunists, religious fundamentalists and capitalists. But after hundreds of years of struggle, you, the individual, have won, and you know this from history books, novels, movies, computer games and that institution that has convinced you that you are so smart – University. If I may ask another rhetorical question, in this reality, are there seriously command and control style companies who think that graduates can switch off their brains and individuality during office hours?
So as people wanted to have a meaning for their lives, today many employees wish to be engaged at work. This is clearly shown in a report submitted to the Government of the United Kingdom in 2009 entitled, ‘Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’. People want more than just the wage at the end of the week. This report was presented to the Right Honourable Lord Peter Mandelson, then Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, who commented in its foreword ‘that only organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation, productivity and performance.’ The report also stated that only engaged organisations have strong and authentic values, with clear evidence of trust and fairness based on mutual respect, where two way promises and commitments – between employers and staff – are understood and are fulfilled. Furthermore, in manufacturing companies for instance, people management practices were a better indicator of company performance than strategy, technology, research and development.
Few might have read this report but many can see the beneficial results of engagement in facebook, Wikipedia, Linux, Innocentive, Human Genome Project, You Tube, Second Life, Flickr, Modzilla Firefox and Goldcorp. People (both paid and volunteer) are now creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favourite music, designing software, finding cures for diseases, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles. This extensive collaboration and user-participation on the marketplace and corporate world has been coined as Wikinomics.
Wikinomics is based on four principles: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally – the future of the 21st century successful creative firm. Tapscott and Williams the authors of Wikinomics point out that this is very different from the hierarchical, closed, secretive, and insular multinationals that dominated the previous century. They even argue that organizational values, skills, tools, processes and architectures of the ebbing command and control economy are not simply outdated; they obstruct the creation process.
But what does an employee want today? Eudaimonia – happiness. Socrates argued that everybody longed for happiness, above everything else. Aristotle, another ancient philosopher says that happiness required not only good character but also rational activity i.e. to be entirely engaged in intellectually stimulating work that one excelled at. In modern psychology eudaimonia has been conceptualized by Ryff in a six factor model: autonomy, personal growth, self acceptance, purpose of life, environmental mastery, and positive relations with others. Six factors which fit much more with employee engagement in an organization than a command and control style one. Hence my last rhetorical question: isn’t it obvious that the employee wishes first and foremost to be engaged, be counted for, feel worth it and then he/she would be more useful to an organisation?
Mr. Kristian Bonnici holds the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Diploma, an undergraduate degree in International Relations, where he obtained first class honours, and a Masters in Diplomatic Studies. Mr. Bonnici speaks Maltese, English and Italian fluently, and has a good command of French, Russian and Arabic. In 2003 Kristian passed a competitive exam to join the diplomatic corps of Malta. Since then Mr. Bonnici served as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as Deputy Head of Mission and Consul in Egypt, and is currently the Deputy High Commissioner of Malta in Australia. Mr. Bonnici has a passion for Public Relations, and wrote a paper establishing who the founder of this discipline is.
