Training Industry Magazine - Winter 2023 - 47

What is Employee
Engagement?
Forbes describes employee
engagement as:
Not exactly equivalent to
employee happiness.
Not exactly equivalent to
employee satisfaction.
The emotional commitment the
employee has to the organization
and its goals.
Gallup defines employee engagement
as the involvement and enthusiasm of
employees in their work and workplace.
Before March 2020, many organizations
had no policies for working remotely.
During the pandemic, companies started
to redefine their meaning of " work. "
Experiments were introduced for fourday
workweeks, split-time or sabbaticals,
because employers started to realize that
their employees were no longer staying
for many years, not out of a lack of loyalty,
but out of an understanding that not all
work situations appeal to all people.
Being engaged as an employee looks
different for different people and the
tricky part for organizations is realizing
that a " one-size-fits-all " strategy is no
longer enough to keep the empowered
and diverse workforce necessary to
thrive in today's ever-evolving landscape.
An employee who isn't able to find a
sense of belonging, which includes
being valued and heard, is an employee
who isn't fully engaged in supporting
the organization.
What is Conversational
Leadership?
David Gurteen, a pioneer in the field of
conversational leadership, defines it as
" appreciating the transformative power
of conversation, practicing leadership,
and adopting a conversational
approach to the way we work together
in a complex world. " Dr. Patricia Shaw,
a fellow at Schumacher College, states
" leadership is convening conversations
that otherwise wouldn't have happened. "
Conversations are broader than simply
two people talking with each other.
They are an opportunity for individuals
or groups to make sense collectively
of the complexity that surrounds
them.
Unfortunately,
conversations
often resemble parallel soliloquies as
opposed to back-and-forth " building
upon each other " moments of creating.
Conversations are an opportunity
to
emerge as different people, because
someone else has enriched our minds.
Especially in asynchronous virtual
environments, serial monologues are
noticeably different than relational,
meaningful and impactful conversations.
Similarly, the notion of leadership is
beyond any individual role or title.
Leadership is a practice that we should
all have an opportunity with which to
engage. In fact, the idea has been floated
that the discipline could be renamed
as conversational communityship, a
term coined by Henry Mintzberg after
decades of frustration with the outdated
and shallow definitions of leadership.
Conversational
leadership
and
brings
together these concepts of collective
conversations
communityship
so that not only do our singular
conversations reach their potential, but
also that the collective discourse across
all conversations might fundamentally
shift the way we understand and interact
in our shared environments.
Why are Employee
Engagement and
Conversational
Leadership Pertinent
Right Now?
In a world that is now more virtual,
employee engagement becomes that
much more difficult to gauge and,
therefore, can cause trust to erode.
For some leaders, it's hard to adjust to
employees' needs when they haven't
yet figured out how to engage with
them virtually and doubt creeps in about
how productive someone can be when
working remotely. And yet, thinking that
people are always fully productive when
they're in the office is illusory at best.
The question shouldn't be about which
environment is easiest to control, but
why there is such a profound lack of
trust in people whom the organization
hired, ostensibly because they were the
most qualified to fill the position. Being
forced into a virtual environment by the
pandemic has given us an opportunity
to shift focus from where we do the
work to the quality of work being done.
And now, while working online, we
contribute
to
discussions
in
nearly
the same way we do in the physical
office. In fact, there are some who feel
more comfortable or practiced in
virtual conversations regarding goals,
progress and actions.
Some may argue that virtual work doesn't
allow for impromptu conversations in
the break room, the debates at lunch
or even the empathetic " how's your
family doing? " chat in the corridor.
But are those moments of connection
really creating lasting bonds? Katherine
Woods asks, " Are we in a meeting, or are
we being met? "
If you think about it, the ability to read
body language, have those short
conversations in a hallway or laugh
together at a coffee table are all tools we
use when we're not actually in a mindset
to have a deeper conversation. All those
other ways of engaging have come about
because we seem to be decreasing our
individual and collective ability to be
candid and tell our co-workers " I'm bored,
I'm hurt, I'm feeling vulnerable, " or similar
reactions to our current environment.
Because our society is built
predominantly around infrastructure
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/06/22/employee-engagement-what-and-why/?sh=67bfddf57f37 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285674/improve-employee-engagement-workplace.aspx https://mintzberg.org/blog/communityship https://questionsworthasking.podbean.com/e/19-are-we-in-a-meeting-or-are-we-being-met/ https://questionsworthasking.podbean.com/e/19-are-we-in-a-meeting-or-are-we-being-met/ https://conversational-leadership.net/introduction-to-conversational-leadership/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la2h9yCd6Qs https://www.trainingindustry.com/magazine

Training Industry Magazine - Winter 2023

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