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What's the difference between a motivated employee and engaged employee?
I saw this concept being tossed around the Twitterverse, and thought it'd be an interesting discussion here on Focus. What's the difference between a motivate employee and an engaged employee? Is there any?
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3 Answers
Motivation is a one-way street - new starters in a business are usually motivated, but can hardly be "engaged" at the time of entry.
Engagement is a two-way street - employees are not just motivated but well integrated into a business and what's going on. The business provides communication and an environment fit to enable the motivation so that it achieves results. Engaged employees tend to remain happy at and proud of where they work, and they tend to tell others.
Motivation will fall quickly by the wayside if it's not turned into engagement.
Nik's quite right, motivation can be the first step toward an engaged employee. Motivation by itself is quite often timebound. An employee can be motivated by a monetary reward, recognition, or the chance of promotion, but these and other factors can quickly end at the completion of a project.
Employee engagement is a longer term committment and as crude as it sounds, similar to marital engagement, it's when an employee is happy to work through the ups and downs of business (marriage!).
You can identify and engaged employee by their likelihood of declining an offer by another employer, even if they're offered a better salary package.
How you engage an employee depends on a number of factors specific to your company and workforce demographics, but one thing is for sure - the more your employees understand your business, your strategy and how they contribute to it, the more engaged they will be.
Motivation tends to be fairly narrow in scope (i.e., pursuit of a reward or avoiding punishment) while engagement denotes a feeling of connection and caring about something greater than yourself.
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