A couple of weeks ago there was some interesting commentary happening in employee communications and HR blogs about a study released by Northwestern University about employee engagement.

Our own Regina Miller was in the thick of it. I am not going to rehash the various posts (go read the links above, as they are all substantive explanations), but I wanted to draw your attention to a distinction that struck me as interesting and useful: that between commitment and engagement.

The Mirriam-Webster Online definitions of commitment and engagement are not tremendously helpful in clarifying the distinction between the two (both have to do with having an emotional involvement). Interestingly enough, however, in its definition, commitment has the implication of being impelled (pushed) while engagement has the implication of being a personal choice.

Before looking at these definitions, I had suggested (in comments) that a good way to think about the difference between the two was that commitment was more of an emotional state of mind, while engagement encompassed action.

Now, my goal here isn't to parse definitions, but rather try to understand what it is that we need to do as communicators or HR people, for example, to keep employees from leaving their company. Should our goal be to foster commitment -- an emotional state, but passive (and maybe forced) -- or engagement, where an employee is taking action based on his or her personal choice?

I, for one, vote for engagement. And that has implications for the kind of communications we undertake. If our goal is to persuade people to action (vs. some happy happy joy joy state of mind), laminated pocket cards with values statements aren't the way to go. An active blog written by lead executives who encourage employee comments and geniunely tries to communicate might be. Better yet, encouraging your employees to blog themselves could be a powerful strategy as well.

There are a myriad of ways that a focus on engagement can help us rethink our strategies and tactics. I bet Regina can give us a few examples from HR!

[Tags: communications workplace]