Commitment and Engagement
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.
Communications at the Heart of the Future of Work
I began seriously thinking about the future of work when I got involved with the organization called, aptly enough, The Future of Work. They were getting ready to produce their first conference - or Congress as they like to call it - and hired my agency to help them. That was more than two years ago.
At roughly the same time, I had discovered blogging, and rapidly become immersed in it and other emerging communications tools, such as RSS feeds, wikis, podcasts, tagging, social networking, and so on. I firmly believed at the time -- and still do -- that these tools are incredibly valuable for corporate communications and marketing.
At the same time, however, these tools are also transformative as they work to break down the old hierarchical command/control structures of organizations, giving rise to more collaborative/cooperative network-based structures. Now, it is too strong to state that these structures are breaking down because of these tools. In fact, old hierarchies have been being undermined for quite a long time due to a confluence of forces, including technology, science, population demographics, globalization, education, society, culture, and so on.
It is these forces and how organizations are reacting to them that we will be examining here. I will be looking at them primarily through a framework of organizational communications, which is my expertise. I firmly believe that as we move to more distributed workforces, communications will be at the heart of whether or not we are successful. Other authors here will take different frames, including HR, technology, education, community development, and so on.
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