Understanding Employee Effectiveness
Author: Eric Thompson
Eric Thompson develops a model of employee effectiveness so that we can understand how to improve it.
Employee effectiveness is one on these things that is very hard to vote against. If someone asks you the question “Would you like your employees to be more effective?” you are hardly likely to say no! On the other hand, if we are going to try to improve it, we need to know what it is. We also need to know that if we make any changes, they will take us in the right direction. We need a definition for employee effectiveness and a model that suggests how the contributory factors interact.
'Would you like your employees to be more effective?"
Armed with the definition we can begin to monitor what is happening on a consistent basis, and we can use the increased understanding that the model brings to begin to influence the outcome. Interestingly, Wikipedia does not currently offer us any help on either front, in spite of the fact that the term is well used. So we will need to have a go at defining employee effectiveness for ourselves.
Our proposition is that employee effectiveness is the product of employee engagement and capability (both that of the employee and that of the organisation.) Want to understand why? Read on.
The Factors that Influence Employee Effectiveness
It is not too difficult to identify the factors that have an impact on employee effectiveness based on our collective experience, namely:
• Employee Capability – the summation of the behaviours, competencies, skills, knowledge and experience of the individual employee gained through life.
• Employee Commitment - their attitude to the organisation and their motivation and intention to perform at their best.
• Organisation Values & Culture - not so much what it says on the mission statement rather the way the employee perceives it to behave in reality.
• Organisation Identity and Direction – what the organisation stands for and the direction in which it is heading.
• Leadership – the example that the collective leadership set as a role model
• Organisation Systems – the systems, process and tools that the organisation has in place to enable employees to do their work.
If you would like to explore these factors further, you can read my article “Improved Employee Effectiveness – The Factors that Contribute”
Four Quadrants
The American author Ken Wilber offers his Four Quadrants as the basis of analysis of any system in terms of its Internal and External elements and its Individual and Collective parts. He suggests that any system is the sum of these components and that the output is determined by their interaction. If you would like to know more about Ken Wilber, quadrants and holism, you can follow this link to Wikipedia. For our purposes, we can use the Four Quadrants to examine the relationship of the factors that influence employee effectiveness.
We can place the factors that we listed in the previous section in the quadrants as illustrated below. If we make our judgements from the standpoint of the individual, and start with the employee related factors, we can judge that capability is an external perspective and commitment is an internal perspective. Similarly, for the collective factors, as we have defined them, organisational systems and leadership are external factors and organisational values, culture, identity and direction are all internal perspectives.
The factors constitute a system which defines employee effectiveness. To make a change in the level of employee effectiveness requires study of what is going on in all four quadrants. As an example, seeking greater employee effectiveness through working at obtaining increased employee commitment will have not have the desired impact unless the employee perceives that the values of the organisation align with their own.
Any negative issues in any of the quadrants would make progress difficult or impossible, and any change unsustainable. To bring about a change, the factors in each quadrant must be in harmony with what you are trying to achieve.
A Simplified Model for Employee Effectiveness
Our model for organisational effectiveness has been implicitly defined. The output (the effectiveness of the organisation) will adjust in response to changes in all of the factors. We can show the interaction pictorially, in a simplified presentation of the model.
We can now observe that the factors that are defined in the “Internal” quadrants i.e. individual commitment and organisation values, culture, identity and direction are those factors collectively defined in the literature as “employee engagement”. This fits with the perception that employee engagement is not something tangible that can be required under contract between the employee and the organisation. Rather, it is something intangible that the employee has to offer on a conditional basis. Collectively, the internal factors influence how an individual feels about doing the work.
Similarly, the factors in the “External” quadrants are to do with capability, both individual and organisational. They relate to what the individual does.
We can therefore define employee effectiveness as the interaction between employee engagement and individual and organisational capability. What we are saying is that the individual’s effectiveness is determined by a combination of their ability to do the work combined with their willingness to do the work as exemplified by the depth of their engagement with the organisation.
The model shows that capability and engagement are not independent. A change in the state of employee engagement will ultimately have an effect on capability and vice versa. Observation of what happens in practise substantiates this insight.
Employee Effectiveness Factor
Using the model we have derived, we can define an Employee Effectiveness Factor (EE) in terms of the other factors Employee Capability (ECA), Employee Commitment (ECO), Organisation Values (EV), Organisation Direction (ED), Leadership (EL) and Organisation Systems (ES).
EE = ECA x ECO x EV x ED x EL x ES
"...employee effectiveness ... represents the interaction between employee engagement and capability."
Each factor scaled from 0-1
You can see from this that employee effectiveness will be maximised when all the other factors are maximised as well. On the other hand if any one of the contributory factors is zero the overall employee effectiveness will also be zero.
If you have a means of assessing the values for each of the contributory factors from employee surveys or from some other objective source, then you have a means of assessing and trending the effectiveness of individual employees. Reviewing the contributory factors will also enable you to judge which area requires the most attention.
In Summary
We have examined the system of factors that contribute to employee effectiveness and concluded that it represents the interaction between employee engagement and capability. The derived model for employee effectiveness helps us to understand how employee effectiveness can be achieved and by defining effectiveness factors we can measure progress towards improvement.