By Adam DiPaula, PhD, Mary Bacica, CMRP and Julie Winram, CMRP

“Good leaders must first become good servants.”   Robert Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader

In the Winter 2013 edition of PeopleTalk, we talked about the value of segmenting employees to better understand and manage your workplace. We identified four distinct segments, based on their level of engagement and intentions to stay with the organization over the long term.

To re-cap, these segments are:

• Committed. These are the organization’s most ardent supporters. They believe strongly in the company’s direction and vision and feel that they belong.
• Strivers. They are engaged, but easily disappointed.  These employees can be impatient and high maintenance because they are constantly looking for a way to get to the ‘next level’.
• Disgruntled. They tend to view everything the company does or say through a highly cynical lens. They feel slighted, unfairly treated, marginalized.
• Detached. Sometimes called ‘Lazy Lifers’, they can be a very toxic group because their apathy coupled with their tenure can make them a particularly negative influence among more impressionable employees.

Naturally, organizations are looking for more Committed employees, and here is where we turn our focus for this companion article. Specifically, we explore the defining characteristics of this key segment and the conditions that need to be present in order to foster long term commitment. We also test the hypothesis that Committed employees are company leaders; that is, they are your senior executive, managers and team leaders. Our analysis is based on Sentis’ Employee Engagement Benchmark survey which we conduct annually in BC among the province’s workforce.

Defining Characteristics of the Committed
The Committed segment carries your business through good times and bad. They are generally unwavering in their support for the organization and are your true brand champions. They live your brand, support it and, when necessary, even defend it.

There are four defining characteristics of Committed employees:

• strongly supportive of the direction the organization is taking;
• highly likely to recommend the organization as a good place to work;
• highly motivated to do more than is required for their job; and
• intend to work for the organization indefinitely or until retirement.

Who is Committed on Your Team?
We began with a hypothesis—Committed employees are much more likely to occupy managerial or leadership positions than other employees. Wouldn’t those who hold more responsibility and who in some respects have more at stake with the organization, be more committed to its success? It turns out this is not necessarily true.

One of the first things we observed about the Committed segment is that they exist at all levels of the organization and across job functions. They are just as likely to be front line workers as they are to be managers.

The Committed Practice ‘Servant Leadership’
Digging a bit deeper, we realized that while Committed employees may not always have official titles, they hold an unofficial leadership role because they have influence over their fellow employees. They have the characteristics of those individuals that Robert Greenleaf described as ‘servant leaders’ in his seminal 1970 essay ‘The Servant as Leader’.

The Committed are your servant leaders. They lead through dedicated service and by example. They are focused outward—on the growth and well-being of the organization, as well as the others that they work with.

While there is really no question as to whether having a greater percentage of Committed employees is of interest to organizations, two key questions emerge:

Can individuals be developed into Committed employees?  How do you go about doing that?

Neither are unfamiliar questions for HR professionals. We too, have rooted our thinking in the positive potential to which such questions point.  Indeed, you can create or develop Committed employees and it starts with creating the right conditions.

Maslow for the Masses
1970 was a great year for HR thought leadership. Greenleaf published his work on servant leadership and Abraham Maslow published the second edition of Motivation and Personality, in which he further expanded on his Hierarchy of Needs theory. Maslow’s work has had a big impact on our understanding of human motivation and personal development.

The core idea is that humans have certain basic needs that need to be met—e.g., food, shelter, safety—before other higher-order psychological needs, like belonging and self-esteem, can be met. At the top of the pyramid are self-fulfillment needs including self-actualization—achieving one’s full potential in one’s personal and work life.

A less talked about aspect of this theory is Maslow’s belief that only very few people can actually achieve self-actualization because the conditions and factors necessary to create it are so difficult to establish.

We agree with Maslow that a hierarchical model can be effective at understanding and creating the conditions for motivating people to achieve their full potential (i.e. become a Committed employee). However, unlike Maslow, we don’t believe that this can only happen for a handful of employees.  The Sentis hierarchical model of employee commitment is based on the premise that if the right conditions are in place, a far greater percentage of the employee body can become Committed and leaders in their own way.

Our hierarchy is based on some fundamental differences in the perceptions between Committed employees and the other three segments. Committed employees clearly carry some very strongly held beliefs that not only differentiate them from their fellow employees, but help explain why they are leaders.

Create a More Committed Opportunity
Where the opportunity to grow the segment of Committed employees exists is in creating the environment that meets the hierarchy of needs outlined below.

Dignity, Respect, Fair Treatment. The foundation of commitment is the workplace environment.  Employees have to feel that they are treated with dignity and respect. In our employee engagement survey, the extent to which this foundation is present is measured by survey items like the following – ‘I am not subject to harassment’, ‘People at my workplace are treated with dignity and respect’, ‘I am treated fairly’.

Work-Life Balance. If the workplace environment can effectively meet the employee’s basic need for dignity, respect and fair treatment, then the questions evolve. Do conditions exist to create a healthy work-life balance for the employee? Can the employee do productive and meaningful work without being overwhelmed or consumed by it? Success at this level in the hierarchy is measured by the extent to which the employees feel they are ‘able to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life’ and ‘there are usually enough employees in my department to handle the workload.’

Communication and Trust. The next level in the hierarchy is all about open and honest communication and creating the conditions in which employees trust the organization. When the organization does an excellent job of ‘keeping employees informed’, ‘encouraging face-to-face communication’ and instilling feelings of ‘trust in senior management’, it opens the door for employees to feel secure enough to stretch to their full potential.

Learning and Growing. Stretching to one’s full potential is the essence of this level in the hierarchy. Employees feel that they are in a place where they can learn and grow. They feel it is safe to try new things, make mistakes and challenge themselves. In our survey success, this level is defined by employees who feel strongly that they are ‘given the opportunity to learn or train to improve my skills’, ‘given flexibility in my job to provide good service, and ‘encouraged to come up with new ways of doing things.’

When the organization consistently creates an environment which fosters employees’ intrinsic motivation to grow and develop, employees respond by becoming intrinsically motivated to help the organization succeed. They go ‘above and beyond’ because it’s now about much more than compensation.

Sentis founder Adam DiPaula, MBA,  VP Mary Bacica, CMRP and managing partner Julie Winram, CMRP merge their passion for employee research at Sentis Research (www.sentisresearch.com).

(PeoplTalk Spring 2014)