Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR, the blog written by members of Human Resources UK.
Today we have a rather timely article about engagement. It won’t have escaped your attention we’re all engaging closely at the moment with the demand for networking events. We now have confirmed events for London, Newbury, Bristol, Birmingham and Gateshead. So we’re all engaging with each other, but Sheena McLullich discusses today whether we can engage too much with our employer and be too close for comfort. (Ed Scrivener)
Too close for comfort?
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| Sheena hummed "I'll do anything" all day long |
I had lunch a few weeks ago with a former colleague. Although we hadn’t seen each other for over two years, we’d worked together in the same company for several years previously, so we had a lot of catching up to do. After exchanging all the family news and updating each other on our respective careers, the conversation turned to the company we’d both worked for.
Without going into too much detail, we had worked for a small company which had grown rapidly over five years or so and had undergone significant changes, including a change of ownership, before being bought over by a multi-national a couple of years ago.
We’d worked very closely (and very successfully) together on a number of key initiatives for the growing business. It had been an exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting, time often involving long hours, last minute changes and juggling several conflicting imperatives in very tight timescales. We were part of a close-knit senior management team who all got on well together, socially and professionally, and no-one really complained about the sometimes challenging environment we found ourselves in.
Over lunch, we had a lot of fun reminiscing about the people we’d worked with and some of the more bizarre events that had taken place. There was the time when, owing to a clerical error, everyone had been paid twice (yes, really!) The day we’d watched a whale swimming up the Thames right in front of the office, the night out when …. I could go on, but I really ought to spare the blushes of any of our former colleagues who may be reading this!!
We both left the company for different, but compelling, reasons several months apart. However, I was intrigued to discover that we’d both experienced a huge sense of loss at the time of our respective departures and that this had also been experienced by other senior colleagues who had left the same company before and since. Why was this? We talked about it for a while and came to the conclusion that we had probably all been too close to the business.
A case of ‘extreme engagement’ perhaps? Employee engagement is a stated aim of most organisations and we were all totally committed to ‘our’ company. It was never questioned or articulated but we would all do whatever it took to get the job done with the resources we had at our disposal – and if we didn’t have the resource, we simply did it ourselves. Discretionary effort and ‘going the extra mile’ was probably never considered by any of us. In all the whirlwind of dealing with constant change and growth challenges, we just got on with things and never really questioned why we were working so hard and what the end result would actually be.
Now that I’ve had time to reflect however, I think that there was a significant downside. For several weeks after I left I often found myself thinking deeply about my previous role, what had gone well, what I could have done differently, wondering what was happening, whether I was being missed, whether …
It was very difficult for me to ‘let go’ even though I had made my decision to leave several months before I actually did so. I had made such a strong emotional investment in the business that I couldn’t simply break the attachment overnight, even though it was high time for me to move on to different things.
Is that such a bad thing? Many organisations would love to have such dedicated, committed employees but is it possible that employees can become too engaged, so interwoven into the organisation that they cannot separate themselves from it? What do you think? Is this a feature of small companies only or something that many employees experience at some point in their career? I’d be very interested to hear your views.
About the author
Sheena began her career in Training & Development before moving to a generalist HR position in 1998. Since then she has held senior HR roles for several SMEs in a wide range of industries. A Fellow of the CIPD and Member of the US SHRM, she has a keen interest in Employee Development, specifically in coaching and supporting managers to enable them to get the best from their people. She was appointed as Director of People for SPA Future Thinking in September 2011.
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Discuss HR is the blog for Human Resources UK, the leading LinkedIn group for those involved with HR in the UK. Next week’s Discuss HR will be published on Thursday 15th September and will be written by HR recruitment specialist Ed Scrivener.
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