The Power of Commitment for Success in Organizations with Andrew Kitchner

Employee engagement is a topic that often blurs the lines between commitment and engagement. In any organization, having a clear vision, mission, and goals is crucial. However, to effectively achieve these objectives, it is essential to provide employees with a sense of purpose and direction. So, what are the best strategies for organizations to improve company culture and enhance employee motivation and performance? In this week's episode, we have a special guest, Andrew Kitchner, the Founder of New Wave Solutions, who joins us to discuss the crucial role of employee commitment in organizational success. Andrew illustrates the distinction between commitment and engagement by providing practical scenarios within organizations. His platform, New Wave Solutions, is dedicated to measuring employee commitment and uncovering effective strategies to enhance employees' dedication to organizational goals and values. Tune in and discover strategies to enhance commitment for your organization. Listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Power of Commitment for Success in Organizations with Andrew Kitchner Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. The last couple of episodes, we focused quite a bit on jobs, both how we find a job as well as how we could kind of network to become better connected to some of our potential jobs. The question we’re asking today now is what happens once you get into the job because one of the problems that we have with a lot of organizations these days is employees, you’ll get your job, then it takes maybe a month or two, the new job thing, where it’s off and you wonder, “Is this what I really want? Is this what I really expected, am I really happy?” and as my guest, Andrew Kitchner, will say, “Am I really committed?” Andrew Kitchner is the founder and chief survey administrator, hope I’m getting that right, of New Wave Solutions, and he focuses on commitment rather than engagement, so that’s a good place to start. --- Andrew, welcome to the program. Thank you, thank you for having me. Definitely. This is great because we’re talking about the last few episodes, the different ways people go about getting to their ideal career. We know that the process of — the applicant tracking system process is broken, the process by which people discover who they are, the way people post postings can be a little bit broken, and, now, we also have some issues that we’re going to talk about today with what happens once someone gets into a job, what employees are doing, because so many organizations, whether you’re the one at a job or you’re the one who started your company and you’re looking to keep your employees, you say that we should be focusing on commitment rather than engagement. Yeah. I originally he was a believer in engagement. What we found was, when we were looking at what is the best predictor of long-term retention, my hypothesis was engagement. Companies are spending millions of dollars on engagement surveys. I wasn’t cocky enough to say I know better than all these companies, I assumed that these companies are measuring the best metrics. After looking at about a hundred different variables, engagement was about the 35th best predictor of long-term retention. It frankly ruined my hypothesis so it’s not like I came into this wanting this to be true. What was the best long-term predictor of retention as well as performance was a term called organizational commitment and what that means, it’s an employee’s commitment to their company’s goals, values, mission, and people, and just on an intuitive level, what I say now is when you think about something that you worked hard to achieve, whether it’s in your personal or professional life, why did you put in that discretionary effort? Very rarely will somebody say, “I put in that discretionary effort because I was engaged.” I’ve in fact never heard somebody say that. What they do say is that, “I was committed to a goal, committed to an outcome, committed to a value, committed to a group,” and so, on an intuitive level, it does make sense and, like I was saying, the statistics and the research bears it out. So, we’ve heard so much talk about employee engagement and we know the numbers around what percentage of employees are engaged. Can an employee be committed yet disengaged? No. So, what we see is it goes in order. So, commitment leads to engagement.Share on X So that’s why it’s more important is because it starts with commitment, engagement is merely an outcome of that commitment. And what you’re saying is that that’s what someone needs to work on. You need to work on getting that person to become committed and then they’ll become engaged. And that’s one thing that I think is important to distinguish. So, because we do commitment surveys, I understand the initial reaction. A lot of employees will say, “Hey, hey, hey, I don’t want you measuring my commitment, tracking it,” and I get that, but where the responsibility falls in my mind and the way we operate is on the company, not the employee. It’s not the employee’s obligation to be committed. It’s the organization’s responsibility who foster employee’s commitment. So, can an employee who is not committed become committed? Can you foster that through kind of some sort of workplace culture improvement or some sort of better expression of your values mission statement? Yes. The other way around? And that’s exactly what we do with our commitment feedback surveys is we determine what are the best predictors or the causal factors which influence an employee’s commitment. We do that through regression so that it’s a causal relationship, not a correlational, and we’re able to say, “Okay, if you improve employee satisfaction with company culture by 10 percent, here’s how you can expect employee commitment to change,” and so we rank those what we call drivers of commitment so that companies know what to prioritize and what to expect by improving those variables. So, is a committed employee, generally speaking, a happy employee? Yes. Yes, they are. And it’s on a deeper level. They are willing to go through times in which they might not be happy or difficult experiences or even turn down better offers because of their alignment with the company’s goals, values, and mission. So, anybody who’s had a long-term goal, let’s say getting in shape in the gym, it’s not always fun, there are difficult times, there are sacrifices required, but people do it because of their commitment to a long-term goal or value or mission. You don’t want an employee where you’re seeking to make them happy 100 percent of the time. It’s not about happiness. Happiness is something that will come as a result but you want to foster an environment where an employee will go through adversity by their own discretionary choice, not because they’re forced to or because they don’t have another job offer but because they consider it to be worthwhile to go through that adversity. And we’ve heard so much about the current status of employee engagement, as in that’s what people usually talk about, how, whatever they say, two-thirds are disengaged with the one-third actively disengaged, sabotaging the company. When we’re talking about employee commitment, is the situation in general amongst the American workforce as dire as it is with engagement in the current state? The reality is yes. It really is. What you have with organizational commitment, it’s composed of kind of, not to get too deep but there’s three types. Employees who want to be committed, feel like they should be committed, and feel like they need to be committed. So, need, want, and should. So you can think of need as financial, you can think of should as social, and want as in personal desire. What we see is the need is there. Not surprisingly, people need to work. That need is there. But the want and the should are what needs to be improved, mainly the want. So, yes, people might feel the social pressure to show up at their job but they don’t want to. Yeah. And so that desire is one of the biggest areas that needs to be improved. And do you think, in all the surveys and all the studies, everything you’ve looked at, that want is missing because a lot of people are just working jobs that aren’t that exciting, aren’t that interesting, organizations that really don’t have that great of a mission or whatever it is? Or do you think that want comes from some other level of dissatisfaction that people get to when they get into the organization, a situation where someone maybe comes into a job, really excited about it, but then they’re, I don’t know, stifled by bureaucratic red tape or they have like office politics that gets in the way and, all of a sudden, they’re like, “I just don’t care anymore, I just wanna have my paycheck because I have to have my paycheck to pay my rent”? Yeah, it’s a good question. So there are multiple causes. What I boil it down to is mainly two things, is, one, employees don’t believe in the mission or the goal of the company. So, let’s say you’re working for just an accounting agency, hypothetically. You might not really understand what is the goal mission purpose of that accounting agency other than to do accounting. You don’t see the bigger purpose. The other one is maybe you do believe in the bigger purpose of your organization but you don’t feel like you’re personally contributing to it. You’re more of a cog in the machine and you understand, yeah, my role is necessary, but you’re not seeing the impact of that goal or mission so you don’t have a personal connection to it. So, it’s either you don’t believe in the goal of the mission or it’s not clear or you don’t see the degree to which you’re contributing to that goal or mis