Congratulations to Min Hee Yoo, the winner of the book giveaway! Please email Ann Parker at [email protected] with the best mailing address to which ATD can send your free copy of Creating Engaged Employees.

Employee engagement has been a popular topic for both scholars and practitioners in many fields, including human resource management, human resource development, organization development, business, and psychology. The term is trending heavily in academic and professional circles as organizations attempt to better understand how to recruit and retain the best employees. Employee engagement is attractive because research shows that the level of employees’ engagement could be enhanced by individual and organizational efforts, and that engaged employees make more positive contributions to increasing organization effectiveness—for example, high job performance and lower turnover intention. For all of this enthusiasm, however, the definition of engagement has been elusive.

With regard to conceptualizing employee engagement, there are more than 10 approaches with diverse perspectives. Scholars have attempted to delineate what employee engagement means to individual employees and their organizations. For instance, in my experience, the closest definition on which my colleagues and I could agree was: Employee engagement consists of three states—emotional, cognitive, and behavioral—and these three states influence how engaged an employee is with his work, relationships, and organization; the more positive these relationships, the more positive engagement.

Since there is no agreement and no right nor wrong answer to defining employee engagement, it is important for organizations and their employees to think about their own ways of understanding and conceptualizing employee engagement. With so much effort and resources being expended to achieve engagement, the importance of working from a common definition is even more critical. Yet, so many leadership teams just move forward without really developing a definition or a plan. For these reasons, below are five guiding questions to facilitate organizations and their employees to develop their own definition of employee engagement. These guiding questions are covered in the book, Creating Engaged Employees.

1. Who cares about employee engagement in your organization?

2. Why does your organization care about employee engagement?

3. How does your organization care about employee engagement? What kind of policies, strategies, or activities do you currently implement or plan to implement for employee engagement?

4. What might be the important factors that contribute to employee engagement in your organization?

5. Based on the four prior questions, what does employee engagement mean to your organization?

So here’s the question: How would you define employee engagement in your organization?

For a chance to win a copy of Creating Engaged Employees****, answer the above question in the comments section below, and include your email address. Your comment must be received by 5 p.m. EDT on Friday, December 19. If you prefer to email your response, please send it to Ann Parker at [email protected]. After reviewing the comments and emails received, we will select and announce a winner in this post by Tuesday, December 23.