Keeping the hearts and minds of your employee.

In my last post, I talked about how we ensure that our new employee last through the honeymoon phase, where their engagement and motivation is high, so the next aspiration is to retain them. The ability to retain employees and ensure productivity at the same time is no mean feat, and congratulations if you do it well. The following post series will discuss key retention elements starting with organisational commitment.

Organisational commitment was made popular by the work of Meyer and Allen in their book: Commitment in the Workplace: Theory, research, and Application. It is an excellent book if you want to delve deeper into this work. Their work inspired this post. I will describe what organisation commitment means, how to develop the various types of organisational commitment and the current outlook of organisational commitment in a hybrid world.  

Organisational commitment can be seen as the psychological attachment to an organisation. Meyer and Allen identified three components of organisational commitment: affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. This post will focus on affective commitment, and subsequent posts will focus on other forms of commitment, but first, I will describe briefly what each key concept means.  

A staff with a robust affective commitment has a strong belief and acceptance of organisational goals, will exert extra effort, and will want to remain with the organisation. Continuance commitment employee stay because the cost associated with leaving the organisation is high, and employees with normative commitment are tied to the organisation by obligation. Meyer and Allen conclude that employees with affective commitment will be motivated to contribute meaningfully to an organisation and are very valuable.   

Organisational commitment gained its popularity primarily from research which shows that it reduces turnover and increases performance. Committed staff are said to have high participation and are productive. It is argued that this leads to low levels of absenteeism, tardiness, voluntary turnover, and high levels of operating efficiency. 

Factors that affect affective commitment include organisational characteristics, the person characteristics and the work experience. Organisation characteristics, such as the concept of organisational justice in the form of the policies and procedures of the organisation, whether they are fairly applied consistently. Is the pay policy equitable, how are organisational decisions made, are they devolved, or is it hierarchical? Do you communicate changes made, and how does it communicate organisational changes. 

Personal characteristics such as tenure may increase affective commitment; the longer an employee is with you, the more they grow attached to the organisation. The employee's age also matters as that tends to tally with the different phases of life of an adult, which matters to retention. Research also supports that growing older affects one affective commitment levels. Generational differences play a role in affective commitment. The individual value of the employees also contributes to their affective commitment levels. Employees with a high need for achievement and strong work ethics tend to have stronger affective commitment.  

The personality of an employee plays a role when it interacts with the organisational characteristics. I recommended the big five in one of my previous posts, so I will use one of those traits as an example of how personality traits and organisational characteristics can influence affective commitments. For example, if an employee is high on agreeableness (this is characterised by being interested in people and takes time out for others), then working in an organisation that emphasises teamwork would develop the affective commitment of that employee. Another example is a person high on conscientiousness (this is characterised by a high attention to detail) may not necessarily flourish in a start-up setting where the work is fast-paced to achieve a minimum viable product.  

Job challenge, degree of autonomy, the ability of the employee to use a variety of their skills, the scope of the employee’s role and the relationship between the employee and their line manager impact the employee's work experience. The employee's perception of fairness of the line manager also affects the commitment level of the employee.  

What does it mean to those staff we want to retain?  

Our interventions need to review the organisational characteristics, the person characteristics and the work experience. Regardless of the organisation, a key difference would be improving organisational justice in addition to other elements discussed here. The perception of organisational justice and fairness is as important as the actual display of organisational justice. We must be not only fair but also seen/perceived as fair.  

We cannot change our employee’s disposition, but we can influence their interaction with the organisational characteristics. This is assuming that you have chosen the correct selection battery, which ensures that you have the right personality traits for the role as per your selection process.  
We can also mediate their experience of the role, but something that can make a real difference is the relationship between the line manager and the staff. This is key in mediating the experience of the role. 
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To grow the employee affective commitment, the work environment must support the employees holistically. The organisation should create an environment that makes employees feel that their contributions are important, that they are treated fairly and are supported.  
My next posts will look at other types of organisational commitment.  
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