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!
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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.
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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.