A glimpse behind the curtain: Using cocreational employee engagement to support university faculty and staff

Abstract

The following paper is an autoethnographic, autobiographic self-study, a rarely used method in public relations, of my experience in overseeing employee engagement for faculty and staff in my college. By adopting the cocreational employee engagement framework, I explore and uncover some of the complexities that underpin employee engagement in higher education, which is an underexplored context in public relations. Through narrative, insights demonstrate the connection between employee voice and the cocreational framework, where committee efforts were dedicated to making employees feel psychologically safe enough to express their thoughts and feedback. In other words, this approach helped college members join in the actual process of meaning making. However, feedback is only valuable when it is followed by action, and action is directly linked to active listening. The narrative also revealed that in adopting and implementing the cocreational employee engagement approach, the inherent power dynamics were hard to avoid, which presented a key tension to overcome. Implications from this autobiography for theory and practice are included.