Is Your Team Struggling With Low Engagement and Quiet Quitting ? The “CAMPS” Model Can Help

Managers are constantly trying to improve workplace engagement.

Quiet quitting has been on everyone’s lips since the pandemic and the mass migration to remote work began a few years ago. Since then, leaders around the world have been searching for ways to inspire their disconnected and isolated workers to invest in their work. 

The thing is, this inspirational process takes place almost exclusively within the workplace. It focuses entirely on caring about and prioritizing work.  

When managers emphasize workplace engagement to the exclusion of everything else, they’re undercutting their own efforts. To be effective, they also need to keep lifeplace engagement in mind. 

What Is Lifeplace Engagement and Why Does It Matter?

Everyone is familiar with the term workplace engagement. Gallup concisely defines it as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” In other words, workplace engagement is the concept of how much employees invest in and are excited about their work. 

The term “lifeplace engagement” is a similar concept coined by the management training team at LifeLabs Learning. According to the company’s CEO, Priscila Bala, the term mirrors workplace engagement with the important caveat that it considers life outside of the workplace. Bala specifically defines this thusly, “[Lifeplace engagement] is the degree to which we feel committed to our personal well-being.” 

Not surprisingly, when lifeplace engagement is low, workplace engagement suffers, and vice versa. When someone comes home from work feeling discouraged, stressed, or drained, they drag those feelings into everyday life.  

Helping address this isn’t just something leaders should do out of the goodness of their hearts. A lack of lifetime engagement can also have a direct negative impact on workplace productivity. It hampers employees’ ability to rest and inhibits their recovery time. When they feel stressed and strained at home, workers will also bring those feelings right back into the workplace and even share them with one another, too. 

Bala and the team at LifeLabs have developed a clever solution to help leaders address lifeplace engagement while at work. They call it the CAMPS Model. 

Using the CAMPS Model to Improve Employee Engagement 

The CAMPS model addresses five psychological factors that have the most impact on a team’s development and willingness to engage in both their work and life. The acronym stands for: 

• Certainty: When employees have clarity about workplace priorities, they can stay focused, remain effective, and leave work feeling they’ve taken care of the most important things. 
• Autonomy: Empowering employees while also supporting them is a key element in helping them develop confidence and thrive, both in and out of the workplace. 
• Meaning: Transparency and communication are important at work. Show team members why their work matters, and you’ll inspire them to live and act with a greater sense of purpose. 
• Progress: When your team members make progress, they should know it. This provides a sense of satisfaction, enhances feelings of personal development, and helps them maintain momentum. 
• Social inclusion: Feeling on the outside leads to feelings of rejection and isolation that can spill outside of work. Good leaders make sure every team member has a voice and a chance to speak. 

Even when leaders fulfill just some of these factors, employees can end up benefitting. They can feel more confident, included, and inspired. They can benefit from team spirit, compassionate support (both for and from others) and collective energy. Critically, they can take this out of the workplace where they can truly unplug, rest, and recharge from professional responsibilities before coming back to work. 

The Need for HR Leaders to Lead the Charge on CAMPS

CAMPS is a powerful tool that sheds light on a little-known and rarely addressed issue in the workplace. The lack of engagement on an individual level is something that impacts both personal and professional initiative and satisfaction. 

It’s up to leaders to cultivate a CAMPS culture within their workplaces. CHROs should proactively pursue CAMPS initiatives as a way to spark engagement and reignite passion and drive within their existing workforce. 

It’s up to leaders to cultivate a CAMPS culture within their workplaces.

The problem is that addressing workplace engagement alone requires a deep sense of empathy and nuance. Going a step further and integrating lifeplace engagement into the mix takes strong, confident, and creative leadership. 

Identifying the leaders with those capabilities can be difficult. Working with a professional executive recruitment partner can help. They can provide third-party perspectives, deep talent networks, and the experience and tools required to identify high-performing CHROs with the capabilities and skills to embrace a CAMPS mindset. 

We conduct business in a remote-first world now. As leaders adapt to remote and hybrid environments, they should look to HR to help them maintain a CAMPS mindset that stokes engagement, and fosters invested employees, no matter what project, team, or workplace environment they’re operating within. 

About the Author

William Brewer, CCP, is a Director at Stanton Chase Los Angeles. He is also Stanton Chase’s Global Human Resources Practice Leader. Prior to moving into executive search, Bill had 25 years of experience in corporate human resources. In addition to his executive search career, Bill is an adjunct Professor at the University of Redlands. Bill also serves as a mentor for the MBA program at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and has been a mentor with the School of Business at the University of Redlands.