Why employee engagement isn’t working

Why employee engagement isn’t working

Article Type: Research articles From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 14, Issue 6

John Guaspari

John Guaspari is an Employee Engagement Expert, Consultant and Author in Massachusetts, USA.

The headline of a recent article on Forbes.com reads: How Many Employees Hate Your Company? “Another year, another employee engagement poll by Gallup, another round of teeth gnashing. Despite small gains in 2014, a great majority of employees are still not engaged. On average, only 31.5 per cent of your employees are engaged, 51 per cent of them are not engaged and 17.5 per cent are creating real trouble by being actively disengaged”.

Td.org, a publication of the Association for Talent Development, puts things even more portentously in this headline: Employee Engagement: Epic Failure? “According to a Towers Watson survey, nearly two-thirds of USA employees are not fully engaged in their work. The same percentage of the workforce was as disengaged in 2000 as it is today and that trend has been consistent throughout the past decade”.

So despite all of the engagement projects, programs, initiatives, conferences, publications and battalions of consultants who have emerged to drive up their clients’ engagement levels, the return on investment has just not been there in what has become, according to a Bersin by Deloitte report, a $1.5 billion employee engagement market.

Herewith, three reasons for that shortfall:

1. Correlation confused with causality: The current enthusiasm for engagement began with multiple studies showing a strong positive correlation between high levels of engagement and better business results. But saying that engagement causes business success is like saying that water is attracted to tall buildings, as large cities are located along riverfronts and coastlines. Engagement can be defined as “the extent to which an individual is moved to invest additional effort and energy in the tasks at hand”. Success breeds excitement. Successful enterprises are more fun – one might even say, more engaging – to be a part of.

2. Gresham’s law as applied to the definition of engagement: Engagement is a common word, generally connoting connection or interaction. Gears are said to engage in a transmission. Opposing armies are said to engage on a battlefield. Business leaders hold all-hands meetings to increase opportunities for connection and such meetings will often include breakout sessions that foster increased interaction. But while such tactics jibe with the Interaction/Connection definition of engagement, that definition is very different from the Effort/Energy definition cited in #1 above. In other words, much of the activity that comes under the heading of engagement is not the engagement studied in the research that prompted those activities in the first place. In a semantic corollary to Gresham’s Law, the bad definition is driving out the good one. Why? Imagine a fork in a road. One path is marked Interaction/Connection and the other is marked Energy/Effort. Achieving Interaction/Connection engagement is tangible, it is well within most people’s comfort zones and it is pretty straightforward to pull off. Energy/Effort engagement, on the other hand, is intangible, makes people more than a little uneasy and is, simply, tough to do. Which path do you think is going to be more heavily trafficked – Tangible/Comfortable/Easy or Intangible/Uncomfortable/Hard? Me too.

3. Managerial obsessive compulsive disorder: Let us face it. We like things nice and neat and tidy. Under control. We like flow charts and spreadsheets and regression analyses. If we start getting into engagement – real, no foolin’ Energy/Effort engagement – things can get a little messy. Readers of a certain age will remember when Steve Martin first turned up on Saturday Night Live as a white-suited, banjo-playing goofball. In one of his bits, Martin would announce, “To prove how much I care about my fans, I will now go down among the people!” Then he would wade into the audience, so clearly appalled at the idea that he kept his hands thrust high above his head as though he were being held at gunpoint while issuing stern warnings to everyone around him: “Don’t touch me!” This is how a lot of leaders approach engagement and it is not good.

What is the solution? Simple. Stop focusing on engagement; it is an outcome, the result other things having been done well, not an input. Instead, start focusing on infusing your organization with the one thing that actually drives engagement – respect, properly understood to mean “giving due consideration to the other”.

Let us parse that definition a little more finely:

• Achieving engagement is about doing the hard, slogging work necessary to understand the other person as a person, not a cog in a machine. Consider how that other person is different and responsive to different stimuli that will cause him or her to invest the additional energy and effort you are after.

• Respect requires consideration, and by consideration, I do not mean courtesy or politesse. I have a much more prosaic sense of the word in mind: “Did you take the time to think about – i.e. did you consider – the effect of what you said (or did not say) and did (or did not do) on the other person?” This, of course, requires first accepting – perhaps grudgingly – the reality that your words and actions do, indeed, affect others.

• I am not saying that it is your job to accede to all of the hopes and wishes of those other persons; it is a business not a social club. That is where the word “due” comes in. Yes, you will have judgments to make as to what represents due – or sufficient, or appropriate – consideration. But if you are genuinely and sincerely weighing such factors, you pass. You are being respectful.

There is no getting around the fact that dealing with the people stuff can be less neat and controlled than we might like. But a desire for tidiness does not constitute proof of the absence of messiness. The application of the wrong definition, however appealing that fork in the road might be, will not get you to where you want to go. And even though it may have been decades since you took that introductory course in statistics, correlation is still not the same thing as causality.

Further reading

Galagan, P. (2015), “Employee engagement: an epic failure?”, TD Online, 8 March, available at: http://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2015/03/Employee-Engagement-An-Epic-Failure

Scott, R. (2015), “How many employees hate your company?”, Forbes, 5 March, available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/causeintegration/2015/03/05/why-your-employees-still-hate-your-company

About the author

John Guaspari is an Employee Engagement Expert and Author of Otherwise Engaged: How to Get a Firmer Grip on Employee Engagement and Other Key Intangibles* *If, That Is, It Were Possible to Grip Something That’s Intangible (Maven House Press). Visit his Web site: http://www.johnguaspari.com