Moving the Engagement Needle
Two-thirds of the American workforce is disengaged, estimated to cost the US economy approximately 300 billion dollars every year in lost productivity (Towers Watson 2012). Organizations with high engagement consistently outperform the total stock market index and post shareholder returns that are significantly higher than average (Aon Hewitt 2011). Disengaged employees are more absent and less productive, all resulting in reduced organizational profitability (Towers Watson 2012).
Given those statistics, it’s no mystery why employee engagement is thought to be a strong predictor of organizational performance. The number of journal articles, books and popular press reporting on the positive correlation between high levels of employee engagement and the financial performance of businesses around the globe are too expansive to count. And those kinds of business outcomes have gotten the attention of professionals, researchers and practitioners everywhere.
Yet, as a business community we have failed to move the needle on employee engagement over the decade(s) that we’ve been focused on it. In fact, a recent study conducted by Gallup (2013) suggested that corporate employees are more disengaged than ever. What are we missing? It’s clear that merely knowing employee engagement is a predictive factor in business outcomes is not enough to shift the degree to which human capital is engaged.
The wealth of complex theories and highly developed consultative processes that have been designed to increase employee engagement over the past decade have generally failed to directly impact the degree to which our human capital is engaged in the workplace. Corporate America has tried to apply complex programs across vast institutions, rather than focusing their efforts on engaging unique, individual employees.
Organizations have taken a global approach, when they need to be taking an individual approach. That is, companies need to shift their thinking about employee engagement by focusing, not on broad universal approaches to organizational engagement but on specific personalized approaches to individual engagement.
This tutorial intends to (1) provide participants with an overview of the limitations of existing approaches designed to enhance engagement, (2) propose an alternative approach to enhancing engagement by aligning employee engagement practices with the hard-wired values of individuals, and (3) offer a tactical toolbox specifically designed to enhance the engagement of the individuals that make up every organization.
Challenges in Enhancing Employee Engagement
Leaders have invested significantly in measuring and addressing employee engagement placed over the past decade but that attention has, unfortunately, not resulted in increased clarity around the drivers of employee engagement. The body of literature on employee engagement has grown but with it has come more confusion than conclusion. Before we can understand why attempts to make headway in predictably enhancing engagement have failed, though, we have to first agree on what employee engagement even is.
Though there are literally hundreds of studies on employee engagement, including a large number of cumulative meta-analyses, there is no consistent definition of the construct. Descriptions of employee engagement include, but are surely not limited to: the extent to which employees have a sense of purpose (Macey et al. 2009), employees’ deep and expansive connection to the company (Gebauer and Lowman 2009), or simply as the opposite of employee burnout (Maslach and Leiter 2008).
Instituting successful programs to enhance employee engagement is certainly set up for challenge when both the research and practitioner arenas have widely varying definitions of what employee engagement even is. That said, for the purposes of this tutorial, we will borrow from Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes (2002) and define employee engagement as the extent to which an individual is involved, satisfied and enthusiastic at work.
Beyond the challenge of consistently defining employee engagement, another roadblock facing efforts to enhance employee engagement has been the ongoing difficulty in accurately measuring engagement. Most tools historically used to measure employee engagement are annual surveys that ask a wealth of questions about the degree to which employees have the support, resources etc. necessary for them to be fully engaged at, and with their, work.
The limitation of this approach is that the extent to which an individual employee is engaged fluctuates to a large degree over time – over days, weeks and months. Therefore, how engaged an individual employee is on June 1st may have little to no relationship to how engaged they were on January 1st or how engaged they will be on August 1st. To effectively shift or enhance the engagement of an employee we need to be able to keep a finger on the pulse of their engagement on an ongoing basis.
Without that, a drop in engagement can lead to a dip in employee satisfaction, productivity and ultimately organizational profitability before leaders have even had a chance to intervene. Actively measuring engagement over time is critical if we’re going to make headway on its improvement.
Finally, perhaps the most significant impediment to enhancing employee engagement has been the fact that efforts around enhancing engagement have typically been vague, over-generalized or have focused on the crafting of complex, universal engagement solutions (Gruman and Saks 2011).
In all cases, attempts to address engagement have generally held at their roots the assumption that employees can and ought to be more effectively engaged in exactly the same way as one another. In the initial case, we know that many organizations manage engagement merely by measuring it annually and creating vague, ad hoc solutions when engagement scores are lower than desired (i.e., engagement results showing a low score on rewards results in a general attempt to increase pay and/or benefits for employees) (Dale Carnegie 2012). In the second case, correlations between factors such as trust, connection and inspiration (LRN 2012) have led to assumptions that focusing on increasing those factors for employees will increase engagement. However, consistently operationalizing those broad factors is difficult and increasing their potency across an entire organization is a massive undertaking in and of itself. In the last case, rich but very complex programs have been offered up to tie performance management to efforts to enhance engagement (Gruman and Saks 2011).
While these programs are strong conceptually, putting the multiple pieces required in place within organizations is likely to be highly resource-intensive and difficult to maintain over time. Most importantly, the main challenge that spans across all of the described approaches to enhancing engagement, from vague to complex, is the universal assumption that all people can, or even need to be, engaged in the same way. This assumption sets employee engagement programs up for failure. People are not all the same and so neither can be the efforts to engage them.
Focusing on Engaging the Individual
Efforts focused on unilaterally engaging an organization, rather than on engaging each individual that makes up the organization, are missing the engagement boat. Why? Organizations are systems of individuals and for the most part individuals’ personalities and core values are pretty well developed by the time they hit the work world.
Now, people can certainly change over the course of their lifetime but the core of who they are tends to remain very stable. This reality is supported by abysmal ROI on remediation coaching – making someone good at something they’re not good at, and don’t like. Even when highly developed coaching programs are put in place, individuals have a strong tendency to revert to their typical behavior within 6 months.
What’s more, these hired wired core values drive our behavior on a day-to-day basis more than anything else. Everywhere. Including the work place. So, given the hard-wired nature of human beings, it would clearly follow that attempts to enhance engagement without tailoring to individual core values is a setup for failure.
There have been a number of empirical papers focused on the positive relationship between the extent to which employees feel supported within, and valued by, their organization and their level of engagement (Saks 2006). Different actions are required for each of us to feel supported and valued – it is an individual experience, not a universal one.
As such, those core stable values that are unique to each individual are the perfect guide to ensuring each employee receives what they need to be fully engaged. More specifically, since individual employees each hold unique values at their core, we need to use those core values to drive our efforts to keep the individual employee feeling supported, and thus engaged, at work. Take for example a situation where two employees both report decreased levels of engagement related to rewards received – but one of those employees places high value on receiving High Pay for Good Performance and the other places high value not on monetary rewards but on receiving Opportunities for Professional Growth. Without that essential data describing the core values uniquely important to each employee, traditional engagement practices would likely assume that both employees experiencing decreased engagement around rewards were simply in need of more in the way of financial compensation. In the case just described, that assumption would be wrong. And that error would have left at least one of those employees feeling misunderstood and unsupported, leading to a further decrease in engagement. Engagement is personal. We need to shift our engagement practices to incorporate that reality.
Employee Engagement Toolbox
Using an individual, rather than universal, lens to understanding employee engagement makes it possible to provide each individual employee with the support, resources etc. they need to be fully engaged at work. Proposed here is an employee engagement toolbox that consistently uses an individual lens through out – a toolbox that is fundamentally the same whether an organization has 30 employees or 300,000 employees.
Measure the core values of each employee. Use a strength-based approach to identify the values that are most important to each individual within the organization. Be sure not to ask employees about the values they think are, or should be, important to the organization. Those questions get at a different, and often error-laden, body of data. The critical goal here is to figure out which values are most core to each of your employees, as individuals – to pinpoint the values that remain constant for them over time. Those are the values that will drive their behavior and the ones you want to incorporate into your engagement strategy.
Manage dips in engagement. When decreases in engagement are identified, quickly address the employee need (e.g., rewards, trust, feedback etc.) with action(s) that are aligned with that individual’s core values. Using our earlier example, if an employee reports a dip on engagement around rewards. Line that need up with their personal core values. If that employee places high value on Opportunities for Professional Growth, provide them with a new learning opportunity, seminar, or challenging project for them to work on. Employees differ widely in their wiring so don’t make the mistake of trying to engage them using a one-size-fits-all model, make it personal.
Monitor engagement continuously. As noted earlier, a snapshot survey of engagement conducted on one single day during the entire year does little to inform you about how engaged your employees are through out the year. Instead, use short pulse surveys with 10-15 questions on a regular – quarterly or even monthly – interval to track engagement continuously. That way, you’ll be alerted to dips when, or not long after, they occur – and can immediately put values-based tactics in place to re-engage your people before productivity and satisfaction dip. Engagement is not only personal, it’s also changeable and you must track it in order to impact it.
In order to effectively enhance employee engagement, organizations must incorporate tactics that are designed to engage the person – not the general population – and those tactics must be active and ongoing. Engagement doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact complicated engagement strategies often miss the mark as noted above, it just has to be direct, consistent and focused on the individual.
Moving the Engagement Needle
Employee engagement is undisputedly a hard driver of business performance. That said, engagement is not truly captured by a number spit out at the end of an annual survey every 12 months, it is not driven by universal tactics applied to a highly varied body of individual employees, and it does not shift without focused, concerted effort. Rather than blindly increasing pay, moving to a 5-day workweek or installing a foosball table in the lunchroom, companies need to get personal about engagement. Aligning tactical, ongoing engagement efforts around the core values that drive the individuals that make up an organization will finally move the needle on employee engagement.
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