Employee engagement is a massive topic and one that most companies are still somewhat struggling with. I say “most companies” because of the now famous (infamous?) 2013 Gallup research showing about 13% of employees worldwide engaged in their work. In the U.S., the number is higher -- around 32% -- but has remained stagnant for most of a half-decade. You can view the 32% number as good (it’s 2.5x the global average!) or bad (it still indicates 2 in every 3 employees are not engaged in the work they do every day).
I wanted to break this up into a couple of posts because employee engagement, as noted, is a huge topic. It touches everything about the working world; from how we recruit and hire to how we compensate to how we promote to how we assign tasks to workers and managers alike. All those factors (and more) contribute to how “engaged” you are with your work, and that engagement impacts lots of other aspects of your business, from turnover to your bottom line profit-making ability.
The first thing that needs to be addressed here is the basic question: what is employee engagement? What does it mean?
There are millions of Google results for this, but here’s the little secret of employee engagement: it varies by person. Some people, naturally, will feel engaged by a high salary. Some will feel engaged by a good degree of formal power. Some might feel engaged from a great relationship with their boss. Still, others might dislike their co-workers but love their actual work, and report engagement from that. There are hundreds of possible constructs.
A recent article in The New Yorker entitled “What Makes People Feel Upbeat At Work?” featured this section about the intersection of “feeling engaged” and “performing well at your job:”
The highest performers of all were those in a moderately regulated environment who also felt a high degree of autonomy, as determined by their responses to a single statement: “My job permits me to decide on my own how to go about doing the work.” In other words, people want to feel in control. They want to be afforded respect and to determine on their own how to act; it is this autonomy that helps foster emotional positivity.
This ties to past research showing that, while compensation is important, many employees in industrialized nations report wanting two things from work above all:
You can argue that the term “opportunities for growth” simply means “a higher salary” to many people being surveyed, and that might be true.
At base level, I think the term “employee engagement” refers to, well, how engaged an employee is in their work. I view it as connection back to the employer, both in terms of net promoter score-type metrics (they’d recommend their employer to others), and in terms of consistently wanting to do their best outside of salary. As many have noted over the years, from Peter Drucker through Daniel Pink, salary is a transactional relationship -- you complete tasks, and you get money. Employee engagement, to me, is a transformative relationship -- I do these tasks and I aim to do them well because I care about more than the transaction or base end result.
Now, there is a dark side to employee engagement in some ways. There’s documented economic research that most U.S. earnings, for example, have been stagnant for years. The overall economic picture is better -- less unemployment, new jobs being created, etc. -- but people’s actual wages aren’t rising, and neither is their purchasing power. As The Economist recently noted, profits are outpacing wages at the highest rate in about 75 years. That means people at the top -- i.e. executives -- are being compensated more and more, but their incentive to fairly compensate and advance others down the hierarchy is lessened each year.
A cynical person could look at those numbers and the recent rise in employee engagement discussions and think, “What if it’s just a big scheme?” A company, after all, probably wouldn’t flinch at having “Free Waffle Friday,” especially if it meant employees were in the door by 8 AM to get those waffles. And that waffle idea might be cheaper than giving 10-15 people raises that year.
So what if “engagement” is just a synonym for “pay them less and offer moderate perks along the way?”
To some executives, that might be true. But I think most care about their people and their processes and their productivity towards growth goals, which is driven by people.
“Employee engagement” might be approaching buzzword or eye-roll territory in some organizations, but I believe it’s still important in helping people, and the bigger business, grow at the rate they want to.
Now comes the hard work: if we have an idea of what exactly employee engagement is, via above, where do we start trying to move our business towards this idea?
First up: hiring, recruiting, and diversity/inclusion towards employee engagement.