These days, it’s popular to talk about “employee engagement” as a solution to numerous organizational challenges, including talent retention, productivity, and innovation. However, what exactly constitutes “employee engagement” remains unclear. Articles on the topic cite initiatives ranging from workplace wellness programs to governing councils to continuing education offerings. Not surprisingly, data on the existence and outcomes of employee engagement programs are also inconsistent, but a cursory review of diverse sources suggests that 40-50% of organizations are investing in employee engagement strategies, typically administered by the HR department, with the express goals of attracting and retaining talent.
“engagement” – that powerful combination of commitment, full attention, and discretionary effort that fuels innovation and bottom line gains – versus mere job filling
What isn’t said is whether these programs correlate with actual “engagement” – that powerful combination of commitment, full attention, and discretionary effort that fuels innovation and bottom line gains – versus mere job filling. Given the significant level of investment being made in these initiatives, it seemed like a good time to distinguish between retention and engagement and to dispel a few myths about what does – and does not – encourage workforce engagement.
Myth #1: Employees who feel adequately informed will be engaged.
A quick scan of job posts for “Employee Engagement Managers” indicate that many organizations are using the word “engagement” when they’re really talking about “communication.” Certainly, communication plays an important role in helping employees to feel “connected” and “informed,” but neither “connected” nor “informed” are the same thing as “engaged.”
Myth #2: If the boss’ expectations and the project objectives are clear, employees will engage.
Again, making sure everyone on the team is clear on the objectives certainly increases the chances that individuals’ work efforts will contribute toward those objectives, but “willing compliance” is also not engagement.
Myth #3: If people are paid well, they’ll engage.
There’s conflicting data on this one. One study says “72% of workers are satisfied, but 60% are still looking around for a new job with higher wages (Addison Group)” while another reports that “nearly 60% of Americans would take a job they love over a job they hate, even if the preferred position paid half the amount of salary they would earn at the job they dislike (Lexington Law).” (Thanks to AccessPerks for sharing info). While neither of these stats is explicitly about engagement, they are representative of the inconclusiveness of studies on the wage-satisfaction relationship. Wages do matter. All else being equal, wages can be the determining factor in attracting and retaining talent, but money can’t buy engagement.
Myth #4: If people are properly incentivized, they’ll engage.
This is the “advanced” approach to incentives that emerged when it was discovered that employees were motivated by incentives other than money and that there’s not a single incentive that motivates everyone equally. So it became the manager’s job to sleuth out each employee’s intrinsic needs, then try to provide tailored incentives and rewards. Certainly a constructive step forward in beginning to acknowledge the complexity of the human animal. The primary limit of this approach, however, is that it continues to emphasize extrinsic motivators, which tend to work in the short-term but lose effectiveness over time. This approach can also create all sorts of HR landmines around “fair and equitable” treatment of employees.
Myth #5: If we make work fun, they’ll engage.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of rarely used foosball tables standing as evidence to the contrary. In some organizations, the foosball table does get used, and employees are eager to participate on the company soccer team; in others, not so much. “Fun” alone doesn’t seem to be a sufficient recipe.
SO…if the goal is a committed, hyper-productive, innovative workforce, and money, incentives, and “fun” aren’t the answer, what is? Under what conditions do employees engage? Like so many other hard questions in management, the real answer is “it depends.” A significant limitation of all the beliefs addressed here is the mechanistic, top-down view of human behavior where managers believe if they “pull the right levers” and “push the right buttons,” the human machine will respond in predictable ways. Any manager with more than a few months of experience knows better, but it’s very hard to let go of the hope that there is a single, mechanistic, “social engineering” solution that will work.
The reality is that while there are some predictable cause-effect patterns in human behavior, there is so much psychological variability – cognitive, emotional, and experiential – in the people who make up any work group or organization, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The key to “engagement” lies in the word itself – managers and leaders must engage with their employees to create the conditions that will enable that particular group of people to bring their best selves to bear on the task at hand.
In the next post, I’ll take up the topic of “team engagement” and why I think it holds so much promise for delivering the type of engagement leaders hope for while simultaneously improving employees’ quality of life.
