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Want to Enhance Employee Engagement? Ask Three Critical Questions
By Michelle Sterling
I first heard the term “employee engagement” in the year 2000. I had just survived a series of bank mergers and had made it through the Y2K compliance computer-threat unscathed.
I was exhausted and questioning whether or not a career change was in order; I was in dire need of inspiration. I found it in a copy of First Break All the Rules, the best-seller by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman of the Gallup Organization. I was hooked. As an organizational leader, the idea that I could apply these concepts to help my fellow employees feel more engaged in their work while simultaneously helping my organization improve its performance was intoxicating.
I wasn’t alone. The idea took on a life of its own. Since that time the term employee engagement is commonplace in corporate hallways, and thousands of organizations have launched hundred of surveys—either the original Gallup Q12 or their own proprietary surveys to see how their organizations measure up. However, in that time have engagement efforts actually paid off?
The answer is hard to find. Gallup’s data show that the number of employees “engaged at work” has hovered between 26% and 30% over the past decade. Reports from other surveys, like Watson and Wyatt and the World at Work, indicate a nearly 10% decline in engagement levels from 2008 to 2009. The Conference Board has its own results. Mind you that these results have all been gathered in a decade that has seen extremes from employer’s declaring an all out “War for Talent” to their downsizing the employee base and declaring a hiring freeze. It’s also a decade that’s seen extremes in businesses’ financial performance. Yet in spite of all that turbulence and effort, engagement scores have remained relatively stable.
So a decade later what do we know? We know there is still room for improvement.
For starters, most organizations use benchmark data to evaluate their results—either against their own past performance or against industry standards. One of the problems with benchmark data is that it waters down what is possible. For example, by benchmarking results it’s considered acceptable to have only 26-30% of employees engaged at work. So if you have 10 employees, only 2 or 3 of them are showing up every day fully engaged. How can anyone be satisfied with that statistic? Is that really going to help you deliver your best performance?
Secondly, advances in technology have changed the way we communicate in organizations and it’s often employees’ ability to quickly generate, process, and exchange information that gives them the edge they need to excel. Because of this shift, management communication practices that were once viewed as highly effective weekly team meetings, monthly one-on-ones, and annual retreats—are now perceived by many employees as providing too little communication too late.
If organizations are serious about moving the employee engagement needle in the right direction over this next decade, I propose it’s time to append the employee engagement survey. It’s time to ask and answer questions that will uncover obstacles impacting your organization’s ability to improve engagement levels, and reach its greater potential.
1. Do Your Employees Have the Capacity to Be Engaged?
In their book, The Power of Full Engagement, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz argue that the means to engagement is found in a person’s ability to effectively manage energy. The authors go on to describe four distinct but interconnected energy sources that are required to fuel full engagement: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Using this concept, you can measure an individual’s capacity for engagement by determining the quantity of physical energy, the quality of their emotional energy, the focus of their mental energy, and the force of their spiritual energy. Put another way, employees need to be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned in order to perform with the optimal energy required for full engagement. Does this describe your workforce?
I think the theories introduced in this book, and continued at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Florida, hold the key to the single biggest opportunity organizations have to improve their employee engagement levels. If employees don’t have the capacity to be engaged, it really doesn’t matter if you rearrange the furniture or rewrite the corporate mission statement, you won’t be able to solve their low engagement levels.
2. Are Your Managers Trained for Engagement?
Teaching employees how to effectively manage and expand their energy capacity equips them not only with the ability meet their daily demands, but gives them tools for taking control of their own performance—essentially turning over a large portion of the responsibility for engagement from the organization and management team to the employee.
In my workshop “Communicating for Engagement,” I ask managers two questions: “What does employee engagement look like?” and “How do you personally model and support engagement?” It never fails that the responses include references to drinking the company Kool-aid, going with the flow, not questioning senior management, and even just showing up for work every day. The Gallup Organization’s research clearly lists which manager behaviors enhance workplace perceptions. These are the same behaviors managers are held accountable for and evaluated on in most engagement surveys. However, very few managers can describe these behaviors and many can’t even define what engagement means. And even worse, their responses actually indicate they equate engagement with compliance, which research has repeatedly proven isn’t what drives high-performance.
Add to this lack of understanding the use of ineffective communication practices, like cleaning out emails late on a Sunday night, essentially inundating employees with random information delivered out of context. Managers need some new guidelines for helping employees find and filter out the information they need to do their jobs, rather than adding to their information overload. This improved communication skill of proper timing, context and transparency is directly related to employees’ workplace perceptions, and their engagement.
3. Does Your Organization Have a Culture for Engagement?
In my work, I help organizations decipher their employee engagement results to identify learning opportunities. One client asked me to conduct focus groups to get to the bottom of a negative trend in engagement scores—in particular a decline in the attitudes about management, communication, and integrity. We agreed that the participant feedback would be anonymous to encourage candid responses…until I presented them with the feedback at which point they determined that rooting out and punishing the most outspoken employees would be a better tactic.
Now I know to ask questions up front like “What is your motivation for measuring employee engagement?” or “How do you use your engagement results?” Many times the answers to these questions tell me whether or not the culture is serious about engagement for its intended purpose: to create a workplace environment that facilitates top performance.
A New Decade for Engagement
As we move into a new decade of employee engagement surveys, as technological advances continue to accelerate the speed of change in the workplace and as demands on employees continue to increase, having an engaged workforce continues to be a key differentiator. Don’t be satisfied with average results. Help your employees better manage and expand their energy capacity. Train your managers to communicate for engagement and ensure that your corporate culture models the values you measure. MW
Michelle Sterling, CPLP, is a learning strategist and founder of VisActiva Learning. She helps organizations design, implement and evaluate business-relevant learning solutions. Contact: michelle@visactivalearning.com
