Let’s begin with a survey. Which statement is correct?
A) Weak employee engagement is killing your company and addressing it is the single most important thing you can do to improve your company’s competitiveness.
B) The work place has always had winners and losers — the problem hasn’t changed, 30% high performers seems about right.
The fact is 70% of America’s employees are “checked out” or actively hostile at work. At least, according to an annual survey of the American workplace conducted by the research giant Gallup. That seems to support statement A. 70% – yikes! That sounds frighteningly high.
However, if you also consider that the same Gallup’s research shows that the ratio of “engagement” to “disengagement” has been basically unchanged for the last 13 years, statement B seems correct as well.
I think they are both right. There is not a sudden crisis of engagement, but rather a shift in expectation. If American businesses are going to compete globally and retain our expected earning power, more people have to bring their best game to work.
If we can figure out how to increase that elusive state of mind called “engagement,” we know we can impact company performance in some pretty stunning ways.
The Gallup report show that low engagement teams suffer from:
- higher absenteeism (+37%)
- turnover (up to 65% higher)
- employee theft (+28%)
- safety problems (48%)
- quality defects (+41%)
High engagement teams on the other hand enjoy:
- 23% better profitability
- 21% higher productivity
- 10% better customer satisfaction scores
It’s easy to decide which workforce you’d rather have at your place of business. Getting to “high engagement” is definitely with the effort. The question is: How to do you bring it about?
The popular author Daniel Pink, in his bestselling book Drive, says that engagement comes from three factors — autonomy, mastery and purpose. Summarized brilliantly here, Pink talks about creating an environment where work can be self-directed, even self-selected. Where employees can become increasingly better at important skills building their understanding towards mastery. And doing it all for a company has a mission that the individual wants to help make come true.
In her recent Harvard Business Journal blog post, coach and Harvard faculty member Susan Davis says that leaders who want to influence engagement should 1) read and understand the research, 2) figure out what motivates your own employees, 3) encourage grassroots engagement, and 4) recognize that its always changing and you need to understand and track those changes.
Sigh. Thank you Ms. Davis.
That tells us what to do (sort of). But it sure doesn’t tell us how to do it.
If you have been reading even some of the articles on employee engagement in the popular press, you have probably heard stories about cutting edge companies where employees decide what to work on and bring back stunning new technologies and products. When at the same time most companies have internal systems built around 19th century ideas of compliance and control.
Just think about the term “productivity” for instance. The classic definition of productivity is the amount of product output per unit of labor. But how can I even know what the output is if everyone is doing their own thing? Can we even capture the impact of a remarkable breakthrough idea using traditional systems and controls?
So employee engagement is important, but it seems to be hard to both effect and to measure. Many of our traditional internal systems are almost hostile to the idea. If you really want to capitalize on this research, you have to be willing to experiment and to let go of a lot of ideas and systems that have worked well for a long time, but are no longer optimal.
So we are stuck with a dilemma. Of all the things you could invest your time and resources in, which ones are likely to really effect employee engagement? And how will you know?
I would love to hear from people on this subject. What do you know that works – or doesn’t? How could your company increase your personal engagement? What companies do you think are doing a great job?
