Employee Engagement: Voodoo or “To Do”?

by | Sep 21, 2009 | Employee Satisfaction Survey, Positive Workplace

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Is this tree healthy? How can you tell?

Is employee engagement just another management fad? That was the question asked in an interesting blog post by Bret Simmons that I ran across last week called “Engagement Soup.” Since I’ve helped many companies transform their work environment over the years I certainly count myself in the camp of folks who believe that employee engagement works. But the post does make some interesting points. First Bret takes a Business Week article to task for making the claim that the Gallup Q12 questions measure engagement or predict financial performance. Then he goes on to state his general skepticism of engagement research. Brett says:

Here are a few examples of effect indicators of engagement: I am immersed in my work; when I get up in the morning, I feel like going to work; I feel very happy when I am working intensely.  To the extent you answer these in the affirmative we know that you are engaged.  We don’t know what caused you to be engaged, but we have good reason to believe you are because we can measure the effects.

Want to know if a tree is healthy?  Look at the leaves and the fruit.  These are indicators of the health of the tree.  Just because we give our tree lots of fertilizer, water, and sunlight does NOT mean it is healthy.  These are all very smart things to do, but they do not guarantee health, and the only way to evaluate health is to examine the tree and not its environment.

But what about the business results, those higher sales and profits?  If you ever do find that data published in a peer-reviewed format (consultant promotional material does NOT count), remember this simple fact: correlation is not the same as causality.  Establishing the case that an individual level psychological construct (that’s what engagement is) can cause a company level aggregate measure is VERY, VERY, VERY difficult.

I remain extremely skeptical.

While I agree with the general point, that when it comes to employee engagement cause and effect can be difficult and sometimes impossible to parse out, I think Bret overstates the case against engagement research, including the usefulness of some of the statements on the Q12 survey. Using his own example, just because a tree’s leaves and fruit look good today does not mean that the tree is healthy – it could be diseased now and dead in a few months too. Does that mean don’t measure a tree’s health by looking at its leaves and fruit? Of course not. But I don’t agree that just because water, sunlight and fertilizer don’t necessarily mean health that it’s not a good idea to measure those qualities as well. I think you should examine both the tree and its environment.

One of the comments to Bret’s post is very instructive. One of the Q12 questions is whether you know what is expected of you at work. This individual says that he actually witnessed a meeting where a supervisor went around the room in a sort-of hazing ritual and made each person who reported to him tell the group exactly what was expected of them at work. I suppose the idea was to make sure his department got a perfect score on that statement next time around. I’m guessing that work group is probably not too engaged (that is not our recommended way to action plan after a survey project…).

Survey research is simply a tool. It should serve as a platform from which to begin or continue a discussion about the type of work environment a company and its employees want to create together. It gives you a good idea of places to “shine a flashlight” that may be productive areas to work on, or areas of strength to amplify. Just like any other tool, it can be used productively or (like in the case of the manager above) destructively.

I agree that consultants should be careful about claims regarding business performance (especially financial performance) as a result of engagement interventions. Organizations are organic and constantly changing. Bret is exactly right that figuring out what is a cause and and what is an effect (and even what cause causes what effect) is probably impossible in most cases.  But I can say that I have personally seen many examples where a company has experienced significant improvement in business results after working steadily on employee engagement. I’m sure Bret has too. That’s not necessarily cause and effect, although in many cases I believe it is.

I’ve never thought that improved financial performance should be the main thing motivating an engagement project. Whether there is a measurable financial impact or not, creating a great place to work is the right thing to do. But there are clearly measurable impacts of a disengaged workforce (absenteeism, presenteeism, shrink, quality problems, etc.) that do have a financial impact on a company. To whatever extent these things improve – whether they can be specifically tied to a specific survey statement or consulting intervention or not – they help a company succeed. So while we don’t guarantee financial improvement for clients who participate in our Next 52 Weeks program, we do guarantee that they’ll protect their direct relationship with employees by creating a more positive workplace.

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