How to improve engagement and disengagement: Why feedback is the first step

The link to leadership.

Talk to anyone about being disengaged in the workplace and they will probably say something about “trust” and something about “management.” Surveys show the same results, supervisor’s leadership style has so much to do with employee engagement and the differences between work groups can be astounding. 

But what to do about it?

Feedback is the link to developing leadership for employee engagement. Most of us do not know, in a nuanced way, how we affect others. Leaders are no different. Feedback can help. The best feedback is measurement as well as understanding and learning from the results of the measurement.

Measuring employee engagement, for example with surveys or focus groups, is a great foundation for improving engagement. It can motivate and direct change.

It is important to make sure that organizational leadership understands engagement, the factors affecting engagement and the engagement of the functions they manage. When you measure engagement the results will tell you something about “trust” and the quality of “management."  If leaders understand the engagement picture they are likely to try to change it for their own good!

Simply giving supervisors a report on engagement in their area is not enough. Feedback can be hard to take and even harder to act upon. Organizations that really want to improve engagement will ensure that managers have support, in workshops or with coaches, to understand and plan how they will act upon the feedback.

Many organizations (namely Dell and Ford) tie manager compensation to survey results. This puts a lot of focus on engagement, but it is not necessary for leadership development. My experience is that most managers want to be better leaders.

Organizations that complete engagement surveys must answer the questions “what groups will be reported upon” and “how many reports do we develop?” A lot of resources (time and money) are required to process feedback. If you have 300 department managers, does each get a report? Further, will all 300 managers get, understand and act upon the feedback? These questions must be practically considered.

Let’s be realistic

Anyone that manages knows that regardless of your leadership skills, other factors affect employees. Pay/benefits, strategy, competition, and organizational culture all affect individual employees and morale/engagement. 

While leadership probably has the biggest impact on day-to-day engagement, there are many factors in building engagement. Successful organizations will consider both; why they need engagement and what to do about it.

I look forward to your thoughts,

Charley Morrow

www.sageassessments.com

Is Engagement A Buzzword?

In my last blog I focused on the negative side: disengagement—people quitting and feeling stuck.  I’ll talk about the positive side in this blog—engagement.  If you can envision a miserable and disengaged employee, I hope you can envision an activated and positive employee.

Is Engagement A Buzzword?
Engagement is a big concern to HR executives—it might even be a “buzz-word.”  People are writing about, and Google-searching, employee engagement more than satisfaction these days.

Google Trends: Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement

Are we thinking clearly?  What is employee satisfaction and does it matter? Is engagement different? Despite being a humanist, I do not care about employee satisfaction. Many point out that employee satisfaction has NOT been proven to be related to company performance. But there are other problems with satisfaction.

It is hard to understand satisfaction because it is multiple things. To reliability measure satisfaction, you have to specify the facets of employee satisfaction.  Satisfaction with pay, supervision, working conditions or senior management all are different. 

Further, personality predicts job satisfaction;in fact, twin studies have established a genetic element of job satisfaction. (see meta-analysis here.) Said another way, satisfaction is a trait!  So why worry about changing the work environment to have satisfied employees? If you want a satisfied workplace just hire satisfied people… or, well, maybe not.  

I’d argue that dissatisfied people get more done!  Most sales managers I know are looking for sales reps that are “hungry,” not those who are content and satisfied in life. Looking at history, dissatisfied people have made the greatest human innovations.

I wonder the importance of employee satisfaction.  I applaud the move to engagement.

In the late 1990s, publications started to highlight that employees’ sentiment does matter.  Tony Ricci’s HBR article on the Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears highlighted the importance of customer and employee engagement and Marcus Buckingham’s First Break All the Rules showed how employee engagement predicts company profitability.  His index of engagement is called the G12 based on 12  questions.

Gallup's G-12 An Index of Employee Engagement

1. Do you know what is expected of you at work?
2. Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
7. At work, do your opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
10. Do you have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
12. In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

If an organization has a big database of employee survey data and many identical operating units– like retail stores or chain restaurants-- research can demonstrate how employee sentiment is related to unit-level business results.  The research validates that employee sentiments are related to metrics of interest, within a business. 

This research is called linkage research, and is practical due to increased computing power and databases.  The sentiments that relate to business results are called “engagement.” 

There is a new idea here: employee engagement is active and related to passion and enthusiasm.  While satisfaction suggests being satiated or fulfilled, engagement is dynamic.  For example, I am satisfied with my clothing, while someone else might be much more engaged in the pursuit of fashion. (Those that know me well tell me I could never be in the fashion industry!) 

Engagement is sensibly related to business results.  An engaged employee might be in pursuit of organizational strategic success, professional excellence or any number of things.  Leaders have intuitively known this for years; now HR is starting to understand, measure and worry about engagement.   

What is Employee Engagement? / Defining Employee Engagement?

Engagement is about a personal relationship—relationship to work, organizations, and supervisors.  In this sense it is a buzzword—there is no consensus on what it means.  Like satisfaction, we think about a global idea yet there are different facets.  Consider: engaged in work, engaged in organization, socially engaged. Buzzwords are not bad, but we should understand what they mean for us and our organizations.

Here are two of the best definitions I’ve seen:

1. Engagement is an individual's sense of purpose and focused energy, evident to others in the display of personal initiative, adaptability, effort and persistence directed to organizational goals.  (see Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice and Competitive Advantage by Macey et al.[2009])
   
2. The degree to which a person commits to an organization and the impact that commitment has on how profoundly they perform and their length of tenure (see Employee Engagement: A Road map for Creating Profits, Optimizing performance and Increasing Loyalty by Federman[2009])

Let’s be honest though, people are different and engage in different ways—some individuals work for social aspects, some for financial reasons, and some for yet other reasons.   A great review of the meaning of employee engagement (See Macey & Schneider's Paper ) notes that engagement is variously defined as   

• Psychological a state
• A trait
• The factors that lead to engagement. 

We get even more confused when we try to measure engagement. Whether deliberate or not surveys and indexes always have some underlying theory of engagement.  Some consultants have developed engagement surveys using empirical methods—survey questions that relate to business results are combined in an “engagement” index. It seems like one widely used index is a mix of social engagement and drivers of engagement.  

I fear some indexes have caused more confusion and mystification than progress. If you are a team leader with poor engagement, as defined by an index, you have to understand and define engagement for your team.  Let's not make it hard on our clients! 

Further, organizations need to engage people in different ways—what sort of engagement does your organization need? These questions will have to be answered by practical individuals that understand our organizations' strategy.  Organization’s strategy and the role of employees in organizational success is the best starting place for defining engagement. 

Finally,  we must understand the drivers of employee engagement as well as we understand the state of employee engagement.  Without a sense of the drivers of engagement (e.g., supervision, connection to organizational strategy), how will we engage employees?  

I have summarized research and past work to develop a model of the drivers and state of employee engagement.

The REALI Model of Employee Engagement

 (See more here) 

If you have a work-group that would like to pilot this assessment for free let me know.  While I have used every question in the survey previously, I am looking for some small samples to test the psychometric properties of the scales.   

Please let me know what you have seen and learned.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Charley Morrow
www.SageAssessments.com

Engagement and the Workforce

From reading the news and blogs one has to ask—"is there really a crisis of disengagement in the workforce?" Many are concerned about this. As most readers will know, employee engagement is related to customer satisfaction, company productivity, and retaining good employees. So, it is a problem if engagement is down in a company. 

And, it seems like we are getting close to disengagement of crisis proportions. This is an acute concern to HR professionals. Let's look at the data in terms of employees leaving –quitting as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calls it and in terms of engagement and satisfaction with jobs.

Engagement and Moving Jobs

Anecdotally I've heard many say – "I'd leave now if I had an option." Well, it turns out that the "quit rate" of last year was extraordinarily low. I did a little poking around at the (BLS)—last year voluntary quits (excluding retirements) is was at the lowest level since they began keeping records in 2001. Typically some 24% of American "quit" in a year. The chart below outlines the percentage of employed Americans who quit in a year—it looks like people do NOT have options—they are not leaving voluntarily right now!

Total US Total (nonfarm) Rate of Quitting

But, job security is not gone. I was surprised at a Gallup poll from August 2009 that found American workers are not as concerned with job security compared 2003. In 2009, 50% were completely satisfied with their job security. It is as if many employed workers are not threatened that they will be forced out; employed Americans do not seem terrified of being laid off.

Gallup Poll of Satisfaction with Job Security

The parallel nature of the Gallup and BLS trend lines is interesting—job security and quitting seem related. People are more apt to quit in times of higher job security.

We are slowly getting out of this recession. I wonder if increasing job security will lead to future quitting? No one knows the future, but it sure seems as if there might be a spike in quitting later this year or the next. Of course, every company is different.

Given that many feel they "can't move" jobs right now, you might think that psychological job engagement would be down. Simply put, stuck people disengage.  Everything I see is pointing to this trend—anecdotes and many converging surveys. To understand, I looked at some current surveys on engagement.

National Engagement Surveys Converge: Employee Engagement and Satisfaction is Down

A senior HR official at a fortune 100 technology company told me that when the recession first started measures of employee engagement went up—as if employees were happy to have a job. As the recession has worn on, however, engagement in her firm has dropped. It was as if the work load and stress has worn the spirits of employees down. National polls seem to echo this concern.

In a rare convergence of national polls, all data suggests engagement is down. Individuals have told me about divergent data, but I can't find it. As far as I can tell all sources say the same:

Right Management Consultants found that sixty percent of employees intend to leave and an additional one-in-four are networking and updating their resumes. They predict that turn-over will skyrocket this year. Here is the survey question/distribution of the survey of approximately 900 workers in North America:

Do you plan to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010?
60% - Yes, I intend to leave
21% - Maybe, so I'm networking
6% - Not likely, but I've updated my resume
13% - No, I intend to stay

http://www.right.com/news-and-events/press-releases/item1954.aspx

Gallup found employee engagement plummeted in 2009, much of this driven by job satisfaction. The Gallup organization's Work Environment Index includes four items: job satisfaction, ability to use one's strengths at work, trust and openness in the workplace, and whether one's supervisor treats him or her more like a boss or a partner. Gallup only asks these item questions of respondents who are currently employed by others. American workers' decreased job satisfaction (from an average 89.0% in 2008 to 88.0% in 2009) contributed most significantly to the decline in the Work Environment Index overall.

The Work Environment Index saw the largest year-over-year drop, declining to 49.2 in 2009 from 51.4 in 2008, a loss of 2.2 points overall.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125060/Americans-Lose-Ground-Areas-2009.aspxc

The Conference board, based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households reports that only 45 percent of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted.

http://www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressDetail.cfm?press_ID=3820

Untangling Engagement

In the technology company I mentioned above, management is aggressively addressing engagement by sharpening strategy and making sure that every employee understands how they contribute to the company's success.

I've heard from other consultants and clients fearing engagement and what it means for retaining top talent. This is the time to think about it—before resumes get out there and top talent are offered good deals.

What is engagement anyway?  What can improve engagement? Is it just related to business cycles? What kind of engagement matters for different organizations? There are so many related questions. Please comment on this post and I will be back next week with more research, viewpoints and models as I attempt to answer these questions.


From Jackson NH
Charley Morrow
www.sageassessments.com

Who Am I, and What am I Doing?

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my work life assessing performance, leadership and engagement -- I'll share my thoughts on this blog.

In the last few months many individuals have contacted me about engagement. Many have talked about plunging employee engagement based on anecdotes and data. I'm becoming very interested in this area and will be consulting, reading and researching it over the next months.

I will commit to blogging on this every week for the next ten weeks. I will bring research, viewpoints and models as I investigate and try to understand the future. Maybe we can sort it out—please comment to this and future blogs.

Charley C. Morrow
www.SageAssessments.com
781 639 9696