Are you engaged at work? Oh, dear. Well here’s a flexible vacation program. How about now? Still no? How about a swell way to earn points you can redeem for small appliances? Are you engaged yet? Maybe a little? Well how about I top up the dental coverage, give you a day off to plant trees and put essential oils in the printer room?
This is the point where most HR folks call the consultant, who, six months and six figures later, recommends lunchtime yoga and a new intranet to solve the whole engagement thing. Of course, that won’t make much of a difference, but they can probably a buy a little time while they roll them out. A year later, when engagement numbers haven’t budged, the executive team will be asking HR and corporate communications all over again for some answers.
The truth is, North American employee engagement rates have really not changed in a generation. In fact, despite employers spending $750-million a year on the whole thing, engagement rates have improved only about 3% in the past 20 years.
Despite all the money employers are throwing at the issue, and all the books and keynotes, and all the card-carrying members of the Bullshit Industrial Complex claiming they can build the bestest, coolest, most engaging workplace on the planet, just nothing is changing.
So what’s wrong with this picture? I think what’s wrong is that we don’t really have a problem here. What if 30% is the best we’re going to get? Heck, what if 30% is frigging awesome. If you’re a baseball player who hits the ball 30% of the time, you’re actually doing pretty well.
What if all the problems we associate with “low” engagement, like turnover and poor productivity are actually symptoms of something else? There is no correlation between engagement and share price, and we know that share prices usually rise when a company downsizes.
If Google is the gold standard for engagement, then retention is certainly not an output since they average about a year of tenure, despite the onsite gluten-free dry cleaning.
Of course there will be those rare and beautiful companies with engagement way up in the 50 percent range or better, and we all know there will be plenty racing for the bottom of the pile, too
Maybe we can just live with the fact that a third of the workforce is doing fine, liking the work, feeling secure, making a fair wage and getting on with it. Understanding that these folks are one crappy boss, one toxic co-worker, a few angry customers or a dysfunctional project away from joining the other 70%.
What would happen if employers took that $700-million they pay to engagement program people, and spent it instead on packaging out flailing executives, teaching managers to diffuse toxic twats, scrapping soul-destroying projects and paying a living wage across the board.
Would the imaginary engagement score go up? Probably not, but it wasn’t going to anyway. In fact, let’s stop paying for ridiculous annual engagement surveys and pay for useful workplace sentiment data.
How about we actually ask people if they are getting along with their coworkers, if they feel supported by their manager, or if they are running into stupid friction that prevents them from doing their jobs.
We could, say, spend more time asking the people who are leaving why they’re leaving. Most exit interviews take about ten minutes and the data goes…that’s right, into that employee’s file. That employee who just left and is not part of the dataset anymore. That guy.
If you want to understand why people leave, ask the ones who have left. If you want to understand why people stay, ask the ones who stay. If you want to understand why some teams outperform others, ask the performers and the underperformers.
Why, the marketers will say, this sounds just like customer service data. What if we surveyed and tracked our employees as assiduously as our customers? What if when an employee sends back a terrible score, someone actually called them to find out why? Yes, just as with customers, some of them are unreasonable in their expectations or just plain nuts. But most aren’t. Most are invested enough to actually respond to your survey, which suggests, they are invested enough to want to change things.
There. Non-existent engagement problem solved. You are welcome.