Engagement Doesn’t Need to be Analysis Paralysis

Employee Engagement is always a hot topic in the HR community, especially with the huge shifts in the working environment and great discussions around what is the best approach, home, hybrid or return to office.

Over the last few years the economic climate has been challenging for most organisations. As mentioned above, the shift on how we operate and the way we approach business has changed; organisations have looked at how to stay in the race, never mind breaking world records. This has meant sometimes the people agenda has been ignored and the opportunity for progression or career development has been left at the side of the road.

Is the cost of living crisis or the downturn in the economy the real driving force behind the lack of engagement or increase in absenteeism? Are there other factors that we have chosen to ignore?

In my opinion Employee Engagement is often overcomplicated, because there are always going to be different factors in different organisations that mean people are more or less engaged.  I challenge you to stop and think about when you have been truly engaged in an organisation – how did this feel and what did it look like?

Frequent responses to this question include:  great leadership, working in a high-­performing team, people doing work they love and deliver exceptional performance for themselves, their manager and the organisation. Off the back of this they were delivering high performance in their work and achieving their own personal and work passions, plus adding maximum productivity to the organisation. They were probably in the 20% of highly engaged workers globally, but how long did it last?

The challenge here is: how do you make this continually happen?

What’s interesting is…when organisations talk about Employee Engagement they usually go straight into the thought process of surveying to discover what the issues are in the organisation.  The survey is completed and data comes back, but what happens with the data? It gets analysed to try and find out what the issues are and how we can overcome them, but it’s missing one key factor – personal feelings and human connection. Surveys, questions and data – it can only tell us so much. A computer can’t truly assess the answer to these questions: How is the employee feeling about their role? Are they satisfied at the end of the day when they leave their desk? Likewise, can a computer truly measure how effectively the individual is doing their job and the level of productivity they are adding to the organisation? With so many of these questions being NO surely we have to question the validity of the survey.

When you look at most global engagement survey results employees want organisations to further develop; Pay, Flexibility & Wellbeing and Personal Development & Career opportunities. Even though we know these are likely to be the most important areas for employees we still continue to run the survey.  Why does nothing change? How does this truly help us create a more engaged workforce?

If we go back to the 70’s training was viewed as a tick box exercise to develop skills. Individuals would go on a ‘training course’ and then come back to work as usual. Rarely was what they learned in training discussed or implemented and it feels like the same is happening with Employee Engagement and other significant topics like Wellbeing.

What is the value on investing in Surveys (or other initiatives) and not seeing direct ROI? Asking employees to take time to complete if limited change occurs? Why bother if you are not going to get any commercial gains from doing so?

As we think about changing the view of employee engagement to employees we need to make it meaningful by asking WHY are we doing it, HOW do we make it impactful and WHAT are the outputs we require. Too often we jump to the HOW and WHAT but forget about the WHY. When this happens it becomes meaningless to most employees, a tick box exercise and just a number or a percentage that is shared to executives.

One dead battery can’t jump-­start another…Engagement is contagious and building a culture of engagement has to start at the top of the organisation. If your senior team not clear about the direction of engagement in the organisation, doesn’t see the value of it and is and not achieving their own levels of passion and performance then they will struggle to create a fully engaged organisation. If the employees see an engaged senior leadership team this is a great starting point but still requires a lot of work.

Whose responsibility is it to develop engagement? It has to be everyone’s; engagement is like confidence though, it is not a skill you can give to somebody. Individuals have to OWN it for themselves; leaders must support them and finally organisations must provide tools and create an  environment that has an open culture of communication, trust and action.

With an estimated 73% of employees not fully engaged there is no time like the present to start changing the narrative and thinking differently about Employee Engagement. We should be putting the individual at the heart of the conversation supporting them to grow and develop and not worrying about benchmarks and percentage points, after all shareholders are more interested in profit than eNPS!

In simplest terms, in order to develop a more engaged workforce leaders need to become better at communicating and creating an environment of trust. Understand what truly engages their employees and support them to achieve their passions, support in driving performance and increasing productivity rather than spending hours of doing analysis to be told the same thing as last year!