A New Model for Employee Communication, Part 14: Employee Engagement
This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, one designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.
| The series: | |
| Part 1: Introduction | Part 7: Channels |
| Part 2: Overview | Part 8: Culture |
| Part 3: Alignment | Part 9: Vision/Mission |
| Part 4: Listening | Part 10: Values |
| Part 5: Consultation | Part 11: Practices |
| Part 6: Branding | Part 12: People |
| Part 13: Place |
The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post introduces our discussion of the second circle, engagement.
An engaged employee is one who gives her best to her employer every day. She is psyched to come to work and help the company succeed. She cares about her work and the company. Because the confines her job description is confining, she even makes discretionary efforts on the company’s behalf.
What company doesn’t want an employee like that?
After all, there is more than enough evidence that companies with large populations of engaged employees outperform their competitors. According to Aon Hewitt, organizations with high engagement levels…
- Outperformed the total stock market index
- Posted total shareholder returns 22% higher than average
- Earned twice the annual net income
According to Gallup—the company that first identified engagement and developed the first survey to measure it—companies with engagement scores in the top quartile average 12% higher customer advocacy and 18% higher productivity. Nearly 60% of engaged employees say their job inspires their most creative ideas (only 3% of disengaged employees agree). Most important to leaders, companies with engagement scores in the top 25% had twice the annual net profit and revenue growth 2.5 greater than those in the bottom quartile.
But wait! There’s more!
- The UK’s National Health Service says its data demonstrate that higher engagement levels lead to lower patient mortality rates.
- The Royal Bank of Scotland found a 7 percentage point difference in customer service scores between the top 10% and bottom 10% of employees.
- In the UK, engaged employees take an average of 2.7 sick days per year; disengaged staff members take 6.2 days.
- PricewaterhouseCoopers finds a strong correlation between engagement and wellbeing. (You can also correlate better wellbeing with lower healthcare costs and fewer sick days.)
- Gallup and TowersWatson both find companies with high levels of engagement have turnover rates 40% lower than companies with low engagement levels.
- Improvements in engagement lead to better safety numbers (such as fewer lost-time incidents).
Believe it or not, these are just a few of the results from hundreds of studies that reinforce the importance of engagement. You would think that leaders would pull out the stops to build engagement.
The data says otherwise. As I noted in the very first installment of this series, between 2011 and 2015, employee engagement rose from 29% to 32%, according to Gallup. Despite the fact that businesses have likely invested hundreds of millions of dollars in improving engagement, the needle has barely moved. Three percentage points sounds more like a rounding error than an improvement.
Let’s be clear: If 32% of American employees are engaged, 68% are either not engaged or actively disengaged.
Why hasn’t engagement improved?
Employee engagement may be great in your company. There have to be companies with a lot of engaged employees; without them, how would we know that they outperform their competitors?
A few factors could be the culprit behind those companies suffering from low levels of engagement.
One is a misunderstanding of what engagement is. I have read more than one post on LinkedIn, in blogs, and other channels that suggest building engagement is as easy as paying good wages, providing good benefits, and paying attention to work-life balance. These, no doubt, are important. But they deliver job satisfaction, not engagement. They are two entirely different things. (We’ll look at job satisfaction when we get to the final circle of the model, Employee Experience.) As a result, some leaders implement solutions that solve a different problem.
In other cases, CEOs angry with the results of their engagement surveys get on the phone to HR and demand fixes, leading HR to create programs, pump up their training efforts, add wellness programs, create new recognition programs, offer flex time arrangements, and a host of other programs.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these. They are, in fact, fantastic. Given that people look first at how companies treat their employees when gauging how trustworthy those companies are, these kinds of programs can pay off in important ways.
Engagement, though, isn’t one of them. (I’ll explain why in just a minute.)
Another reason engagement levels remain low overall is that some companies expect too much from employees. Being engaged doesn’t mean sacrificing the rest of your life to the company. Some employees want to put in their eight hours and go home Is it right to dump them into the not-engaged category? Not if they’re giving their best while they’re at work. (Engagement levels were undoubtedly low at Cerner Corporation in 2001 when CEO Neal Patterson sent managers an email that dressed them down for allowing their teams to “think they had a 40-hour job. I have allowed YOU to create a culture which is permitting this. NO LONGER.” Patterson gave employees “two weeks to fix this. My measurement will be the parking lot: it should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM…The lot should be half full on Saturday mornings.”)
Some engaged employees will want to put in extra hours. Others will want to do their best during regular hours and spend the rest of their time with their families, their friends, their hobbies, or other outside pursuits. These employees simply have different life goals. Both approaches to work are fine and organizations need to accommodate them.
In some companies, leaders believe engagement is high because survey results say they’re high when, in fact, employees are responding with the answers they know their managers expect. When the CEO erupts at managers because the survey results are bad, managers, in turn, berate employees, who respond by delivering results that keep the CEO calm.
Response rates to engagement surveys have declined, in part because employees haven’t seen anything change despite previous surveys (and the subsequent introduction of programs that don’t address the reasons engagement was low).
In addition, a lot of engagement surveys ask the wrong questions. I have never been a fan of the Gallup Q12 question that asks whether you have a best friend at work. As my colleague explained to me, having good social relationships could be the result of other cultural factors, such as affinity and proximity. Ryan also said that “having social relationships in combination with strong benefits packages may just make your organization comfortable. That will not support performance.”)
Ryan also noted that the consulting firms that offer surveys also sell solutions around entitlements:
They measured the ROI of those entitlements and thus the answer to getting happy employees was to provide things that reportedly made them happy (e.g. flex time, health care, performance pay, and social connections). All of these things can support sustainable and healthy workplaces but I would not suggest that these cause performance or sustainable relationships. The feeling of reciprocity at first glance seems fair but it is one of transaction that will end up feeling unfair when work is hard or other values clash.
Meanwhile, few of the surveys assess whether employees trust the company, its leaders, and/or their managers. You can be positive about a lot of aspects of your work but if trust is missing, you’re still likely to be less engaged than you would if trust was strong. (I have seen this first-hand in companies where employees felt great pride in working for the company but, at the same time, didn’t trust leadership at all.)
So what drives engagement?
A lot of things, depending on what report or study you read. For purposes of this employee communication model, though, I subscribe to the four enablers of engagement promoted by the UK organization, Engage for Success:
- Strategic Narrative—Where did the organization come from? How did it get to its current state? Where is it going? Where do I fit in that story? Can that story be made relevant by leaders and managers at all levels of the organization?
- Engaging Managers—Do your managers focus the people who report to them, make them feel part of the team, show how their work contributes to the company’s goals, coach them, stretch them, bring out the best in them?
- Employee Voice—Are your employees seen as central to the solution rather than as the problem? Are they involved, listened to, and invited to contribute their expertise and ideas?
- Integrity—You’ve seen lists of values statements (I addressed values in the Culture section of this series). How often have you seen leaders behaving in ways that are in direct conflict with those values? How often are people rewarded for achieving results while violating the spirit of the company’s values? Integrity means leaders walk the talk, reflecting the values in their day-to-day behaviors.
Research identifies a host of other engagement drivers: relationships with co-workers, meaningful work, pride in the company, autonomy, access to the resources needed to do high-quality work, and more. What I like about the Engage for Success enablers is that employee communicators can easily communicate them.
The next four installments of this series will explore each of these enablers and how to build them into your communication strategies and tactics.
Up next is a closer look at strategic narrative, the biggest no-brainer of the enablers for employee communicators.
The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.
09/04/23 | 15 Comments | A New Model for Employee Communication, Part 14: Employee Engagement