The 'Employee Engagement' Crisis Is Fake News (1/2)
Guest essay
This is part one of a two-part essay
Is there an “employee engagement” crisis - or is “employee engagement” a crisis unto itself?
“Oh-mi-gawd, what are we going to do about the employee engagement crisis?”
I see posts like this about four times a year, usually in conjunction with some press release from the fine folks at Gallup, whose discovery of a correlation between “employee engagement” and corporate profitability has allowed them to position their solutions as magic bullets for the last 20-plus years.
Usually these posts go like this:
“Employee engagement scores are low or falling. At least for some groups. So what you need to do is focus more on employee engagement (and we can help you do that and improve those scores!)”
This intuitive line of reasoning is easy for executives to buy.
But in making “employee engagement” a linear, one-size-fits-all, zero-to-100 concept, Gallup and its approach has been massively problematic, particularly for the communication pros and people professionals who are tasked with getting those scores up to 100—or else.
I’ve been writing about how “employee engagement” is a lousy objective for internal communication folk for about 20 years, when the idea began to surface as an object of management and political attention – offering the promise of ever-increasing worker contentment, commitment, and contribution in return for relatively minimal investment.
Indeed, the problem is compounded by the plethora of definitions of it. I’ve personally identified 21 different definitions of “employee engagement,” ranging from “the willingness to provide discretionary effort” to “employee satisfaction” to “a meeting between senior management and employees.”
Gallup uses its definition, based on its almighty Q12 survey, incorporating twelve curiously worded questions:
Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?
Setting aside whether or not these questions address the wide range of different individual, generational, or cultural motivations found among members of the workforce - the very structure of these questions drives legitimate skepticism:
The biggest reason is baked-in positivity bias: A huge red flag is how these questions are asked, and the need for participants to evaluate these sensitive questions against a rating scale.
Have another look at these Q12 questions:
Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
The tone of these questions—and the requirement to rate them from one to 10 on a linear scale—is particularly problematic in any workplace with psychological safety issues.
Literally, who wants to get caught out saying “No” or rating these questions a two or a three if their suspicion about the faux anonymity of these surveys proves to be correct?
Indeed, having questions where negative responses could flag someone as one of those dreaded “disengaged employees” can easily nudge less enthusiastic employees toward responding with a “7” when a “3” might be a more authentic response.
The linkage of engagement scores to KPIs invites even more positivity bias
Positivity bias is exacerbated further when performance on engagement scores is linked to organizational or manager-level key performance indicators, which leads to pressure to encourage positive employee responses even when insincere or unwarranted.
At an organizational level, pushes for high survey participation levels sometimes coincide with charm offensives by the organization.
In some teams, including in at least one organization I’ve worked in, managers with bonuses or continued employment linked to engagement score improvements engage in flat-out electioneering—pressuring their employees to participate or, even directly, to inflate their scores.
Another problem is the “Feel-Do Gap”
Aside from the perils of biased and forced positivity, employee engagement surveys have an additional problem. They only measure how employees feel, and not what they do.
Now, while Gallup and other employee engagement survey companies claim a “correlation” between high engagement scores and high performance, there’s no provable connection between what engagement surveys measure and what employees actually do, know, or say.
Focusing on employee engagement scores to adjust employee performance becomes a highly indirect exercise with limited ways to track the efficiency of the time, effort, and money invested.
Yet the practice persists, fueled by Gallup’s ongoing efforts to create perceptions of an “employee engagement crisis” and to position focus on employee engagement as the solution to this so-called crisis.
There are certainly major issues affecting employee enthusiasm for their jobs and organizations. Layoffs, increasing workloads, economic uncertainty, and pressure to spend more time at the office come immediately to mind. The gaps between organizational promises and day-to-day reality further intensify unease and cynicism. And the fundamental differences in what drives the motivations of individuals, which could vary widely between achieving monetary reward, achieving professional satisfaction, or avoiding medical bankruptcy rarely even get considered.
Do these all get overridden by whether an employee “has a best friend at work” or whether “you have the materials to do your work right?” Or, is it time to ditch the one-size-fits-all employee engagement survey once and for all?
In part two I explore another crucial shortcoming of Gallup’s methodology:
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Cracking and very timely for me. I hope part 2 contains your suggestions on what should be measured instead of these types of surveys and pulses.