The Employee Engagement Myth
medium.com
medium.com
Its similar to the concept of forcing them to take personality and aptitude tests. It serves no purpose, and takes time and money. I remember having to sit through a meeting after taking one of these where the presenter explained the best way to approach members of different personality styles. My takeaway was that this is the real world and I am not going to prep to understand someones personality profile before every meeting or human interaction. No one at the manager level or above in the company as far as I am aware ever utilized it again. Lower level people tried but it had no positive results or changes to their career so they eventually abandoned it and worked for their C.O.L. increase. This is a 5k+ employee company.
Just treat your employees like real people who have lives and value them, best way to get employee engagement.
It's really weird. They do everything they can to make their employees into replaceable cogs without any input. My engagement would go up a lot if our input would be listened to. For example if my team proposes an office layout why not actually do it that way instead of doing something nobody wants? Or if projects are always late maybe ask the workers what they think the problem problem is and then fix these issues.
If they aren't, and they're just willingly spending company money on something they believe will work, then they're just another out of touch spreadsheet manager.
The idea that people's engagement or happiness -- or even just their general satisfaction at work -- is strongly correlated to their employing corporations' success is a persistent myth in tech that I just don't understand. People hate "sell outs" and they hate themselves when they sell out for a reason. You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.
Steph Curry is happy when the Warriors win because he's on a team that is winning by playing the game his way. If the team made him go to dunk every time he got the ball I bet his satisfaction would be shit too -- and it probably wouldn't keep netting the Warriors more rings.
This is the best summary of what matches my experience in this industry that I've seen. Favouriting.
Based on what I read about it, I agree that the way "employee engagement" is pursued is missing the point. Especially that companies typically also optimize for having employees be replaceable cogs. I don't think you can have both. Engagement comes from aligned goals, autonomy, and coworkers you can relate with. Which is opposite of what you want to have when you're building a machine, where employees are dumb parts.
But why am I supposed to feel good about being part of that system? And who decided that was the best we could possibly do?
19 years out from the release of Black On Both Sides and still all anyone wants is to tell me to try to have some fret in my heart behind the things that they do. I mean, I guess...
There's a great book about this called Seeing Like a State. It's about the conflict between top-down planning and bottom-up development of complex systems - things like cities and forests.
One of the big points is that leaders tend to be obsessed with making the system legible to themselves, often at great cost to the effectiveness of the system itself. There's a sense that "if I can't easily model/perceive it in my head, it doesn't exist or it's worthless". Of course the reality is that the majority of what goes on in a complex system is invisible to any outsider; the system is more complex than the brain trying to model it. So management efforts that ignore or even try to reduce that illegible complexity end up destroying much of the system they're attempting to manage.
I think there's also a simpler explanation: It's unintentional gamification. People like dopamine hits they get from rising numbers, rectilinear grids, clean charts and projections. So they pursue these things as an end goal, imagining somehow that this is the same as pursuing success. Of course a really well-working complex system (like a company or city or forest) is too complex to model with such tools. But the manager isn't playing to make a good complex system, he's playing a little game of graphs on his computer screen. The chart went up and to the right - you win today!
The only analogy I can think of is another sports one. I used to do track & field. I wasn't the fastest guy running, but I still pushed myself to beat my previous records. I felt a sense of progress/fulfillment when I ran faster than the past.
I think this can exist inside a company as well. It's highly unlikely that people find fulfillment by the mission of a company, but they can find some sense of fulfillment (at least in a work context), by "playing the game their way" and continuously improving.
Even for athletes, though, you see more simple name recognition for NBA players than for, say, NFL players, simply because basketball teams are smaller and the individual players are so much more pivotal to the team's success.
To use your analogy, it's like running if you were following a cart that laid out every foot step and were followed by another cart with a whip. There's no incentive or freedom to engage.
> People hate "sell outs"
No one other than characters in 80s teen movies goes around unironically complaining about "sell outs".
But you can act as if this were the case and it looks good, so sometimes you might be well-rewarded.
I'm also a software engineer at Google and I think our stock price has gone up too? I might be wrong.
"company success [worker gets to pay their rent this month]"
with
"employee satisfaction [worker's role and tasks in organization are congruent with how worker sees / wants-to-see self]"
Maybe buzzwords like that wouldn't be needed in the first place if your employees were simply happy to do their jobs; now this faux-philosophical mumbo jumbo has to be inserted and the job needs to mean something. No, screw employees being enthusiastic and committed to work because it benefits their lives outside of work... we need them to be enthusiastic and committed to work for the sake of it so we can pay them less. (is what it comes down to)
A.: Provide services in return for financial compensation.
Q.: Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
A.: Providing services in return for financial compensation.
People should, ideally, have a level of passion for what they do. Employers looking for employees with passion can swing too far the other way. We shouldn't kid ourselves that money is almost always almost everything, and many of us would have entirely different occupations without financial dependence.
If you are led to believe it is different, you are most likely being misled, for example in order to pay you less (as you pointed out before).
I actually find this sort of "company culture" that demands your whole being to be creepy bordering on totalitarian.
It’s not enough that you’re damn good at your job, you have to be “passionate”!
Dear employers, most of your stuff is mundane and boring. But that’s perfectly fine! If you pay us we will do our jobs very well. However, if you want us to be passionate about integrating the n+1-th tracking library into a website, or writing that ETL script, then be prepared to be lied to.
Apparently if it's important someone will come ask if I got the email within 5 minutes anyways
1. Your relationship with your family is more important than any relationship at work.
2. For the vast majority of people, their current job may be a potential route to fulfilment, but is unlikely to be the long-term path to that, and they know it.
3. It is incumbent upon employees to pretend to be engaged only so long as a less draining option for meeting the financial demands for their life is not apparent.
4. Employee engagement surveys ultimately are only designed to justify the cost of maintaining the ongoing salary of a VP and attendant minions.
Yes, practice your craft, and work hard, but please just know that your fulfilment will likely come from outside of work.
Real employee engagement comes from understanding that employees are unique and often have similar but different needs when it comes to what motivates them (money, ego, success, quality, output, social, etc.). The data often doesn't reflect the fidelity needed here.
* or, Human Resentment, as the joke goes.
The first few years the work was interesting and fun, but as the company has grown, the work has become more segmented and specialized and so much "big company" process has been put into place that it's not nearly as fun, and something that I used to do myself requires coordination with several different teams and seemingly endless meetings.
HR (or "people first", as they call themselves) is not helping, HR used to be our office manager/HR/facilities manager all rolled into one -- if employees wanted 2% milk in the refrigerator or an ergonomic keyboard, they only had to ask him and it was there in a few days.
Now we have to make a request... and get it approved (if possible, maybe it takes several levels of approval), and someone has to enter it into the purchasing system, and maybe someday I'll get it.
In an effort to "streamline employee benefits", benefits have been reduced, nothing added. Likewise, the "unlimited free snacks, add your favorite to the list" have been reduced to "Here's what you get from the vendor we outsource to"
Our average engineering salary must be close to $200K, but it still takes VP of engineering approval to get a second $700 monitor because "policy says employees only get a single monitor"
When the new office was being planned, management asked for suggestions about how to make it more engaging, feedback was overwhelmingly against an open office plan -- the response was "We are listening to your feedback, but we are going with an open office".
I think a lot of this comes with working at a larger company, but we've already lost some key early employees, and will lose more as the company grows and becomes more "big company" like.
The economics are slanted against employees as the company grows - if a 100 person company spends $100/employee on a benefit, that's only $10,000. If a 5000 employee company does it, that's $500K - the cost of several HR staff, so HR can say "Look, we've saved the company more than our own salary by streamlining benefits!"
It's not all bad, of course, or I wouldn't be here, but more and more, I find myself thinking that I'm just here for the money rather than because I enjoy it.
This is a bit shocking for a tech startup. In a crappy backwards bank that was my last job everybody got as many monitors as they wanted, without putting in any request (there was always a pile of new monitors available, you only needed to notify the admin that you're grabbing one). Some people even got five of them.
Also, if you're a manager worth his/her salt, you would probably agree with the survey result at a high level already. Where the survey comes in handy is, helping you prioritize which problems to tackle to first.
Sure it's a 'lagging indicator', but that's why the survey doesn't focus on questions that would fluctuate highly. Examples: "Does your manager give you clear directions" or "does your organization communicate overall company strategy" etc.
We also supplement it with informal, brief monthly anonymous feedback that focuses more on short-term issues and qualitative data.
Do I want weekly survey? No. That's what weekly 1:1 is for. You should have enough rapport with your employees that they feel comfortable sharing their concerns or joy through 1:1 channel. If not, they can always use the monthly anonymous feedback.
That sounds like a shortcut to burnout. No, employee satisfaction is not based on "operating and delivering their best work".
Being able to perform at your best is a contributing factor but employees are humans with feelings and families. Maybe treat them as humans for once.
This rang true upon reading. The other part is that the engaged employee has to feel that they contributed to that performance. Long term, if you believe it doesn't matter how well you do things, there's no motivation to maintain any level.
My situation has typically been that I take pride in my craft and as a craftsperson I want to do my best so that I do not contribute to a possible failure. Another way of saying I enable success if each group does the same. But as for degree of engagement, the more autonomy I'm given the more engaged I'll be as I'll see to making each choice I make work out.
Note that this cost cutting can be considered predatory or not -- what if the engaged person's pay-and-benefits have a big proportion of RSUs which gain value after said cost cutting?
I worked for years in this space at my startup but we found success coming at it from a different angle. We started with a gamification platform and transitioned into enterprise integrations to measure "Employee Engagement". The difference was that we didn't just measure it through employee surveys but through objective goals on measurable KPIs. Essentially we hooked into live data sources from our customers and provided a way for managers to create leaderboards, achievements, goals, etc. against it.
Every time we renewed our contract with our customers we would measure and compare the performance of employees using the system against to those who were not and provide an ROI report. Most of our customers felt it was a no-brainer to renew once you could tie our costs to their increased revenue.
> "While measuring on a more frequent interval is a helpful start, the act of measuring doesn’t lead to improvement. It’s like if I step on a scale and expect to lose weight. If I couple the measurement with action, change can be made."
I think what it boils down to is "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.". It's very difficult to measure something nebulous such as Employee Engagement which is an intangible moving target.
I think it was Tom DeMarco who popularized this slogan (or a popular variant of it), but he has abandoned it in later years, even going on to give counterexamples. See http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep... .
If you actually want to increase genuine employee engagement then by all means do whatever it takes to make that happen even if it can't be measured.
What I've seen is that a lot of companies say they want in increase Employee Engagement when really what they're looking for is "We want our employees to be more productive and not quit".
Some jobs just won't be engaging or rewarding though. That's why we're paying them after-all though, right? :)
Most managers shouldn't be managers. If writing reports is your top priority you have failed miserably at your job, but will probably be promoted
There is definitely a cargo cult phenomenon going on here. For companies that value employee engagement and are willing to sacrifice other things for it, it's just not that hard. Companies that don't value it, but think it sounds progressive or enlightened or whatever, will do some official-looking things with the phrase "employee engagement" associated, but will mysteriously find it to be a thorny problem.
And the less often we vote for people further away the less our vote engages us
What we need are local elections for local bodies with genuine power and spend, and democratic companies.
I think a more accurate assessment is, trying to increase on a broad scale levels for the the typical employee with measurable bottom line impact is questionable.
Employee engagement is huge if it’s authentic and high powered. Take the top 5% at any company. Likely no software product made them that way, it’s just who they are.
Separately, that these companies don’t charge by impact to the bottom line is not really fair. Many companies don’t work that way. I don’t think McKinsey will give you strategy advice and then take a cut, unless it was a pretty binary scenario.
For over a decade, Gallup has measured engagement on an almost daily basis and the number has barely budged over the last decade. The number tends to stay in the low 30% range — this strategy is a PR dream. Year after year, Gallup can state that “the majority of the workforce is disengaged.” They then proceed to sell products/services to improve the score. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!
- eating lunch together
- having fun weekend trips with coworkers
- getting invited in to celebrate ethnic festivals
- getting invited in to each other’s parties
- taking vacations together for common interests
Things like above developed stronger bond to the extent were many folks would let go bigger compensation outside. It allowed to express opinions without being politically correct to leadership. It enabled continuous feedback and information sharing as opposed to infrequent all-hands and toung in chick critic. This quite a contrast from many 9-5 cultures where employees sell their time in exchange of money and nothing more.
Just cut all the BS.
Give emps. some PS.
Watch emp. eng. n biz soar.
The stock mkt. will roar.
- VR
[PS = Profit Sharing ]