What Does Engagement Really Tell Us?
You’ve no doubt heard the expression, Employee Engagement. It’s roughly equivalent to the age-old concept of job satisfaction, or JSAT. The big question is, does increased employee engagement improve performance?
It sounds like it should be true – as long as you believe that happy workers are productive workers. Unfortunately, I don’t! Most often, happy workers are just… happy!
Investopedia tells us that Engagement is the level of enthusiasm and dedication a worker feels toward their job. Engaged employees care about their work and about the performance of the company, and feel that their efforts make a difference. An engaged employee is in it for more than a paycheck and may consider their well-being linked to their performance, and thus instrumental to their company’s success.
Does increased Employee Engagement improve company performance? Or does improved company performance increase engagement?
There is no data to support the claim that there’s a causal link between engagement and performance.. In fact, my decades of anecdotal observation tells me the opposite…
When people are part of a high-performing team, they become more engaged…
AON Hewitt is a company that’s been measuring Engagement for a lot of years, and it has an excellent repository of historical data. It’s survey instrument breaks employee engagement down into 6 dimensions:
- Work
- People
- Opportunities
- Total Reward
- Company Practices, and
- Quality of life
So, let’s say we set out to improve these 6 dimensions, and lift the engagement score of our team, in the expectation that this would, in turn, lift performance…
- Paying everyone over the odds would boost the score for the Total Rewards dimension
- Unrivaled job security would boost the score for the Quality of Life dimension
- Autonomy without consequences would boost the score for the Work dimension
- Access to seemingly unlimited resources would boost the score for the Company Practices dimension
- Leaders who stay away and don’t demand anything would boost the score for the People dimension.
- Is there anyone who thinks that would have even the remotest chance of lifting company performance?
The secret sauce isn’t engagement… it’s culture… Culture is defined simply as the way we do things around here, and it can be measured, too.
The difference with culture is that you can measure the right things… the things that correlate directly to performance, without relying on the spurious link between happiness and productivity, which we often take for granted.
If you want a high employee engagement score, then just pay your workforce really well, give your people total job security while demanding very little from them. Make sure you satisfy every request they make for additional resources, and allow them to take time off whenever they want. Basically, you just have to be prepared to pander to their every whim.
If you can do that, you’ll definitely be able to brag to all your colleagues about how you lifted engagement during your tenure… but perhaps you should also be keeping an eye on the company’s financial performance, and measure how far it plummets during that same period!