Stephen Billing’s Blog

Chris Rodgers on his blog Informal Coalitions  has picked up on my criticism of the employee engagement industry.

Interestingly he has criticised ”disembodied" culture change programmes and I am struck by his insight that employee engagement is similarly disembodied from the "everyday experience of organizational practice and performance." When he talks about the disembodiment of culture change, he is meaning the way that it is common to treat culture as a thing that is separate from everyday interaction, a thing that is a separate building block of performance that can be managed independently of daily conversation.

The measurement of employee engagement by means of surveys leads to engagement being thought of as a thing independent of human interaction, that can be objectively measured and managed.

To my way of thinking, employee engagement refers only to human interaction and is not something outside of people in organisations interacting with each other. By definition it cannot be outside human interaction. And because we are human beings, we cannot stand outside of human interaction. Managers cannot stand outside of their interactions with their employees and measure them objectively.

So the notion of measuring employee engagement is of doubtful value, particularly if it results in people taking their eye off their results and their interactions with others.

Chris Rodgers suggests that instead, "the ‘real’ engagement task for leaders is twofold:

• Helping individuals to make sense of everyday events and emerging challenges in the context of their local interactions; and, in the light of this, to take action in ways that contribute to the achievement of local organizational objectives.
• Doing so in ways that also resonate with individuals’ own aspirations and personal agendas." 

Concentrate on the basics of good leadership and management, not on your engagement scores.

Previous posts have argued that

• High employee engagement does not cause high productivity
• Engagement is becoming a cult and wise leaders will not pay too much attention to it
• Leaders should concentrate on business results and employee engagement is not a business result, it is an input

Given that I’ve been so critical of measuring employee engagement, what do I advocate instead of engagement scores and action planning to increase your engagement scores?

If your organisation is hooked on engagement scores, then middle managers probably have no choice but to comply and go through the motions of completing the questionnaires. And there is no doubt that there is a lot of political advantage in scoring well in the surveys.

If you are the leader of your organisation, think very carefully about your implementation of engagement surveys. As you know, what you measure is what people focus on. Do you want your people to concentrate on inputs or results? Engagement surveys will make your line managers and  support groups (e.g. HR, admin, finance, legal, communications) focus on inputs because that’s what you are measuring. Engagement surveys will concentrate your line managers on inputs and you risk diverting their attention from the things that matter – your business results.

Unfortunately the magic bullet is not magic and it is not a bullet.

Let the good old basics prevail. It is simple, but it is not easy. Implementation is all. Concentrate on the results you are trying to achieve, keep talking to your people about their performance along with what you are trying to achieve, and your progress together towards your objectives. Concrete progress towards business success stimulates and excites people to keep going in that direction. As they achieve business results, engagement scores will take care of themselves. This is the converse of what the engagement brigade would tell you.

The emperor really has no clothes. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the cult of engagement. Instead, stay focused on your results,  keep in contact with your people as they progress, help them to overcome obstacles where necessary and provide recognition of achievements.

By the way, this is heresy in the prevailing ways of thinking in the public sector in New Zealand.

Comments welcome.

Previous posts have highlighted that the correlation between employee engagement and productivity does not mean that engagement is the CAUSE of productivity, and that the discourse around engagement is approaching cult status.

A third reason to be cautious of the way employee engagement is being implemented is that the emphasis on employee engagement has led to engagement being seen as an end in itself. This is flawed logic, and it diverts your eye from the important game – the business results you are achieving. High engagement scores are not the same as business results.

Somehow we have leapt from discovering a correlation between engagement and productivity to thinking that engagement is an end in itself. This is not the case. But the measurements on the surveys are causing managers to concentrate on improving their engagement scores, which are then expected to drive productivity. This focus on engagement scores inevitably leads to some manipulation of the scores, but I think the more critical issue is that it leads managers to concentrate on the wrong things.

Any sports coach knows that you have to be aware of the scoreboard, watch the game and practice hard in order to be successful. Concentrating on engagement is like focusing on practice drills, and thinking that because the team is good at passing, or has good parties on Saturday night, that it is winning the game. It is like thinking that because we talk a lot to our team members and they score well in a survey about how well the coach is doing, that they are automatically playing well on Saturday and achieving good business results. In other words, concentrating on engagement tends to make you take your eye off the real results you are trying to achieve as a leader. 

Engagement is a simplistic measure of something that is very complex and is actually impossible to measure. It is an example of scientific method applied to human society and enterprise, a mistake that Kant warned about back in the 1700s.

Being extremely optimistic, engagement scores are only an approximate measure of human reality, and in fact it is not a very good approximation for business purposes because it is a measure of an input, not an outcome.

What should you do instead? Answers in next post.

Don’t worry about your engagement scores.

Instead, let the good old basics prevail. Concentrate on the results you are trying to achieve, keep talking to your people about their performance, what you are trying to achieve, and your progress together towards your objectives. Concrete progress towards business success stimulates and excites people to keep going in that direction. As they achieve business results, engagement will rise.

The emperor really has no clothes. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the cult of engagement. Instead, stay focused on your results,  keep in contact with your people as they progress, help them to overcome obstacles where necessary and provide recognition of achievements. Comments welcome.

The fervour about employee engagement seems to be reaching cult status.

In my previous post I pointed out that the correlation between engagement and productivity does not mean that employee engagement CAUSES productivity, and some of the insidious implications of this assumption.

A second reason to be cautious of the engagement movement is that the adherents of engagement are becoming so vehement that one cannot question the concept without being thrown out from the group – this is the hallmark of a cult. In a cult, one cannot question the prevailing dogma and remain a part of the group. The discourse around engagement is approaching this boundary. It reminds me of the early 90s when TQM was the thing – the fervour is very similar.

I know that in my work with my own clients questioning of the concept of employee engagement does not seem to be welcomed. The discourse on employee engagement does not tolerate questioning of the concept – and so no critical thinking about the concept is tolerated.

So, rather than being an ‘engaged’ (pun intended) debate about good leadership in organisations, employee engagement has led to a language with its own jargon (who is your best friend at work?) that cannot be questioned. Managers are becoming engaged (ha ha) in relentlessly pursuing a quest to have the highest engagement scores, and the validity of this quest is not able to be debated. 

I don’t blame them for this – I would do the same thing in a world in which high engagement scores are deemed the measure of success as a measure. 

So engagement is seen as an end in itself – to be successful in engagement of employees is a holy grail, in spite of the evidence of the business units that are mavericks, that do not ‘get in line’ with the rest of the organisation, but nevertheless have high engagement scores.