For years, we’ve been relying on the equation that an engaged employee is a more productive employee who creates more value.
To tell the truth, I’ve never been convinced by the notion of engagement, which in my opinion is taken the wrong way by businesses who think that it’s up to the employee to engage, whereas it’s up to them to become engaging.
And what says that an employee is engaged? And that this engagement creates value.
Measuring engagement is a scam
If a business wants to improve employee engagement and its impact , it still needs to measure this engagement, and there are two approaches to doing this, which generally add up.
The first is the famous engagement survey, in which employees are more or less directly invited to say whether or not they are engaged. We already know how easy it is to skew the results of such studies: it has been proven that depending on when the questionnaire is administered (beginning or end of the week, day after payday, return from vacation, etc.), the employee’s state of mind at that precise moment will induce a bias.
Then, for reasons that are easy to understand, the employee may have no interest in telling the truth, may be afraid to express himself, or may be trying to send a message that has nothing to do with the subject.
And then there’s observation. How often do you hear a manager say “so-and-so is engaged and so-and-so isn’t”, or rather “so-and-so looks engaged…”, which is a clear indication that you’re basing your conclusions on observed behavior.
There is no engagement, only proof of engagement
Just as there is no love but only proof of love, there is no engagement but only proof of engagement, and it’s this proof that the manager will be looking for.
“Robert is super positive about everything, he never complains, whereas Alice spends all her time complaining and showing her dissatisfaction. I wish she was as engaged as he is.
In fact, Robert may just be happy to have a job, he has other ways of fulfilling himself and therefore doesn’t expect much from his work, whereas Alice is a perfectionist, always wanting to give her best and also wanting to help the business improve. She’s more concerned about the business and its future, to the point where it can make her anxious.
“Carine creates a good atmosphere in the office, and at lunchtime she’s always the first to get the others together for lunch and to discover nice restaurants around the office, whereas Kevin prefers to stay in the office or even eat alone. I’d like him to show more engagement”.
Maybe Carine likes to organize these moments of conviviality because it’s her nature, or because she’s so bad at her job that she really needs it, or because she doesn’t give a damn about what goes on at work and sees the office as a way of meeting people (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us). And on the other hand, maybe Kevin is a young intermittent or needs to have his hour of quiet solitude in the middle of a day when he’s working hard, giving everything he’s got at the cost of a high mental load that he has to bring down (“Let me have lunch by myself at my desk!”).
And is an employee who focuses on performance and results, to the detriment of fun in the workplace, any less engaged and concerned by the fate of the company? (“I’m no fun at work, and I assume it”).
That’s why I’ve always been suspicious of people who “look” engaged, and of the sweeping behavioral judgments made by managers who improvise themselves as work psychologists for the duration of a coffee break.
Not only does looking engaged mean very little, but being engaged is no guarantee of performance.
Engaged employees rarely perform well
A 2022 study by the O.C. Tanner Institute points out that engagement can be an imperfect and misleading indicator of effectiveness, as it measures neither the quality nor the real impact of the work performed (Employee engagement is out. Here’s a better metric).
This study takes the opposite approach: it starts with employees’ ability to produce excellent work and deduces five profiles based on the personality traits they have in common.
The Sociables: extroverted and pleasure-driven, they are highly engaged (55%) but unlikely to produce excellent work (12%).
The Builders: warm and diplomatic, with a high level of engagement (85%) and an average likelihood of producing excellent work (45%).
The Producers: highly motivated and engaged (96%), with the highest probability of producing excellent work (66%).
The Doers: more reserved, they respond well to rewards, but have low engagement (46%) and little inclination to produce excellent work (10%).
Procrastinators: stressed and pessimistic, with low chances of producing excellent work (3%) and being engaged (17%).
If engagement and excellent work can go hand in hand, it’s clear that sociability is no guarantee, and that engagement is ultimately a guarantee of high performance for only one profile.
Impact and motivation above all
An approach more in line with the practices I’ve developed over time: identify high-impact employees and understand their motivation to do what’s necessary to achieve it (Your old HR barometer measures everything but engagement). The same goes for low-impact employees, with one difference: for the former, the motivation is there and you have to understand it, whereas for the latter, you have to look for it.
Better still: when you ask an employee what motivates them, they’re less likely to misrepresent their answer than when you ask them about their engagement. Here again, the reason seems simple to me: in one case, they feel you want to help them; in the second, they feel you’re reproaching them for something.
An approach that can only be individualized, which may be a limitation a priori, but isn’t it the same with engagement: a global study of employees can only lead to a global action plan, whereas each employee has his or her own levers of engagement.
Bottom line
Engagement is too diffuse and difficult to measure and understand to be a reliable management tool, whereas motivation is simpler to understand and more directly linked to performance.
Image : employee engagement by fizkes via Shutterstock.
