Employee engagement has become something of a holy grail for businesses, akin to the pursuit of happiness in our private lives: an ideal that some consider utopian, pursued with sincerity but in the wrong way. We have seen a proliferation of surveys, barometers, and initiatives designed to strengthen team engagement, but the results continue to disappoint. Retention rates are stagnating, departures are on the rise, and a feeling of general unease prevails.
Are we going about it the wrong way? Or have we simply framed the problem incorrectly?
In fact, we have confused engagement, motivation, and reasons for staying, and in doing so, we have distorted the foundations of our understanding of the employee experience.
In short:
- Engagement, motivation, and loyalty are three distinct concepts that are too often confused.
- Engagement does not guarantee employee performance or retention.
- One-size-fits-all approaches fail to meet individual employee expectations.
- The quality of work organization is critical to retention.
- Improving the employee experience requires operational excellence and personalized listening.
Three different concepts that are too often confused
In its general sense, engagement describes an emotional state toward work or the business. It is a feeling of involvement, enthusiasm, and loyalty that we try to measure in a declarative manner.
Motivation is a personal dynamic, mainly intrinsic, which depends on a person’s aspirations, personal needs, and life circumstances. It exists independently of the professional context.
As for the reason for staying, it is simply a trade-off between what the business offers and what the employee is looking for at a given moment.
Contrary to popular belief, engagement is not a guarantee of performance (Employee Engagement: Illusion of Performance or Real Impact?). Furthermore, an engaged employee may decide to leave due to a lack of recognition or opportunities. Worse still, this situation, often experienced as unrequited love where one gives without receiving, can lead to negativity within the business but also after the employee leaves (reputational risk).
An unengaged employee may decide to stay due to a lack of better opportunities, for personal or financial reasons.
Believing that an engaged employee will stay or that an employee who stays is engaged is therefore a mistake, and thinking that all this creates performance is even more so.
But this is what most businesses do, which leads them to manage the employee experience with the wrong indicators.
The failure of traditional approaches to engagement
Businesses are investing heavily in measures designed to boost engagement. The toolbox is almost endless: internal barometers, seminars, after-work events, and workplace wellness initiatives are multiplying, based on the somewhat simplistic view that a pleasant environment is enough to engage employees and make them stay, thereby improving business performance. This is what I generally refer to as “creating a spa next to the torture chamber and closing your eyes to the latter.”
In fact, these measures only scratch the surface. They capture momentary feelings that are often influenced by the context of the moment (Your old HR barometer measures everything but engagement), are often easy to fake or influence, but rarely capture underlying phenomena that are less easy to perceive, often unconscious, but whose long-term effects can be devastating.
Worse still, we often draw general conclusions that lead to uniform policies, when each employee is what I call a “one-person market” with their own needs and expectations (The post COVID employee: an unseizable one-person market)
Ultimately, many actions to strengthen engagement have no lasting effect because they are aimed at a kind of abstraction, the “average employee,” who does not exist.
What makes people want to stay?
Understanding why an employee decides to stay cannot be limited to measuring their enthusiasm. You need to understand their motivations and aspirations, which are often multiple and changing. Some stay for financial security, others for the interest of their job, and still others for opportunities for advancement. And, of course, the external context must be taken into account: if a competitor offers “better” (and “better” once again depends on each individual’s aspirations).
But beyond these traditional factors, there is one element that is systematically overlooked: the quality of the work organization itself (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions).
Employees stay when they feel supported by their work environment, when they perceive that the organization is designed to enable them to succeed, not to hinder them. They stay when they don’t have to compensate for the weaknesses of the system with constant and frustrating efforts. They stay when they feel that processes are clear, that the tools enable them to be effective, that responsibilities are well distributed, and that managers truly play their role of alignment and support (Managers are responsible for everything that goes wrong).
This has been proven: although generally overlooked, work design is a major factor in employee retention and suitability for the business (Right fit, wrong fit – Dialogue Review)
An organization that pushes its employees to excel by reducing friction, offering clear career paths with clear expectations and the means to achieve them, builds more loyalty than a business that compensates for its shortcomings with internal communication campaigns. Communication and well-being initiatives are no substitute for operational excellence. On this subject, I recommend reading “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work” (Book Review: It doesn’t have to be crazy at work – Jason Fried and David Hansson).
Employee excellence is built into the architecture of everyday work, by removing irritants and aligning what the business says with what it does, which is what determines its employer brand (Your employee experience is your employer brand)
Another way to manage the employee experience
Individualized listening is a lever that is underestimated, if not underutilized. Beyond the rigid framework of the annual performance review, the most relevant questions concern aspirations, frustrations, and personal projects, and these become indispensable.
Similarly, trying to map collective expectations in order to standardize them does not work. Each employee has their own personal history, ambitions, expectations, and constraints that are unique to them, and the employee experience must recognize this diversity instead of attempting to homogenize it.
Finally, and this is not the least of the challenges, it is becoming essential to accept that improving the work experience requires greater demands on the organization itself.
Identifying internal friction, eliminating or simplifying counterproductive or unnecessary processes, and ensuring consistency between discourse, practices, and tools and systems is far more effective at building loyalty than any engagement campaign. This shows that the business cares about its employees in the workplace and is doing everything it can to help them succeed, and because success and performance are factors that contribute to satisfaction.
Bottom line
Believing that emotional engagement alone explains employee loyalty is a mistake. What keeps an employee at a company is not momentary enthusiasm, but the tangible response of the business to their needs, projects, and aspirations.
Loyalty is earned through everyday experiences, through an organization that supports rather than hinders. It is time to consider moving from an HR marketing approach to one of operational excellence in the service of people, if we really want to build work environments where the desire to stay is real and sincere, while also serving the business.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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Employee Engagement: Illusion of Performance or Real Impact?
