Are you not yet engaged at work?
Surely with all this ‘engagement’ activity, the entire corporate world should be ‘engaged’, right? It seems not.
Unengaged or disengaged?
Multiple recent surveys have told us that engagement in Corporateland is still poor.
- According to Gallup, engagement in the U.K. remains “stable but low,” having risen from 12% in 2009 to 21% in 2021. Calm down.
- In the U.S., it’s a similar story: in 2021, it was reported that engagement had fallen to 34% from 36% the previous year. Gallup said that ‘U.S. employee engagement needs a rebound in 2023’ having inched northwards over the previous few years to the heady heights of just over a third of people actively engaged.
- In India, it’s a similar story: just a fifth of employees surveys said they were ‘fully engaged’…
But — stop for a minute — aarggh — that word! ‘Engagement’! What do we actually mean? People use it all over the place: in job titles; in surveys; in KPIs and objectives for leaders. It’s everywhere.
- “Our people aren’t engaged!”
- “We need better engagement!”
- “How engaged are people on this?”
- “What are our engagement scores looking like? Up 2 points! Ok, progress!”
What do we actually mean?
I get contacted frequently by agencies selling ‘engagement,’ claiming that they can improve engagement with their amazing tool or do a communication audit to tell us where we should do better.
But whenever I’ve asked them what they mean by engagement specifically, the definitions range from “motivating people” to “creating advocates” to “getting their attention” to “increasing productivity” and beyond.
I’ve blogged before about measurement and my snappily-named (A)REB-I measurement model, in which I talk about engagement simply as: getting people to react in some way. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Employee engagement has so many definitions, it’s difficult to know which one people are on about and therefore whether people are ‘engaged’ or not.
- Highly motivated?
- Remotely interested in their job?
- Enthused to do a good job?
- An active participant in work events?
- An active contributor rather than a passive wage-collector?
Agreeing what we mean — then measuring it
David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s oft-cited work, Engaging For Success, an excellent study of employee engagement in the U.K. and essential handbook on the subject, provides helpful definitions of engagement, which should be the cornerstones of any measurement efforts.
Their works defines employee engagement as:
- Understanding one’s role in an organisation and seeing how it fits into the organisation’s purpose and objectives (communicators tend to refer to this as ‘line of sight to strategy’);
- Having a clear understanding of how an organisation is fulfilling its purpose and objectives (evidence that the company is succeeding in its mission);
- Being given a voice to offer ideas and express views — and for them to be listened to (two-way communication: arguably the most important part of employee engagement);
- Being included fully as a member of the team, trusted and empowered, given regular feedback, supported to develop skills, thanked and recognised.
If we’re going to improve employee engagement, we need to focus our communication and leadership efforts on creating positive outcomes in each of these areas separately (rather than churning out ‘messages’ because it’s what we think people want or need to hear) and then measuring the impact effectively.
Lumping it all together and making a call on whether or not people are ‘engaged’ won’t help to spot the areas of weakness easily.
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