Leaders and managers frequently refer to the famous Albert Einstein quote when something in their organizations isn’t working after repeated efforts. I wonder what Einstein would say about employee engagement?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
For two decades, the benchmark of benchmarks for employee engagement is Gallup, a world-class research organization. Gallup research shows that, over the past 10 years, the percentage of engaged employees has fluctuated. From a low of 30% to a high of 36%.
Much ado was made about a slight uptick in engagement before the pandemic. Then Covid struck and the trend reversed.
I’m pretty sure Einstein would agree with my old boss at Cisco, former CEO John Chambers. John famously described missed expectations at Cisco this way:
I never get hard work confused with results.
To see engagement move up only six percentage points over a decade without enduring results is underwhelming, at best. Especially when the engagement rate was so low to begin with.
The Decline of Engaged Employees
The most recent 2022 Gallup numbers show the percent of employees engaged is down. U.S. companies are down 32%. It was 30% in 2002 and 2012.
I’m not sure how many billions of dollars were spent on employee engagement measurement and programs during this time, but it is clear from this data it was not a productive investment.
The inertia reflected in the engagement data reflects what I’ve heard over the past three years talking to hundreds of HR leaders about what works and what doesn’t in employee engagement.
Most of the feedback is best paraphrased this way:
We are not learning anything new from our employee engagement data.
Competition vs Collaboration
I’ve been lucky to work with hundreds of companies and their leadership teams. Especially after I wrote The Collaboration Imperative, which shared the best practices used at Cisco in its transition from a culture based on internal competition to one based on internal collaboration.
From these listening sessions, I’ve come to believe that certain ideas exist in organizational thinking in the absence of hard evidence. I don’t know how these ideas got started. I just know the ideas are entrenched.
For example – the way leaders and managers think about employee engagement today. It reminds me of the way organizations think about career planning. That it is the responsibility of the employee, despite overwhelming evidence indicating a different reality.
If it is true that employees are responsible for their own careers, why is “my manager” the most cited reason when an employee leaves a company?
Employee Engagement is Upside Down
I want to eat my own dog food by starting with evidence. I’ve spent the pandemic sponsoring a large, real-world research study on what makes an employee want to stay at a company. I wanted to know what it would take to get an employee to recommend where they work.
Our primary research and the large collection of company data captured in the second phase of our research confirm we’ve been measuring the wrong things in employee engagement.
In fact, employee engagement is upside down, according to our research.
Instead of measuring how engaged employees are, we should be measuring how engaged leaders and managers are.
In statistical terms, our evidence-based model demonstrated a strong, positive linear relationship between the degree to which leaders and managers engage employees and the willingness of employees to recommend where they work. In other words, the more engaged leaders and managers are in creating organizational culture with their teams, the greater the likelihood of an employee recommending the employer. Our research conclusions have a 95% confidence interval.
The Impact Leaders Have on Employee Engagement
Just like career planning. It’s time to embrace the fact that leaders and managers are the reasons why people fall in love with a company and its culture — or not. Leaders create the global cultural values of an organization; managers implement those values locally.
Company values are based on human behavior, not a poster on the wall. Values-based behaviors start with role-modeling them as leaders and managers. How can we expect employees to be engaged if their management team isn’t?
If we’re going to innovate in how we think about employee engagement, I want to call upon Einstein again for help.
Einstein was famous for thought experiments.
Here’s one. Management guru Peter Drucker said you can only manage what you measure. What if leaders and managers were accountable for engagement?
What would happen to employee engagement?
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