Cancel the meeting about employee engagement scores from your latest anonymous survey of your employees regarding their engagement levels. File the PowerPoint presentation. Go ahead…take that off your to-do list.
It’s not that employee engagement is not important. It is. Employee engagement is very important to a company’s bottom line. That’s why you’re worrying about it—or been told to worry about it. Companies with higher employee engagement scores, as compared to their competitors, score higher in revenue growth, EBITDA, equity valuations, ROE, and ROA. They have lower turnover among employees and customers, higher sales conversion, lower COGS, and higher operating margins.
Makes sense, right? Enthusiastic, empowered, engaged employees deliver the desired results. And you want to see that in your organization. Right?
The data is not good for what passes these days for employee engagement strategizing—with its meetings and surveys and actionable items and baubles and trinkets (aka bribes), all organized at the top of your corporate pyramid by a chosen few and then mandated down through the levels as you do all your current initiatives. Employee engagement scores on a national basis have not improved over the past 10 years, according to Gallup’s latest surveys.
However, while the employee recognition industry generates over $46 billion in revenues, it has generated no measurable change on employee engagement scores. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize employees. It just means that what passes for employee recognition doesn’t pass muster as a solution for slumping employee engagement.
What’s missing from the majority of these well-meaning efforts is the employee? The answer is kind of ironic, actually.
In all those planning sessions, no one’s thought to invite the employee. Oh sure, surveys are issued and results sliced and diced. But survey questions reveal more of the surveyor’s bias than they do the preferences of the recipient, and anonymous are the antithesis of employee engagement.
Can you recall a survey that you would describe as engaging? By engaging, I mean one you can engage in a conversation, exchange ideas and emotions, possible solutions and learn something more than an endorsement of preconceived notions?
But meeting about employee engagement is not engaging with employees. Employees, like everyone, know when someone prefers to talk about them as opposed to with them. They also know the sights and sounds and words of yet another corporate missive raining down on their heads—even ones dressed up in pretty colors and slogans and bribes.
Rather than strategize about employee engagement, go engage with your employees. Get out of your office, turn off your devices, and go engage in a conversation with them. Use that hour you scheduled to look at PowerPoint slides on employee engagement to listen to employees tell you what they love about their work—and what they hate, too. Walk out on the assembly line and ask them. Sit by their cubicle and listen to their ideas, yeah, and complaints. Find out who they are as people.
Listen as they tell you what works and what doesn’t in their own words. Listen to their ideas on how to better the product, the service, the operations, and the processes. Indeed, who has a more vested interest in making them better and faster? Who knows more about your products than your employees, the ones who make them?
But don’t stop there. Do something with what they tell you. Go fix that problem they said is the biggest obstacle or the biggest source of customer service calls. Or tell them why you can’t, at the moment. Bring that newest piece of equipment to them, the one they need to do a better job. Tear down the walls of a corporate silo so the two groups can talk together, easier and faster.
Go engage with your employees. If you want higher levels of employee engagement, then engage with your employees at a higher level—more times, more employees, and more personal. That’s employee engagement.
