Powering
performance with
engaged employees
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Why is engagement important?
The business world in general - and HR in particular - are agreed that
engagement is a workplace challenge. Respected analysts and
commentators from Gartner to Gallup tell us that engagement is either
stagnating or in real decline.
Let’s look at the figures. Gallup has been running an engagement survey
since 2000, and producing “The State of the Global Workplace” for almost
as long. The most recent edition claims that, worldwide, just 15% of
employees are truly engaged in their jobs. Some regions, admittedly, are
worse affected than others. The United States, for example, tends to have a
more engaged workforce than Europe or Asia. Even so, the number of US
employees describing themselves as “engaged” is well under 35%. Almost
two-thirds of American workers are either indifferent or actively disengaged.
“Satisfied or happy And that’s as good as it gets: barely 11% of UK employees are engaged.
employees are not
These figures cost money. Companies in the top quartile of the Gallup
necessarily engaged.
engagement metric are, on average, 17% more productive and 21% more
And engaged profitable than their less engaged peers. In 2012 in the US alone, actively
employees are the disengaged people were costing the economy between $450billion and
$550 billion in lost productivity. Dale Carnegie research estimates that
ones who work companies with engaged employees outperform their unengaged peers by
hardest, stay longest, up to 202%.
and perform best.”
Engagement affects performance. Engagement affects the bottom line. We
would go even further: we believe that engagement is impossible to
GALLUP - DON’T PAMPER separate from performance. The two are inextricably linked.
EMPLOYEES, ENGAGE THEM
Other factors have a bearing on this, of course. Wellbeing, mental health,
diversity and inclusion: all of these things affect engagement. What we’re
saying is that we need to look at engagement, first and foremost, in the
context of performance. We need to approach it with the knowledge that
engagement affects productivity, and therefore profitability and business
success.
Engagement, then, is not an HR issue. Engagement is an issue that should
matter to every senior leader in every organization. But we have two major
challenges:
1. We’re not measuring engagement in the right way.
We’re not asking the right questions to explore the ways engagement is
impacting performance. And we’re not using the right sort of cadence or
frequency to make sure that we get the right picture in the right context.
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2. We’re not taking the right steps to fix the problem.
Organizations spend huge sums on tinkering with the employee experience.
Better coffee, yoga classes, free fruit or “bring your dog to work” day all have
their place. People may enjoy a more welcoming workplace environment,
and they will certainly appreciate the business’ efforts to bring positivity and
camaraderie into the building. But engagement is only tangentially affected
by these initiatives.
A recent webcast by HR thought leader Josh Bersin cited a piece of data
that dominates the debate over how to improve employees’ attitudes to the
workplace. When people are surveyed about the factors that make their
working lives better, they nearly always cite the job itself as the most
important. Not the working environment; not the benefits or perks: the
actual process of work is the thing that defines how we feel about our jobs.
We’re not engaged by weekly team lunches, although they may make us
happier. We aren’t energized or given a sense of purpose by a massage.
The key factor is what is known as ‘work engagement’: the energy and
purpose someone gets from being immersed in their job. Any attempt to
boost engagement at work needs to begin with exactly that: the work. We
spend the vast majority of our weekdays doing the jobs we are employed to
do. The other things - the working environment, the opportunities to unwind
or socialise - are important, but the job itself is central.
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Why engagement is an
essential part of performance
Work engagement predicts performance. A meta analysis of 90
engagement studies found that it is a higher predictor of work task
performance than any other factor - more than three times higher than
leadership.
WHAT PREDICTS WORK TASK PERFORMANCE?
WORK
ENGAGEMENT
36%
“Businesses that orient
performance OTHER
FACTORS
management systems
around basic human
needs for
psychological
engagement — such as
10%
positive workplace TR ANSFORMATIONAL
relationships, frequent LEADERSHIP
recognition, ongoing
performance From Christian et al. (2011). Meta analysis of 90 engagement studies with 63,813 people.
Statistics correspond to standardises path cofficients and are significant at p < 0.01.
conversations and
opportunities for
personal development
It’s not just individual task performance either. Work engagement predicts a
— get the most out of massive 38% of team performance: more than double the effect had by
their employees.” leadership.
There is also a strong relationship between performance and engagement.
GALLUP, STATE OF THE GLOBAL One of our customers, the global marketing and branding agency CSM,
WORKPL ACE 2017 recently combined their performance management and engagement data.
The data showed that those employees using Clear Review for performance
management had consistently higher engagement scores relating to
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management, development and feedback. Engagement has a strong impact
on performance, but it’s also clear that good performance management has
a strong impact on engagement.
So it makes sense that we should be managing performance and
engagement together. But in many organizations these are completely
separate processes, often managed by different people or different teams.
Part of the reason for this is that separate technology platforms have
previously been used for each. But this has now changed: technology such
as Clear Review is able to combine engagement and performance
management within the same system.
Once you connect engagement to performance and gear it towards
improving the environment that helps people do their jobs, huge
opportunities open up. Managers can have richer, more effective
conversations with team members. Employees can raise specific issues
around development needs or resources they need to optimize their
workflow. HR (and senior management) can get a better understanding of
challenges that directly affect the flow of work. Rather than spending time
worrying about an organization’s happiness, there is scope here to fine-tune
working processes and make work better for everyone.
MAKE IT CONTINUOUS
For this to work effectively, it needs to be an ongoing process. We know that
performance management isn’t effective if it only happens once or twice a
year - regular performance and development conversations and feedback
are needed. In precisely the same way, engagement needs to be looked at
continuously.
Measuring engagement regularly gives you more relevant and up-to-date
data, enabling you to understand the impact of initiatives and changes
within the business in real time. And this arms you with the ability to take
action when it’s needed - in the moment.
5
Not all engagement measures
are created equal
In Chapter 2, we cited the meta-analysis showing the significant impact
that work engagement has on performance. But this specifically applies
to work engagement, which is not the same as other measures of
engagement.
HOW DO THE PREDICTORS OF ENGAGEMENT STACK UP?
JOB
SATISFACTION 24%
ORG.
COMMITMENT 16 %
JOB
INVOLVEMENT 18 %
WORK
ENGAGEMENT 43 %
0. 0.13 0.25 0.38 0.5
From Christian et al. (2011). Meta analysis of 90 engagement studies with 63,813 people.
Based on the results of a multiple regression analysis of the incremental validity of using
engagement to predict task performance. All four factors are significant at p < 0.001.
This chart from the same research shows that work engagement is by
far the highest predictor of performance, compared to other measures of
engagement such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. This
is why we use it as our core measure of engagement within Clear Review.
MOST ENGAGEMENT TOOLS DON’T MEASURE WORK ENGAGEMENT
Many engagement tools use the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score)
as their basis for measuring engagement. eNPS is calculated using the
question “Would you recommend (our company) to a colleague or friend?”.
What this is measuring is organizational commitment (or loyalty) rather
than work engagement. Whilst it may be interesting for organizations to
measure this, it only accounts for 16% of the impact on performance,
whereas work engagement accounts for 43%.
eNPS can also be misleading. An employee may feel great pride in the
prestige of their employer or have affection for the work it does, yet not
actually enjoy or be engaged in their actual work. The question is also
fundamentally organization-centric. How do you see us? How do we
seem? If your primary means of understanding your employees doesn’t
6 come from their point of view but from yours, what does that say about
you? More to the point, what does that say to them about you?
Some other popular engagement tools use a mixture of measures, such
as Gallup’s Q12. A drawback of this approach is that more questions are
needed, making them impractical for measuring engagement regularly. If
we want to do a regular check-up, it needs to be easy to do and easy to
complete. If it’s too complex, users will begin to resent the process and the
quality of the data will suffer. And if it isn’t done often enough, you lose the
big picture and it becomes much harder to track trends and changes over
time.
But with the right balance of simplicity and continuity, organizations can
gain accurate, actionable insights into the engagement of their employees.
This then gives them the opportunity to take real action to improve that
experience. That action could include improving management capability;
streamlining processes; offering support and training in the flow of work;
strengthening key relationships; or creating development plans designed to
help people realize their potential.
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A proven framework for work
engagement
MEASURING WORK ENGAGEMENT REGUL ARLY
If we want to capture real insight into how people feel about their working
lives, we need to use a framework grounded in workplace psychology.
The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale is perhaps the most widely
used measurement of work engagement. Developed in 2003 at the
Occupational Health Psychology unit of Utrecht University, it identifies
three traits that demonstrate work engagement: vigour, absorption and
dedication. While earlier scales tended to focus on identifying burnout,
the UWES looks at engagement in a positive way. Crucially, its questions
are rigorously focused on the experience of work rather than reputational
concerns. It aims to identify how the respondent feels about their job, not
the personal factors around it.
But although UWES has high psychological validity, it is too long to be
used as a continuous engagement measure. The earlier versions used 17
questions to capture the right information. A more recent version slims
the questions down to just 9, but this is still quite an onerous task to give
employees on a regular basis.
So we engaged an expert workplace psychologist, Ian MacRae, to
develop a valid measure of work engagement with the minimal number
of questions. After many iterations and extensive testing, Ian concluded
that we could measure work engagement effectively using just three
questions based on three factors: energy, purpose and immersion.
Asking these three questions regularly allows you to spot trends over time
and create a culture of ongoing insight into work engagement.
IMPROVING WORK ENGAGEMENT
Measuring engagement regularly and accurately is only part of the
solution, though. We need to understand how we can improve it. One of
the things that makes work engagement so powerful is that research has
shown that it can be improved. But we need data to understand how.
So we added a fourth multiple-choice question to our 3 core work
engagement questions to understand which motivation factors would
improve an employee’s engagement at work - factors such as more
autonomy, more support from managers and better team communication.
Once you understand which motivation levers to pull and in which areas
of the organization, you can start to take meaningful action to improve
engagement.
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GOING DEEPER
Whilst the framework we have set out here provides an accurate measure
of work engagement and insights into how it can be improved, there are
often occasions when a deeper dive is needed. To enable this, we built a
custom survey tool into Clear Review which can be used to survey specific
issues such as psychological safety, leadership and culture, as well as
assessing the impact of specific organizational initiatives.
To maximise impact and avoid survey fatigue, these more detailed surveys
can be targeted at specific groups of employees within the organization
who are most impacted by the issue or initiative.
So by combining a continuous, light touch, work engagement measure
with targeted, deeper surveys when needed, we can gain a detailed
understanding of engagement across the organization without over-
burdening employees with questions.
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Engagement without meaningful
action is damaging
Most organizations run some kind of engagement survey, and these rely
on the goodwill of staff to complete them. Although well-meaning, they
can actively work against the thing they’re trying to encourage. In just one
example, from 2018, a study by Forbes found that of 3,000 senior HR
people polled, 58% took no meaningful action as a result of these
surveys.
This feels a little unfair on HR, who often find themselves cast in the
role of “engagement guardians”. HR people take on the responsibility for
sending out the surveys and collating the data. They often then assume, by
association, the responsibility for “fixing” any problems.
Many
“ well-intentioned As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, making any one group “responsible”
for engagement misses the point. But the fact remains: from the
organizations make a employee’s point of view, HR has created the survey and is now doing
common mistake: They nothing with it. It makes employees feel cynical not just about their place in
make higher an organization, but also by the organization’s efforts to understand them.
And HR people find themselves stuck: engagement is now “their thing”,
engagement results and they find themselves conducting an endless cycle of surveys they can’t
themselves the goal act upon, inflicted on employees who don’t see the value in what they’re
doing.
rather than focusing on
the improved So what constitutes meaningful action? It goes back to the definition of
performance outcomes work engagement. To truly engage people, and to reap the performance
benefits that come from that, action needs to be rooted in the work itself.
that higher If employees lack a sense of purpose in their role, are overworked, or don’t
engagement should have the required training to develop (to their own benefit and that of their
employer), the answer can’t be to tinker at the edges. Short-term benefits
help them achieve.” and perks might raise the numbers enough to reassure senior managers,
but they won’t tackle the real work-based challenges which exist at the
GALLUP, STATE OF THE GLOBAL
level of the employee, their manager and the team.
WORKPL ACE 2017
10
Whose responsibility is
engagement?
Historically, the onus has fallen on HR to manage engagement. But HR’s
ability to make meaningful change to the organization is limited. HR
people can find themselves trapped between senior leaders - who request
that engagement surveys happen but don’t always act on the data - and
employees, who struggle to see the value of the process.
The point of work engagement is that everyone takes responsibility.
It is designed to directly affect work outcomes. When seen as a part of
performance management, the process becomes much more transparent
and the benefits are clearly visible to all.
“The greatest cause of 1. Employees feed their insights into the work engagement system.
engagement program 2. HR captures insights into employee state of mind with a focus on work
failure is this: Employee practices and resources.
engagement is widely 3. Employees and managers work together to resolve challenges and set
considered “an HR development goals.
thing.” It is not owned
4. HR gains real insight into how managers are developing their people
by leaders, expected of and equipping them for high performance.
managers or
understood by front- 5. HR can use data at a macro-level to inform initiatives on wellbeing,
mental health, training and the like.
line employees.”
The role of technology is crucial here. If employees and managers are
to work together to improve work engagement, they need the data and
BUILDING A HIGH DEVELOPMENT
insight to be able to do this. This can be a challenge when engagement
CULTURE THROUGH YOUR
surveys usually come with a guarantee of anonymity.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
STR ATEGY
Clear Review overcomes this by reflecting each employee’s answers back
to them and providing suggested actions based on their answers. These
‘action nudges’ encourage employees to discuss their work engagement
with their manager during their performance and development
conversations and adapt their goals accordingly.
Where this becomes even more powerful is where the organization
customizes these nudges to direct the employee to their existing
workplace resources. For example, if an employee scores low on the
energy factor of work engagement, the software can suggest they book an
appointment with a mental health first-aider or direct them to an employee
assistance programme.
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HR, meanwhile, cease to be the gatekeeper of engagement. Instead,
they can become an enabler of performance and value. They can monitor
patterns and trends. They can connect with the board, giving them genuine
actionable insights into the temperature and mood of the business over
time. They can start to pull in factors that have a bearing on engagement
- a merger, perhaps, or a hiring freeze - and help make the most of
(or mitigate the effects of) events that have a real impact on people’s
behaviour. They can learn from the most engaged teams and offer support
for managers who need it. Engagement in the context of performance
offers a whole new raft of metrics to the HR team: metrics that move
productivity needles rather than just “happiness” ones.
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In conclusion
Engagement has a couple of historical problems. Many organizations
have conflated “engagement” and “happiness”, or “engagement” and
“organizational commitment”, and ended up with solutions that address
the wrong challenges. Alongside that, it is sometimes seen as an answer
in and of itself: “if we raise the engagement numbers, we solve the
engagement problem”.
But engagement for engagement’s sake misses the point. It needs to be
seen as part of a broader question: how do we create resilient, sustainable
high performance from our people?
The answer lies in shared responsibility. Work engagement combined
with Continuous Performance Management seeks to find tangible,
real-world answers to the challenges of work. We should not be seeking
to make people happier without context: we should strive to make their
experience of work more fulfilling and satisfying by removing the barriers
and smoothing the roads.
HR cannot do that alone.
People want to perform better. It’s a theme we see again and again in the
world of performance management: that if you create the conditions for
people to do their best, they’ll do it. By asking employees and managers to
take responsibility for their engagement - and their performance - we build
the right environment for people to perform at their best.
By showing people that the organization has the appetite to improve
their work and wellbeing, we demonstrate that their welfare and their
development is a priority. We can do this by asking the right questions and
empowering them to speak up.
In the war for talent which may well define our markets in the years ahead,
organizations need to show that they’re committed to providing the best
possible environment for people to thrive. The benefits of performance and
productivity - the fruits of work engagement - are there for the taking.
To see how Clear Review is powering performance with engaged
employees, you can book a live demo here.
To learn more about what we do, visit our website.
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REFERENCES
Don’t Pamper Employees, Engage Them - Gallup (2013)
Work Engagement: A Quantitative Review and Test Of Its Relations With
Task And Contextual Performance - Christian, Garza, Slaughter, (2011).
State of the Global Workplace 2017 - Gallup
Building a High Development Culture Through your Employee Engagement
Strategy - Gallup (2019)
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