Introduction.
I have spent hours writing an article on employee engagement and at the end of it I realised that Employee Engagement is passing its use by date. The world of work is changing dramatically. There should be no expectations by employers that employees will be so absorbed by their work, that they will use discretionary effort for the benefit of the company. Those days are going, if not gone.
When I was researching the area, I was looking for information that supported investing in employee engagement. What became apparent to me was with the advent of redundancies, restructures, and endless cost cutting measures, trust has been predominately lost between the employee and employer, with little chance of reconciliation.
Irrespective of this there was no “evidence” that employee engagement leads to better company performance. There are only studies that show a correlation. Some research suggests that the best performers in companies are actually those who are less engaged, suggesting at least that the construct is wrong.
Yet interestingly 78{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of business leaders believe engagement is an urgent or important issue. They spend huge amounts of money identifying how engaged people are. What they seemingly fail to recognise is that employees are so sceptical or fearful of the confidentiality of such surveys; much of the information gathered within companies is potentially flawed.
There are some suggestions in the literature that employees seek profitable companies with a well-known brand. Employees are more satisfied because the company has more money to spend on terms and conditions of employment that suit them. For example, parental and flexible leave entitlements or overseas postings. In addition to this the power of the company’s brand can promote their own personal brand in the employment market. There is no master/slave component of this approach.
The employment contract has changed; the world of work has changed, engagement, as we know it has changed. It is time to stop wasting money on surveys, trying to find ways to entice employees to be engaged and face the reality of the modern workplace. The worm is turning, if not turned.
Questions.
What are the Disengagement Levels?
Despite years of investment, there is no evidence that employee engagement has increased. In fact, it appears to be the opposite. The information below has been culled from 150,000 full time and part time employees.
“Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace poll shows that 70{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of employees are not “engaged” at work. More than half, 52{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52}, say they are not enthusiastic or committed and are essentially sleepwalking through their day. Another 18{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} are truly unhappy, or actively disengaged.
Only 30{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of American workers really love their jobs, according to the survey. At least that’s two points higher than it was in the depths of the Great Depression and it’s as high a percentage as Gallup has found since it started tracking worker engagement in 2000”.
Why should employees be engaged?
Trust has been broken between the employer and employee since the advent of redundancies in the last quarter of the 20th century. Research by Dr James Laurence from the University of Manchester has found:
“That being made redundant from your job not only makes people less willing to trust others but that this increased distrust and cynicism lasts at least nine years after being forced out of work.”
What is most significant about this is many of the employees, who have been made redundant re-enter the workforce in another organisation and they carry that distrust with them. This results in a pandemic of distrust.
Employees now expect they will be made redundant at some point in their career. This is illustrated by the amount of people in organisations storing annual leave and any long service leave to ensure they have a back up plan.
Traditional connections at work have been broken time and time again not only with the advent of redundancies but also the constant restructures. People feel more connected to their IPhone than to the office.
Open plan office spaces, working from home and hot desks have been a result of employers reducing their real estate costs and suggesting communications will be improved. The result is people are working from home, meeting in coffee shops and reverting to headphones due to noise and disruptions. In fact around 35{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of Australian workers spend half their working week outside their main office.
In 2011, the organisational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, open offices were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and employee satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation.
Although coffee shops are becoming a fashionable alternative, particularly in the city environment, they too have similar problems. A national survey of 600 Australian businesses was asked about the working habits of their employees. 79{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} found coffee shops less than satisfactory because of lack of privacy. 66{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} were concerned about noise while 77{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} were worried about security.
Combine a pandemic of mistrust, with a continual cycle of broken or disrupted relationships, and you have at least in part a recipe for employee disengagement. Giving out coffee vouchers and doing pulse survey is just not going to cut it.
How much is it costing to pretend employment engagement is relevant?
What has increased is the cost of measuring employee engagement. According to one report the cost of measuring employee engagement can be as high as $400 per employee. In a survey conducted in the USA by Towers Watson, $720 million a year is spent by organisations trying to improve engagement. The research states that 70{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of the employees are not engaged. Obviously continuing to spend money on measuring engagement hasn’t improved it. It begs the question why we continue to do it.
What is the new world of work?
The world of work in the future will become more “Fluid, Flexible and Mobile”, according to the experts. Already people are working more and more from home. Interestingly Gallup research suggests that disengagement is more evident when people work more than 20{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of their time away from the organisation.
As working away from the traditional office becomes more the norm, the belief is people will still want to physically connect. The way organisations are addressing this is the creation of “third places”. In Europe, organisations like Shell are partnering with train and petrol stations to provide cheaper more flexible co-working spaces.
Employees will have control over when and where they will deliver work, particularly with industries using high-speed technologies. Money will be negotiated on an employee’s brand or a group of employees brand and reputation.
Employees will deliver units of work and be paid for those units. The payment and co-ordination of that work will not be sanctioned by managers but rather through some means of super efficient electronic co-ordination. Interestingly a recent Hudson’s survey on traits for emerging leaders states, “Managers will pay less attention to relationships”.
Employment is becoming an activity, a transaction that if you want to get paid you will have to deliver results. This is certainly a powerful reason to do a good job but whether you are “engaged” or not will become irrelevant. It will be a part of many activities that will create the new world of living. It will be an activity that will have mutually negotiated outcomes.
The world of work is moving at a pace many of us can hardly keep up with. The world of work of a master slave relationship has gone. The world of organisations trying to maximise people’s discretionary effort, on one hand to increase productivity and welding the axe on the other, is gone. The world of spending countless money and analysis on identifying if employees are engaged is becoming redundant. The employee has moved on, as has the structure of organisations. Maybe the 78{01332a80e2e652688e18927fa9a6162580960d47bc08263a3993439d666dcd52} of managers who believe employee engagement is a priority are the ones that have an invested interest in continuing the myth.
