If you have been on LinkedIn or listened to any business news lately I am sure you are familiar with the term “quiet quitting” which has received a ton of media attention lately. If you have heard about this already then ignore the following definition, but to define quiet quitting really is just a renaming of employee disengagement where employees no longer aim for going above and beyond in their job or position. The attention surrounding “quiet quitting” ties in perfectly to the topic of the month, Employee Engagement!
So what is employee engagement and why should you care? After doing some research around a definition and realizing there isn’t something that is officially accepted.
The definition per Gallup is “Engaged employees are those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.”.
Employee Engagement has been around since the 1990’s and prior to that the focus was on employee satisfaction. The term came from Willam Kahn’s study the “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work” (Kahn, 1990), where he defines the coupling of your employees work and parts of their identity to have more creative fulfilling work and the opposite of removal of this to have simply robotic work. So the question becomes why should you care.
Employee engagement has been in the focus of HR for a while. It is no simple task to run a successful engagement survey, analyze the results to build effective action plans to improve engagement within the organization, and finally implement the action plans to improve what you have learned from the survey. The effects of caring about employee engagement are shocking though. Based on studies/cases focusing on employee engagement it has been shown to boost productivity, improve customer service, improve innovation, and finally lower attrition. While none of these are direct revenue generators, depending on the size of your organization, reducing attrition can save your organization thousands to millions of dollars.
A quick example, if your organization has a 10,000 population with a 10% attrition rate you’ll lose about 1000 people a year. If we assume turnover costs of $50,000, the quick math is 1000* 50,000= 50,000,000. Fifty million is a massive cost to any business, and utilizing employee engagement to reduce this by a percent or two can have major implications for the organization’s bottom line.
So you’re interested now, but don’t know where to start?
The first place you need to start is creating a plan and getting buy-in from senior leadership, because if you do a survey and you don’t have buy-in nothing will change and the results will be rationalized away. Employee Engagement is usually measured by surveying the employee population. Next, define a budget for the project and find the correct people in HR to run and manage the survey, and if that’s not an option within your organization there are still options for you. Then, find a vendor to either provide a survey, run one, or just provide guidance. The main vendors you will probably find are Qualtrics, Gallup, Gartner, 15Five, and most consulting firms that offer people analytics will be able to assist. If you are savvy enough you can also create your own from a company that offers surveys online such as SurveyMonkey etc. Then, you will need to advertise the survey to the employee population and keep the survey open for 2-3 weeks to get the most participation but keep the time period relevant. Participation is crucial as if you don’t get enough, it is hard to implement any change based on the results as they might lack information.
Once the survey is complete, depending on the vendor you use, the results you receive may need different amounts of cleaning and interpretation. The cleaned interpreted results lead to probably one of the most challenging parts of working with employee engagement, actually implementing changes within the organization. One of the experiences that you will more than likely run into communicating the results is: leadership challenging results that show the organization scoring poorly overall or in specific areas. This will always be a challenge and I would suggest always starting with exploring the results with leadership and getting clarification on the results that were surprising to them and working through their issues first. This part is the most crucial of the last step because if you don’t get acceptance from leadership, implementing change is going to be almost impossible and that is the only way employee engagement improves within your organization. Other than the challenge of accepting poor results, working to build an action plan and implement the changes that need to occur to improve employee engagement within each team is your last step. To build a solid plan for improvement in employee engagement is dependent on the survey that you use and support you have from the vendor. Some are end to end solutions while others have guidance on changes to make and some provide nothing. I want to stress that running a successful survey is not vendor dependent, choosing one that provides an end to end solution only makes your job easier. What it takes to have a successful survey is two fold. 1)Running a survey to provide results that can be formatted in a way that creates an easily understandable delivery method of information gleaned from the survey. 2) Leadership acceptance of results and alignment with the current organization’s strategic goals. Finally, this project is not a one and done. It requires a commitment to continue to improve and grow, after the first cycle of testing and implementing changes the goal is to retest at frequency to see if the changes have created improvement and rinse and repeat but not survey fatigue your organization.
Besides the recent media focus on quiet quitting, improving employee engagement is absolutely a worthwhile pursuit within your organization. It improves productivity, decreases attrition, and definitely improves employee morale. This all translates to a cost reduction and bottom line benefit. I want to leave you with one thought that I haven’t necessarily tested but always think about is that if you do a better job of exactly what is expected of an employee, engagement becomes less of an issue.
Bibliography
Kahn WA (1990), ʹPsychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at workʹ, Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724
Greg Perry: Quiet Quitting, Toronto Star, 26 Aug. 2022, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorial_cartoon/2022/08/26/greg-perry-quiet-quitting.html. Accessed 15 Sept. 2022.