Employee Disengagement

Employee engagement is a thing of the past.  It’s time to move on.  

“Why would I commit myself to a company that will ultimately lay me off?”  A young manager asked me this question last month.  I’m still struggling for an answer.

Why do we continue to delude ourselves about Employee Engagement?  We all know the numbers.  We know the trend.  Employees in the western world are disengaging from their companies at an accelerating rate – and this trend is catching on in the rest of the world.  Sure maybe Costco, Zappos, and Southwest Airlines are different, but for how long?

You can choose your study to show disengagement, but here’s a quote from a recent report: “In general (employee engagement) is down by 9% and in cases of some top-performers is down as much as 25%.  Even more worrying, 12% of top-performing employees are considering leaving their organizations and 17% confirm they are ‘uncertain’ about staying.”  These results come in light of the fact that:

• We all know there is a strong correlation between high employee engagement and strong financial performance, and
• We have been working on accelerating employee engagement for more than a decade.

So what’s going on here?  Well based on my experience and observations I have come to two main conclusions:

• We changed the rules of the game, and
• We’d better find new answers

1.     We Changed the Rules of the Game

The history of employee disengagement is well known so I won’t take up a lot of space here.

Basically the past 25 years have seen a thoughtful tearing down of many of the factors that attach people to their work.  We called the process “breaking the employee entitlement mentality”; however, it can also be a euphemism for “building a performance culture that focused employees on generating profits for the business and value for the shareholders.”

I'm not saying this was a bad thing.  I'm only observing that a consequence has been employee disengagement.  When we removed what we saw as “employee entitlement” we didn’t inject the “performance culture” with new ways to emotionally bind employees to their company.

2.     We’d Better Find New Answers

The last 25 years has seen a plethora of top-down people management solutions to the disengagement issue.

• We created Values statements that assert employees as our most valuable asset while our actions showed that we valued profits and low cost structures.
• We talked about talent pools and bench strength while delayering organizations thereby stripping them of institutional knowledge and mentoring capability.
• We implemented performance pay systems that set individuals against each other.
• We spoke of business opportunities while severing employees.
• We sent communication down a pipeline that got so cluttered that it got clogged.
• We conduted Employee Commitment surveys that resulted in mechanical solutions that only activated the employee immune system.

These initiatives haven’t worked.  We must stop polishing old solutions while hoping for different results.

We created disengagement and our current practices are reinforcing it.  Engagement will never again be anything more than temporary for small sets of employees who drift in and out of self-actualization at work.  However, that doesn’t mean that employees shouldn’t enjoy their work and be productive doing it.

I believe that we need to accept a new reality.  We need to open a discussion with employees to create a new manifesto about life at work.  I don’t have the complete answer but I think some of the elements are:

1.     Honesty:

Let’s just tell it like it is.  We’re in a global economy.  Business needs to survive if it is to provide opportunities to employees.  People understand this and understand that sometimes tough decisions must be made to protect the greater good.

2.     Customers:

Employees don’t work for a company anymore; they work for their customers.  Although employees understand the need for profits and shareholder value that does not motivate them.  Customers do.  Draw the shortest line possible between every employee and the end customer.

3.     Compensation:

Delink appraisals and compensation.  Get rid  of performance pay.  Structure pay against the market and distribute success through a bonus pool.  If someone believes they are underpaid then ask them to “bring an offer.”  It’s a free market.  Openly encourage employees to test the market.

4.     Respect:

The only commitment most companies can make to their employees to day is to severe them with respect.  Severance should not be an event of shame and rejection.  Severance is today’s early retirement.  Let’s treat it that way.

We need to add to this dialogue.  We need to find a replacement for employee engagement.  We need a construct for “employment” that matches the world we work in.