Employee Engagement – Maybe The Job Is Bad

Employee Engagement - 60's Style

Employee engagement ain’t coming back.  Somehow we have this nostalgia that employees used to be highly engaged.  I have trouble with that hypothesis based on my experience and observations.

Sure, our surveys of employee engagement continue to show declines, but what’s the benchmark and what are we measuring.  I’d say that disgruntled and disengaged employees surrounded my whole career as a corporate employee and manager.  The majority of these people hung in because they had to, not because they wanted to. 

I will admit that today we face a “social media generation” with aspirations that we haven’t seen since the SIXTIES.  Sure, today’s group is more self-important and less altruistic than their colleagues of half a century ago; but both reject inherited authority and want to be included.

A major difference that I see today is that jobs are less engaging than they were fifty years ago.  I see that the vast majority of our for-profit corporations are transactional behemoths.  The purpose of most jobs is: efficiency, consistency, and low risk.  Exactly what recruits are not looking for.

At least when I entered the workplace there was enough looseness that I could constantly define my job to keep me interested.  Maybe that’s the point about employee engagement today.  Maybe the jobs don’t provide room.

Let’s think about Daniel Pink for a moment and his claim that people want three things in their work (beyond basic hygiene): Purpose, Mastery, Autonomy.  Take a look at the jobs in your company – at all levels.  You’ll often find that:

• Purpose: is set within the clear context of profit, which is engaging for shareholders, but not the people who work for them; and even if a transcending mission statement is elaborated it is rarely role modeled.
• Mastery: is often seen as digging deep into the rules that govern a silo; not understanding the much more engaging relationships and flows that are horizontal.
• Autonomy: is seen as working within tight controls, not offering the gifts of innovation and creativity that are housed within all of us as humans.

On the other hand, maybe there is room in even the most boring job but employees don’t have the skills to make the job interesting.  They don’t know how to inject: purpose, mastery, and autonomy into their work.  For help they should turn to Shawn Acor and The Happiness Advantage.  Shawn gives principles and rules on how to change our mindset from “success = happiness” to “happiness = success.”

One thing I have concluded is that neither management nor HR is going to solve the Employee Engagement riddle.  That will only come from inside employees.  The role of the organization in facilitating this is to make the shortest line of sight possible between employees and what they really care about at work – their customers.

Innovation – The Link in the Virtuous Value Chain

Innovation Links Employees & Customers

I get tired of hearing that “70% of change initiatives fail.”  Firstly, I’m not sure of the context and accuracy of this urban myth.  Secondly, to the extent that it is true I don’t hear of many solutions other than the tautological: “we need better management of change.”

Since this 70% mantra has been around for more than a decade maybe its time to question why we haven’t solved the problem.  Let’s step back and look for other correlations and trends.  I see two:

• Employee Disengagement:  It’s astounding.  We’ve worked for decades to disconnect employees from their employers.  Now that we’ve hit all time lows in employee engagement we seem surprised.
• Customer Dissatisfaction:  No matter how hard we work at the customer experience we find that levels of customer loyalty keep dropping in this world of mobile “show-rooming” and social media.  Customers are now in charge of brands; not company’s.

We have produced a vicious cycle: 

Employee Disengagement->Customer Defection

My question is: “How can change, or any initiative, be successful within such organizational malaise?”  Shouldn’t we solve the organizational question before we work on the change question?

We haven’t failed at change; 

we’ve failed our employees!

So if we start with employees, how do we re-engage them?  This topic has received myriad attention in the past few years, but a lot less by way of results.  We know the answers, we just can’t figure out the implementation paradigm.  

For example, if we look to Daniel Pink we can find one slice of answers.  His research shows that engaged employees need three things: Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy.  Ok, that’s a good list, but how do we take action?  Well, I have a few thoughts.  Firstly, let’s look at Purpose.  My observation is that:

Employees don’t work for their employers; 

they work for their customers!

No matter how hard organizations try they just can’t remove the desire of most people to do a good job.  Very few people wake up and say “I want to do a bad job today.”  Yet, the drive for undisciplined profits and imposition of bureaucratic controls thwart the energy of people at work – except when they are directly involved in solving a problem for a customer.  How often have you heard a customer disdain an amorphous company but love the person who solved their problem.

So, customers give employees Purpose.  But what do we do about Mastery and Autonomy.  My answer is that we involve them in Innovation through:

• Skills.  Humans are creative by nature.  They need to regenerate and they love to bounce their ideas against other ideas.  However, often they just don’t know how to structure idea generation and synthesis.
• Means.  Employees need “Nike autonomy” – when it’s right for the customer “just do it.”  When the issue is higher than low hanging fruit we need mechanisms to register employee ideas, and get short term funding for experiments.  These tools are not a mystery in this time of technological open innovation.  

Change initiatives will succeed if we connect our employees to their customers.  Innovation is the link in this virtuous value chain:

Employee Engagement->Innovation->Customer Loyalty