Employee engagement is at or near the top of most surveys that cover the concerns of HR leaders. Almost everyone is enthusiastic about the concept and its program. However, there is far too little focus on the problems or issues related to engagement.
My research and experience with HR leaders have helped me compile a list of the potential issues, problems, and concerns that should be considered by anyone involved in employee engagement.
The following article highlights each of these potential issues in bullet point format.
The Top Problems With Employee Engagement Programs
The top potential issues/problems are split into five categories. And within each category, the most impact problem areas are listed first.
Issues Related to Proving Its Business Impact
Engagement is not productivity or an output– using an analogy, engagement may be smoke but it is not fire. The primary concern of business leaders is increasing productivity, output, or innovation.
Unfortunately, employee engagement, employee satisfaction, emotional intelligence, etc. may contribute to productivity, but they are not productivity.
An employee may be fully engaged and emotionally tied to the firm but without the proper training, leaders, resources, etc. no amount of commitment will improve their outputs.
Emotional states are hard to understand and measure, while behaviors and productivity are not. A superior approach is one that looks broadly at all of the factors that increase productivity, that lower labor costs, and that increase the value of labor outputs and innovation.
An unclear definition– if something can’t be clearly defined, then it can’t be accurately measured. And there are literally dozens of contradictory definitions of “employee engagement”.
And because of these contradictory definitions (and measures), it is hard to accurately compare the results from external statistical comparison studies.
The Conference Board defines employee engagement as “a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work”.
Using this definition, the results of high engagement are “stronger emotional feelings” and” increased effort.” Although these two factors may be important, other factors like a bad manager, the wrong skills, and improper training may neutralize any benefit from engagement.
Some engagement surveys include multiple factors (i.e. satisfaction, performance, sentiment, trust, morale, happiness, burnout, commitment) but many of these may be overlapping or duplication of the same factor.
Engagement may be a Byproduct, not a cause — literally every engagement study I have seen that attempts to connect engagement with productivity, retention, customer satisfaction, being a top performer, etc.
makes the connection using statistical correlations. But don’t jump to any unwarranted conclusions.
Fortunately, any business analysts, statistician, or CFO can tell you that correlations can never prove cause and effect. Providing correlations as proof of cause and effect is a stretch of both mathematics and logic.
The improvement of workplace factors can also explain the few cases where rising engagement scores actually preceded a later improvement in business results.
If an organization changes the way it managed (i.e. increased overtime, eliminated pay and hiring freezes, moved in better managers, opened communications and offered more training) and employees see new products in the pipeline, this better treatment, improved management, and the resulting optimism would increase employee engagement and eventually company performance.
But it would be a mistake to assume that, even though the increase in engagement preceded the improvement in company performance, that the engagement caused the improvement in company performance. Engagement may be a byproduct of other more impact people-management factors.
In many cases, it is not the engagement that is driving the productivity but vice versa.
The ROI May Be Low – the cost of employee surveys themselves are high, because in addition to the survey costs, each employee must spend paid time filling them out. The time spent analyzing, interpreting, and presenting the results can also be significant.
This coupled with the fact that any “action” to improve engagement must be implemented company-wide makes it a significant possibility that the costs outweigh the benefits.
None of the existing efforts to prove its value include employee time in their cost calculations, and no one has published a “split sample” to prove the dollar value of the before-and-after benefits in a corporation.
Consider the possibility that the time and money spent could have a greater impact if it were focused directly (rather than indirectly) on productivity and innovation.
Outside factors may influence engagement — we know from morale and employee satisfaction surveys that many factors outside of the workplace influence these ratings.
The unemployment rate, the cost of living, the mortgage crisis, and family crises are but a few of the many factors that influence an employee’s relative feelings toward their company.
In some cases, external attacks or bad press for the company may actually cause employees to “circle the wagons” and to increase their loyalty and engagement.
Certainly no one in HR can take direct credit if one or more external factors are the reason why the scores improved.
High levels of engagement may not prohibit turnover — at least one study by Accenture showed a weak connection between engagement and turnover.
That study found that 43% of the most “highly engaged workers have a weak or lukewarm intention to stay”.
So do your own research within your own firm to prove that engagement causes people to stay, work harder, or be more productive.
You can perform extremely well without an emotional tie — there is plenty of hard evidence from sports and entertainment that individuals can perform extremely well even without an emotional tie to the organization.
In fact, the emotional tie was so strong that it clouded their perception and resulted in group-think.
Corporate culture “antibodies” may also attack new hires that have yet to prove their loyalty.
Why measure emotion rather than behaviors? — I find it interesting that professionals who demand a focus on “actions and behaviors” during behavioral interviewing are quite comfortable relying on emotional states when it comes to employee engagement.
Using outside results to prove business impact may be difficult — because so many different surveys with different questions are used by outside organizations, it is difficult to use some external results to prove that increasing engagement increases productivity and retention.
Using a survey vendor that also services many of your competitors may help to mitigate this problem. Issues Related to the Actions You Take to Improve Engagement
Results may not be actionable — employee engagement is measured through anonymous employee surveys. Unfortunately, most of those surveys only report the employee’s perception of their level of engagement, but not the causes or factors that “caused” the level of engagement.
And even if you have evidence that the scores can change as a result of management actions, leaders have to guess or use trial and error to determine what factors to change and how to change them in order to increase engagement levels.
Identifying the most powerful actions may be difficult — we know from the Hawthorne studies that merely paying attention to workers may increase their satisfaction and productivity levels.
If that effect is present here, it may make little difference which action you select to improve low engagement, because it is the mere act of taking action and paying attention that increases engagement scores.
The time it takes for actions to increase engagement — there are ethical questions as to whether corporations should be changing the emotional states of its employees.
However, if your goal is to increase engagement, first you must know which actions directly improve engagement, but you must also know how long it takes.
Issues Related to the Survey Process
Unreliable responses – engagement surveys suffer the same problems as all employee surveys. As with most surveys, it is also possible that excited and disgruntled employees will go out of their way to fill them out, or not-very-busy employees with idle time will disproportionately fill them out.
Anonymous surveys mean you don’t know who to target almost all engagement surveys are anonymous, in order to improve honesty.
Unless you can connect the scores to individual business units, it’s almost impossible to tell if a successful management effort to increase scores in that unit actually improved the unit’s productivity and output.
Manager Issues
In addition, employee engagement can also be an “orphan” program within HR.
Simply reporting engagement scores without fully explaining their impact can result in a “that’s interesting” response from managers and employees.
Managers receive weekly reports on productivity, output, quality, etc. but none of those weekly reports include employee engagement scores.
Issues Related to Engagement Program Administration
However, if you could prove that you reached them, including “business impact goals” like improving productivity, revenue, product quality, or customer service would increase the likelihood that your work would get the attention of senior management.
Many engagement efforts also use a single metric or measure the company-wide engagement score.
Final Thoughts
However, their actual business impact is often lessened by the fact that those running them and those who provide vendor services have not done their due diligence in identifying and solving the many potential problems that have been presented here.
Rather than emotionally defending a program, if you expect to become a true business partner, a superior approach is to apply lean HR tools to critically assess and improve every component of the program.
