Beyond Engagement: Do Engagement Surveys Work?
Leaders in politics and business have never appeared more distant from those they lead. Achieving a higher level of engagement is a pressing need, but is an engagement survey the answer?
In vogue
Employee engagement surveys have become widespread over the last ten years, so much so that virtually every large company deploys one. Globally it is estimated that close to $720m is invested every year by companies with the specific intention of improving engagement. The annual engagement survey has become almost a ‘fashion’ and some academics such as David Guest, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Human Resource Management at King’s College London, have pointed out the risks of such fashion-led behaviours. Guest has postulated that:
“Most HR people are dedicated followers of fashion… if [an engagement survey] promotes the right kind of behaviour because it has become a fashion that is no bad thing. The risk is it becomes faddish, and that’s what has tended to happen.”
It is arguable that the current fashion may be failing to reap positive returns for the organisations that conduct engagement surveys but, perhaps more importantly, failing to deliver any tangible benefits to the employees deemed to be the primary beneficiaries of the investment. In fact, the situation could be worse still – if such programmes are pursued without conviction by the senior management teams who put their names to them, they could actually have a NEGATIVE impact. Employees will begin to perceive the exercise to be more about ‘box ticking’ and corporate PR than indicative of an actual commitment to improving their work experience, suggesting disenfranchisement.
In politics
This kind of stakeholder disenfranchisement if it exists has parallels in politics. The UK voting population are increasingly disenfranchised from politicians perceived to be acting in their own best interests for the short-term. Voters are hungry for demonstrations of genuine conviction and integrity from politicians in tackling the pressing economic and social issues which the UK faces.
“As these recent elections show, economic anger, fuelled by perceptions that our institutions and companies are run for the short-term gain of their senior employees and shareholders, is far from abstract. This is much more than a philosophical argument about overpaid executives: a lack of long-term investment in listed companies may be the primary cause of falling productivity over the past decade.”
Source: Tracy Blackwell & Liam Byrne, The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2018
In perspective
The political value of a successfully engaged population is re-election in the short-term. In the long-term, if that engagement happens around a winning social and economic strategy then everyone prospers.
The CORPORATE value of an engaged employee population is similar. The result is a team pulling in the right direction behind a successful strategy which delivers benefits for leaders, employees, and shareholders. The logic for more engaged employees sounds convincing, but is the value impact proven?
Where’s the evidence?
In fact, the evidence around the impact on business performance is often contradictory. Rob Briner, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Queen Mary’s University of London, argues that:
“There are lots of counterexamples where people hate their jobs and perform well or people love their jobs and are super engaged but don’t do very much! A US research study found that in over 40% of organisations, LOWER performers were actually MORE engaged than high and middle performers.”
Aon Hewitt in a report several years ago evidenced a positive correlation between employee engagement and total shareholder returns as do other reports using different data and statistical correlations, but as we all know statistics can prove almost anything.
Source: Aon Hewitt, Trends in Global Employee Engagement 2011
What does it mean?
One big problem is that no one can agree what ‘engagement’ actually means, as Rob Briner suggests:
“Part of the problem is a plethora of definitions, many of them contradictory.”
The UK government’s report “Engaging Success” as far back as 2008 came across over FIFTY different ways of defining engagement. Briner has a point when he argues that:
“Engagement [studies] allow a group of people to talk about engagement and feel as if they are talking about the same thing. But how can you talk seriously about trying to improve something when you cannot agree on what it MEANS?”
This openness to interpretation makes engagement analyses something of a lottery. WHAT is a company asking its employees to ENGAGE WITH?
Its vision?
Their employees’ own work?
Their colleagues?
A broader expression of corporate culture?
Perhaps as a result of this lack of clarity, the standard engagement survey and any management interventions and investments responding to its findings represent a very blunt instrument. Ideally, survey analysis leads to clear diagnostics, a plan of action to address the issue and opportunity areas unearthed and focused investment to fund an action plan. However, we observe that such targeted diagnosis, investments, and reviews are worryingly rare.
We believe that a lack of clarity about what an organisation is specifically trying to achieve is in large part responsible for the lack of traction many experts perceive.
We will look at this area in more detail in our next article - ‘Beyond Engagement - What’s The Point?’ - which will be published on our website in July.