The Truth About Employee Engagement

Martha I. Finney

Take a moment, if you will, to imagine the perfect day at work. By the time you arrive, everyone is already there. In fact, you’re the last one to show up, and you’re a half hour early! Other than the sound of fresh coffee brewing in the break room, the only other noise coming from that area is the sound of laughing as two coworkers share the fun of remembering the great day they had yesterday. Another conversation is focused on exploring ways that your team can put more quality, accuracy, functionality, and affordability into your flagship product that has already received every major industry award out there.

You sit down at your desk and log on. After a quick glance at the day’s spreadsheet to confirm that all projects are ahead of schedule and on budget, you check your email. You’re thrilled to see your email inbox is crammed with messages from exuberant customers (many of the names you recognize from months and years of doing repeat business with them) thanking your department for yet another fantastic job. There are also at least 50 résumés there, all sent from your employees’ friends who want to be considered for the next—rare—opening. And, look at that! An email from the CEO letting you know that you’re in line for this year’s Chairman’s Award for best performance in the company. Again!

You look up from your monitor and around the room at everyone who works with you. You know something meaningful about every one of them. You’re quite sure by the way they’re so dedicated to their work that each one of them must have read What Color Is Your Parachute?, done all the self-assessment exercises, and determined that their mission and purpose in life can be best fulfilled in your company, in your department. They all love their jobs. They are known these days as engaged employees.

Engaged employees are everywhere. And they have these general traits in common:

• Engaged employees believe in the mission of their organization.

• Engaged employees love what they do and understand how their jobs serve the bigger picture.

• Engaged employees don’t need discipline; they need clarity, communication, and consistency.

• Engaged employees augment their skill sets with positive attitudes, focus, will, enthusiasm, creativity, and endurance.

• Engaged employees can be trusted, and they trust each other.

• Engaged employees respect their managers.

• Engaged employees know that their managers respect them.

• Engaged employees are a constant source of great new ideas.

• Engaged employees will give you their best.

Engaged employees are a manager’s dream. Put them to work on a clearly defined mission or goal and set them free to do what they do best. The hardest part for you is the possibility that you may have to change your mind about your own skills and assumptions as their leader. Engaged employees can smell stupid management tricks a mile away. And nothing will disengage them faster than the experience of being handled. They only need to be lead with inspiration.

Not everyone has the potential of being engaged, of course. Some people still just want to punch in, punch out, and cash their check. But don’t assume you can tell who is what—especially if you’ve spent your past years driving poor performers. With most people, there’s a little gem of engagement potential glowing deep inside. Find that gem, and lead with that. You could find yourself leading a transformed department—and loving your own job even more. With engaged employees doing their work—and doing it exceedingly well—your biggest problem as manager may end up being what to do with all that extra time.

You Get the Best by Giving the Best

Every year, the popular software company Intuit gives itself a massive performance review. While Intuit is also always interested in how it performs for its customers and shareholders, the focus of this particular survey is how well it serves its employees. More than 60 questions are engineered to answer one core question: How well do we live up to our promise of providing the environment in which our employees can feel great about doing their absolute best work? Intuit wants to know how well it’s doing engaging its employees.

Intuit also has been learning what it gets in return for giving its best. At Intuit, highly engaged employees are

• 2 times as likely to be high-performing employees

• 7 times more likely to feel appreciated for what they do for the customers

• 10 times more likely to come forward with an innovative idea

• 1.5 times more likely to stay, even if they are offered a better job elsewhere

Even though Intuit is headquartered in Silicon Valley—famous for the many ways companies trick out their workplaces like playgrounds with free latte bars and gourmet restaurants—its leadership knows that getting the best from its employees isn’t about the toys and the free eats. Getting the best is about building a culture of trust, connection, growth, and service. That culture is sustained and enlivened by its managers one person at a time, one interaction at a time. That’s employee engagement.

There are two ways of looking at the relatively new field of employee engagement. There is the positive way. Then there is, of course, the negative way. Let’s start with the negative way first. Disengaged employees are destructively expensive to have on staff. In the United States alone, they cost as much as $350 billion in low productivity. Their attitude also poisons the day-to-day experience of working at your company, chasing away your best employees—not to mention your best customers.

Here’s the good news: Companies with a highly engaged culture have shown consistent growth and profitability over recent years, while their low engaged counterparts report declines in market performance. One study has shown that companies with 60% to 100% engaged employees report an average total shareholder return of 20.2%. But companies with less than 40% engagement show a –9.6% return.

When you do the cost-benefit analysis, employee engagement is so cheap it’s practically free. It can begin anywhere within the org chart. Certainly, the experts will correctly say that an engaged culture must be created at the very top as an essential value to have any chance of thriving organization-wide. But, in truth, the engaged culture lives and dies in the moment-to-moment decisions and behaviors of supervisors and managers. So it only stands to reason that engagement can be born anywhere inside the company.

According to the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, up to 35% of the difference in business results can be explained by the day-to-day differences in the workplace cultures created by managers. So you, as the manager, can make it happen for your department, no matter where you are inside your company. The pay-off will be immediate—even immediately visible—and, ultimately, measurable.

Does this payoff mean you must bring in free donuts and fresh sushi every day? No. Do you need to allocate budget and space for a half-pipe for skateboard practice outside the break room? No. Does it mean that you have to show personal interest and concern in the well-being of each and every one of your employees as individuals? Yes—even on those days when you’re so busy or preoccupied you’d rather just spring for that skateboard half-pipe.

If you’re managing people, you’re standing squarely on the intersection between corporate, mission-critical objectives and the personal ambitions, passions, and drives of your employees. If there’s going to be a 30% difference between your department and your colleagues’ departments, you can either take the blame or take the credit.

The choice is entirely yours. And so is the power to make a real difference—one person at a time.

It’s Not Money That Motivates

Don’t get the wrong idea. This doesn’t let you off the hook for fairly compensating your employees for the work they do. (Anxiety and growing resentment that come from being broke can be very distracting.) You can adequately—even lavishly—pay your employees, but if you overlook one most essential engagement tool, this is what you’ll get: ho-hum workers driving around in expensive cars wondering how they can fill this odd, empty feeling inside.

People yearn for purpose—for doing something that’s important, that engages their full potential in a way that’s meaningful beyond their personal bank accounts. And that makes your job as their manager a little harder. You may not have as much control over their compensation and benefits program as you might like to have. But you do have control over how inspired they are and how connected they feel to the mission their jobs serve.

It’s not about the company. It’s about what the company is doing to make the world a better place. This may seem like an overly romantic or grandiose stretch but, in truth, most people’s standards are realistic and modest. Few aspire to be the one to save the world from the Evil Genius with his finger on the button. Most people want to feel that thanks to their efforts, the world is a little better off by nightfall than it was when the day started.

And the truth is, it is! You just have to help them figure out how what they do makes it happen that way. The first thing, though, is for you to understand how your company improves the world—and then how your job serves that mission. With precious few exceptions (drug dealers and professional assassins are the only two jobs that come to mind at the moment), every paying job improves the day—or the world—for someone else. This is because money is motivated to change hands for one or more of only three reasons:

• To relieve pain

• To restore hope

• To bring beauty into the world

Once you’ve connected your own job to one or more of these reasons, your next job is to help your employees make this connection for themselves. And that’s going to require some imagination.

It’s easy to show a mason that he’s doing more than just building a wall; he’s making a cathedral. It’s even easy to show a hospital janitor that he’s doing more than just mopping the floor for the fortieth time that day; he’s saving lives. But this same connection can be made to elevate the vision and attitudes of all employees, no matter what they do. A music teacher looks out at a room full of snot-nosed kids and wonders if she can do it another day, another year. Mozart was once a snot-nosed kid. And look how well he turned out. More recently, a high-producing salesman who traveled the world marketing telecommunications systems for airports quit one day because he felt that he was born for greatness. Airport electronics just wasn’t doing it for him. No one took a moment to help him see that his product helps loved ones fly to one another safely. And that when a traveler collapses on a concourse from a coronary, the telecommunications system kicks in and, consequently, EMTs arrive in seconds, saving a precious life.

Motivation, for this salesman, was not about winning the game of numbers for the quarter. It was about making a positive difference in people’s everyday lives, which was exactly what he was doing. His boss just didn’t help him see it that way. Motivation is about making a positive difference in people’s everyday lives.

Every job carries with it myriad ways employees can relieve pain, restore hope, and bring beauty into the world. Helping your employees make the connection between their daily deliverables and enduring meaning may not be the easiest, most obvious conversation you can have. But, with a little one-on-one exploration, you’ll find that connection together. It could be with the product itself, the customers themselves, the community, the coworkers, even the employee’s family, and the dream future your employee’s job with your company is helping them realize. And the conversation you have with your best employees exploring those ways is many times more pleasant than the one that begins with, “Is there any way we can change your mind about leaving? More money, perhaps?”

Employee Engagement Isn’t for Sissies

It’s easy to underestimate the full impact of employee engagement and how it’s going to challenge you, not only as you implement it, but also as it helps you carry your company’s values into the future. In its simplest definition, you could say that employee engagement is about getting the absolute best effort from your employees by making them feel good about the work they do. What could be so bad (or difficult) about that?

Employee engagement is not a namby-pamby trip to Candyland—just another employee commitment fad. Trivialize employee engagement, and you’re going to be playing the “hell” edition of Twister. And that won’t be any fun at all. Not one little bit. If you take employee engagement seriously, you take on a no halfway, no turning back, high adventure of finding out just how far your personal and organizational courage will take you. Here’s why you had better be really sure you want to do this: Once you’re in, there’s no getting out. If you’re going to do engagement right, you must go public with your commitments to align your company’s actions to its stated set of values and mission. Once you go public, you’re stuck with your promise. If you ever withdraw that commitment, you would break valuable bonds of trust, and in the process, rip out a lot of heart and talent. Recovery would be long and painful—if you could achieve it at all.

You have to take a good hard look at yourself—You can make a list of ideal values for your company, your department, and your own personal life as idly as leafing through an up-market catalog. Everything looks so delightful and so within reach. But fantasy and real world collide when you tally the potential costs of every must-have. You have to decide what you can’t live without and what is a luxury. Which values do you prize over all other values? Which would you quickly abandon when times get tough? Know the difference between the two sets, get real with yourself, and base your commitments on your limitations.

You have to be prepared to choose passion over profit—There will be times when the most expedient response to an issue is the one that will make you money. If that choice violates the engagement bond that you’ve established with your organization, you will start paying for that so-called profitable choice almost instantaneously as your actively disengaged employees rise up or go underground, which could be even worse.

You can’t finesse or ignore the numbers—Companies that are serious about improving their culture will invest in high-quality, well-designed employee surveys. There will be numbers that relate directly to the way you manage your direct reports. When the scores come back, you have to face them head on and then let your people know exactly how you intend to improve your performance to serve them better.

You must be willing to cut loose the star players—You will face some agonizing decisions as you move forward with your engagement initiative. One of those choices may be what to do with the bullies who are also the ones bringing in the big numbers. The star players who are the top performers in every aspect of their jobs—except that they make life miserable for others—are more expensive than you know. They cost the company in reputation as the best employer, and they chase away employees who know that they can do just as well elsewhere and be happier. They may even stain the company’s external reputation by the way they treat customers and vendors. Getting rid of these people will be painful (especially regarding your department’s performance), but keeping them will be even more painful.

You must keep the faith over the din of the skeptics—You’ve just given your starting lineup the boot. Your numbers are dipping (temporarily). Your quarterly report requires some explaining. The stockholders are becoming disenchanted with this whole engagement thing. You think, “If I hear the word ‘values’ one more time, I’m going to quit.” That’s when you have to keep the faith and be willing to stand toe-to-toe with the skeptics (especially the one in the mirror) and remind them that no one said that engagement was going to be easy.