OTSP #8: Employee Engagement Matters. It Is Not the Goal.

Employee engagement is often treated as a goal — or worse, as a standalone annual survey score that needs to be nudged upward to placate the CEO. But engagement is not an end in itself. It is a condition that makes employees more likely to flag problems, share knowledge, question bad instructions, help colleagues, and contribute discretionary effort. Measuring it can be valuable, but only if an organization asks the right questions, receives honest answers, and acts on what it learns. In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins examine what employee engagement really means, the limitations of standardized surveys, and why disengagement is a leading indicator while turnover is a lagging one. They also explore the role communicators can play — without assuming responsibility for factors they cannot control — and why equipping managers to listen, provide feedback, and translate organizational messages for their teams may be one of Communication’s most effective contributions. Links from this episode: The Big Shift — A Pivot from “Engaged” to “Effective” Employee Engagement Is Not Dead. It Has A Messaging Problem Employee Engagement is Toast. What’s Next? Raw Transcript: Mark Dollins: Hey, Shel, how are you doing? Shel Holtz: I am doing great. I’m heading out on vacation tomorrow, and I’m ready for it. Mark Dollins: I’m right behind you next week, so it’s good that we were able to connect. Something interesting happened in my family that got me thinking about a topic we could cover today. I have a family member who is seriously thinking about getting engaged, and my wife and I are coming up on 40 years since we got engaged. So, let’s talk about engagement, right? But you and I have a very different orientation to engagement in the world of employee communication, and I thought we could talk about that. I’m going to start with something fundamental that a lot of people struggle with: defining it. There’s a big-picture version of engagement, but for employee communicators, what we need to consider can be very specific to an organization or even to a person within that organization. What is your 30,000-foot view? Shel Holtz: I have heard so many definitions of engagement. I’ve heard that engagement is what enables employees to bring their whole selves to work. I’ve also heard pushback on that: Who would want to bring their whole self to work? There are parts of yourself you don’t necessarily want people to see at work. I’ve also heard that engagement means bringing discretionary effort to the job—going above and beyond. Of all the definitions I’ve heard, one I like is the analogy to a car. If the transmission is engaged, the car is moving. If the transmission is disengaged, it’s idling. How do you want your organization to be moving? You want it going forward, not standing still. Before we jump into this discussion in more detail, I want to invite everybody watching or listening to share your comments with us. You can do that in the show notes, where there’s a field for comments, or wherever we post updates announcing a new episode. We would love to discuss your comments in an upcoming episode. Mark Dollins: That’s how we learn, too, right, Shel? We enjoy talking, but we also enjoy learning from others, so please share your comments. Moving on to the broader topic of engagement, I think about some of the studies that have been done. Gallup, obviously, spends a lot of time focusing on the details of employee engagement. This year, it released a report saying that about 20% of the global workforce was engaged at work last year. In 2022, its comparison point, the figure was 23%. So it’s starting to fall again toward almost COVID-level territory. Gallup is quite confident in its reporting and says the margin of error is less than 0.1%. The report makes some interesting points about the value of paying attention to engagement. It says engaged people are 69% less likely to burn out at work, half as likely to be job hunting and 69% more likely to be “thriving” in life, even beyond work. Gallup takes a very holistic approach. As you noted earlier, Shel, it measures many factors in determining what it means to be engaged: whether employees know what’s expected of them, whether they have the right materials and equipment, whether they are allowed to do what they do best and whether they receive recognition. The list goes on and on. As you think about this big-picture world of capital-E Engagement, what are you finding with your clients and in your own organization? Shel Holtz: We conduct an engagement survey every year. We don’t use one of the canned engagement surveys; we have a bespoke survey. After we get the results, we can easily reconfigure the data, batch questions into categories and see where we stand on broader areas that matter to the organization’s leadership. More importantly, we can identify opportunities to improve and come back to employees to say, “These are the things we’re going to change as a result.” We can also narrow the results down. There may be a very low score in one part of the organization and a much better score elsewhere. That enables us to take action locally and work with the leaders of those groups to make improvements that will lift the rest of the organization. Mark Dollins: You’re raising a critical point about how employee communicators should think about engagement: Understand what’s important to your organization. Just as there are different definitions of engagement, what management and executives value will differ from one organization to another. In my experience working with many organizations, an organizational-health or pulse survey typically has a finite set of perhaps eight to 10 questions that someone—usually the chief people officer—has decided matter most and represent what the organization cares about for engagement. Here’s where it gets interesting for employee communicators. We want to help, be accountable and deliver results that help employees feel engaged. But then we sign up for things without understanding what we’re responsible for or whether we can influence them. Many questions, for example, are about what a manager does. I can’t control all time and space for every manager. But if we spend time determining which questions reflect outcomes we can influence, that’s where we should focus. Sometimes we’re behind the eight ball because we don’t have a say in the questions being asked. Some questions are worded so broadly that you could drive a truck through them. Take a question about understanding the company mission. People may interpret that in different ways. Some will think it means the enterprise mission; some, their functional leader’s mission; and others, their team leader’s vision of where the team is going. You end up with a mixture of feedback you can’t meaningfully act on. There are three lessons here. First, understand what the questions are. Second, choose what you’re able to influence. Third, make sure the questions are worded in a way that can produce actionable information. Shel Holtz: I think that’s important. I’m actively involved in developing the questions for our survey every year. Most of them don’t change because we want to conduct longitudinal measurement and see whether we’ve improved or declined from previous years or whether a trend is emerging. But we introduce new questions, and when we identify an issue with the way a question was worded, we fix it for the next survey. I definitely have influence there. It’s not just Communication that uses the survey. It’s a significant input for Human Resources and for leadership in how they lead the organization. Part of the process is parceling out the data to the people who can act on it, even if Communication can’t. Mark Dollins: I love hearing that you have a seat at the table because, in many organizations where I’ve worked or consulted, those questions are sacrosanct. No one touches them, or changing them requires an act of God. That puts a communicator in a difficult position: How can I be accountable for changing an outcome if I have no say in how the question is worded? What did you do to earn that seat at the table and that influence, Shel? Shel Holtz: I’ve been involved with our engagement survey since we first launched it. I had experience with engagement surveys before, and that led to my role. There is an engagement-survey industry, and I think that industry has diminished the perceived value of engagement for many people. A lot of people “study for the test.” It’s engagement-survey time, leadership wants a high engagement score and the boss tells employees how to answer so they won’t get in trouble for contributing to a lower score. That’s not helpful. We need sincere answers. We need people to tell the truth when they respond. Look at Gallup’s Q12 survey, for example. One question that drives me crazy is, “Do you have a best friend at work?” It’s not one of my favorite engagement questions. I understand the rationale and why it’s there, but I don’t think that really drives engagement. Some people want to come to work, do their jobs and go home. They don’t want to go out for a beer after work or do the axe-throwing team-building activity. That doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. Other things drive engagement besides wanting to party with your colleagues. Mark Dollins: For communicators who aren’t in your position and are trying to navigate the questions being asked and what they’re responsible for, my advice is to keep asking why: Why are we asking this question, and what do we expect to get from it? Digging deeper with those “why” questions can help communicators understand the thinking. If the questions come from the CHRO or someone else in HR, ask, “Help me understand why we’re asking this. Why do you think it’s so important?” Push a little. Healthy discernment—and sometimes healthy debate—will give us better information for making informed communication decisions. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Part of the problem is that many organizations think engagement is the goal—the outcome they’re seeking—rather than a condition that needs to exist for the organization to achieve its goals and outcomes. Think about what disengaged people don’t do. They don’t flag a problem early. They don’t help a colleague, share what they know, question a bad instruction or stay late when it matters. These are effectiveness behaviors that don’t show up on a decision-rights audit. Some people who are critical of engagement as a metric say what we really need is competence. But a competent, disengaged employee is the one updating a résumé. Mike Klein, who has written about his objections to engagement as a metric, says people vote with their feet. He’s absolutely right—but disengagement is the leading indicator. Turnover is the lagging indicator. Mark Dollins: Exactly. By the time you get to attrition, it’s costly. It’s better to intercede where possible than to wait for those outcomes, because that doesn’t help anybody. Shel Holtz: Communication plays a significant role in engagement. It starts with explaining why we’re asking employees to complete the survey. Then it involves sharing the results, helping people understand what they mean and communicating what the organization will do about them. Mark, you’ve written two books about communication and engagement. What do you see as Communication’s leading role in driving, supporting or sustaining engagement? Mark Dollins: Manager influence on employee behavior is critical. Employee communicators can serve the interests of engagement by working with managers—especially middle managers and frontline managers. That’s where we see higher turnover rates and where professionals often lack the skills or training they need to support stronger engagement on their teams. We spend a lot of time on general employee communication, but if we don’t focus on and equip and empower leaders—all the way out to the front line—we’re doing our organizations a disservice. That is where the big levers get pulled: in day-to-day interactions. You’ve heard the expression that employees don’t leave companies; they leave managers. It comes down to that relationship: whether employees feel informed, equipped and empowered, and whether the mission is clear. All of those things are funneled through leaders to the front line. We have to invest time there. I have a couple of chapters in my books about this because I feel so passionately about it. Organizations that do this well typically have lower attrition and higher engagement. Shel Holtz: I’m a big fan of Engage for Success, the UK movement working to elevate engagement in UK organizations. David MacLeod, one of the people behind it, and I were both speakers at a conference in Poland probably 13 or 14 years ago. Engage for Success has four enablers of engagement, and I like that framework better than any other I’ve seen. One of those enablers is engaging managers. It’s absolutely critical to have managers who engage with their people. My problem with many managers is that they were promoted into the role based on their performance as individual contributors. They hit the top of their pay range, and the way to promote them and give them a higher paycheck is to make them managers. Then they don’t receive the training, resources or help they need to learn how to manage. They are just suddenly in charge of a team. Mark Dollins: There’s a corollary for employee communicators: We often don’t get the resources or bandwidth to support managers in those ways. We tend to focus on content: “Let’s give them the message.” We don’t spend enough time asking, “Do you have the skill to deliver this message meaningfully? Let us help you.” If we’re thinking ahead about where employee communicators can make an impact on engagement, we should consider how we can help managers not just with content, but also with skills. That’s not limited to delivering a message. How do you learn to listen? How do you learn to provide feedback? Those are critical skills for leaders, as well as individual contributors. As you said, people are often promoted without those skills, which creates a compound problem: They don’t know how to do these things themselves, and now they’re in charge of other people. Supporting them is a worthwhile place to invest time and energy. Have you worked in organizations on programs that support managers’ team and small-group interpersonal communication skills? Shel Holtz: I have, but nowhere more than where I work now. The organization is fully invested in the role of the manager and in adopting a culture of management. IBM used to have that culture. Business schools would visit IBM to see how its managers managed. The company has lost some of that over the last couple of decades, but my current organization is very serious about it. We do several things in Communication to support managers. One is a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. It always starts with three or four things we believe are important enough for managers to share with their teams. The message should come from the manager because we want managers to add the local angle—to translate or interpret what the information means for their teams and the work they’re doing. The newsletter also includes a couple of articles. One might cover a recent survey or study about management. We also have a managers’ blog where we invite managers to share something small they did that helped. It isn’t a major business-school lesson, just a practical tip others can try. One manager, for example, invited someone at each monthly team meeting to cook something from their ethnic background and share it with the group. That led to conversations about those backgrounds, helped people get to know one another, was fun and built the team. I love it when people write about those kinds of ideas. Mark Dollins: Creative approaches to engaging managers in different ways—I love that. We’re almost at the end of our time. Do you have any closing thoughts on engagement, Shel? Shel Holtz: I like the idea of discretionary effort from employees, and I think engaged employees will provide it. But we have to be thoughtful about the mechanisms we use to measure engagement. It should be less about the survey instrument and the survey results and more about what we do with what we learn—and about learning things that matter and can really move the needle. Engagement is not the end game. It’s a condition we need to achieve, and we need it in concert with other things, such as capability. The best approach is to view engagement as a strategic component of leading an organization rather than saying, “It’s time for the annual engagement exercise. Let’s see if we can move our score up 0.3%.” Mark Dollins: Or see whether we can stack the deck a little bit. At the end of the day, the holy grail for me in employee communication and engagement is behavior change. If something isn’t working, how do we as communicators help change the behavior? That has always been the holy grail in the work I’ve done. This has been a really engaging conversation, Shel. Thank you for that. Shel Holtz: What do employees think, say or do, and how are we trying to influence that? It’s going to be easier to influence those things with an engaged population than with a disengaged one. Mark Dollins: Amen to that. We’d love to hear our listeners’ stories about engagement. What do you think? Shel Holtz: I’d love to hear them, too. Thanks, Mark. Talk to you next time. Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. Bye-bye. Shel Holtz: Bye. The post OTSP #8: Employee Engagement Matters. It Is Not the Goal. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.