Where's Your Employee Engagement Heading?

Where's Your Employee Engagement Heading?

Hello Human

I am assuming that by now you have your Top 5 and your Bottom 5 from your annual employee engagement survey sorted, and that you are beavering away busily on actions and interventions to keep your Top 5 at the top and to lift your Bottom 5 off the bottom.

Whatever happens to the Middle 5?

What happens if the Top 5 become the Middle 5?

If the Middle 5 become the Top 5, does that make the Top 5 the Middle 5, or do the Top 5 slide all the way down to become the Bottom 5?

If the Bottom 5 gets lifted off the bottom, will there even be a Bottom 5 next year?

Imagine that - ‘Our annual employee engagement survey results are in, and we are pleased to announce that this year - for the first time ever - there isn’t a Bottom 5’.

Send up the flares, ring the bell.

So many questions; so much to think about; so much work to do; and there’s less than 12 months between now and the next employee engagement survey. In reality there’s likely less than 9 calendar months, which equates to about 180 work days, before you ask those 75 to 100 questions all over again.

Rinse and repeat anyone?

Or better still - delay this year’s Survey - using one of these disguises:

With all the changes going on, is it really a good time to do the survey?

Why don’t we wait until things 'settle down' a little?

Everyone is ‘super busy’ right now - won’t this just create another unnecessary distraction?

It’s ‘Employee Engagement Survey’ time. The place in the annual lifecycle (the people event calendar) where lots of activity takes place, loads of resources are burned and energy is expended, but where arguably not much actually changes as far as employee engagement at work goes.

I have funny memories from my own time in corporate land of Managers scrambling in the few days before the engagement survey is due to go live trying to ‘quick fix’ stuff from last year’s results. They’d done ‘squat’ with last year’s results other than trot out the powerpoint deck from HR or Corporate Affairs, speak to the script, and then return to business as usual - which may or may not have included serving up misery meals to their troops daily.

I asked these (rhetorical) questions about employee engagement last month too:

Seriously, how long have we all been on this ‘journey’? When will it end? When oh when will organisations actually figure this sh&t out?

I still don’t have the answers, but the questions, and the provocation, when it comes to employee engagement surveys, are important.

Barry Schwartz published a book in 2015, titled ‘Why We Work’.

It’s a little book - just 92 pages - but it’s insightful, and relevant to this whole arena of employee engagement.

“Why do we work?” Asks Schwartz in the book's opening line.

He offers a point of view on page 1:

‘Satisfied workers are engaged by their work. Satisfied workers are challenged by their work.

Satisfied people do their work because they feel that they are in charge.

Their work day offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion, and they use that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of mastery and expertise. They learn new things, developing both as workers and as people. They find their work meaningful. Their work provides the opportunity for social engagement.’

I wonder where we all might be in our organisational lives if all of that time, energy, activity and investment was directed to a ‘Schwartzian’ state?

‘The Satisfied Worker Survey’

Save the survey, stay on the satisfied worker quest though.

Go well Human

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