The Gallup organisation recently released its annual State of the Global Workforce survey results. The news is mixed. What they call engagement is up slightly to 23%, but that small shift doesn’t offset the massive deficit of those disengaged.
But what is engagement anyway?
The theory began its march to prominence in a 1990 paper by William Kahn from Boston University, “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work”. In it, Kahn defines engagement as the “harnessing of organisation members’ selves to their work roles”, where “people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances”.
Kahn further observes engagement as a trait fluctuating in particular moments across tasks and situations. This elastic notion is sorely absent from today’s calls for people to amp engagement to 10 and keep it there.
Today, Forbes Magazine describes a narrower concept of staff engagement as “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals”.
However broadly or narrowly you draw it, my question is whether the expectation of engagement is useful for you or your workers at all. Especially when record numbers of people feel burnt out.
Think for a moment about the avalanche of demands for people’s engagement: family, friends, work, the dog, social media, the business where you bought a shovel for Fred and now they keep emailing you even though you unsubscribed. It’s exhausting.
Kahn’s research underlines how achieving engagement requires surplus effort across each attribute. For example, “personal engagement demanded levels of physical energy, strength and readiness that disengagement did not”, and “needed emotional resources to meet the demands of personal engagement”. A quick scroll through the average daily demands of most jobs and it’s a small wonder workers struggle to find oomph to spare.
Hiring someone is a promise. You agree to pay them, support their efforts, and provide some benefits such as holiday pay and decent working conditions. They agree to trade their time for money and do a set of tasks during certain hours towards a specified goal.
The structure of those basics vary, but an organisation’s expectation that people also jump an engagement hurdle feels like fine print on a too-good-to-be-true offer.
Do you pay people an engagement bonus? Reward them in some other way to clear that hurdle. Ensure their working conditions support it?
Certain research shows a relationship to people’s wellbeing when they feel engaged in their work and vice versa. But there are also benefits for the bottom line including the holy grail of increased productivity which translates to more revenue for the company.
So, it’s no wonder target engagement scores constantly creep up, leading to a middle-to-decent chance people end up running on fumes. So, perhaps we should step back from the trope that ‘people’s engagement equals wellbeing’ and try simple enthusiasm.
Originating from the Greek éntheos — which translates as having a god within — today enthusiasm means “lively interest”. Which feels like a more useful way to gauge how people feel about their work.
Not letting workers off the hook for their part of the promises, it’s certainly reasonable to expect they show some interest in their job. Even if the only reason they front up is so they can pay the mortgage and feed their families.
I’m not talking about Golden Retriever levels of enthusiasm. Perhaps a smile and hello. Show some curiosity. Don’t handball hard stuff. Maybe a few supporting words to a colleague having a bad day. Meet the deadline, proof the important proposal. Have a coffee with teammates.
It’s hard to feign enthusiasm. We know and appreciate it when we see it manifesting in the moment.
“How did you feel when you came to work today?” is a good question to explore enthusiasm with your team. Allowing that we all have the occasional bad day or run of them, if their answer always veers into ‘I’d rather be getting a root canal’ territory, it’s time to look more closely at what’s happening.
Focusing on employee interest also rebalances the onus for achieving goals away from ‘it’s on you’, to ‘we share responsibility for the promise’. It’s hard to show enthusiasm if you don’t know what matters and you’re navigating poor systems and processes every day.
The downside: it’s not easily tracked by surveys and over-zealous data junkies.
But while constant calls for engagement and annual 50-question surveys can grind us to dust, a dash of enthusiasm is contagious. Jane’s enthusiasm really does make it more likely you’ll feel that way too.
And just maybe, that’s a first step for ending burnout.
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Michel Hogan is an independent brand counsel. She advises organisations on the risk to their purpose and values or making the wrong promises — with a robust, resilient brand as the result. You can find Michel at michelhogan.com, follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn. Her ebook, Between Making Money and World Peace, is now available.
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