Engagement

It's quite good to be able to write about a truly mundane subject and still find an interesting picture that fits.  (If you don't know why this picture fits, I probably don't know you.)

I have written about engagement before.  I'm against it.  Here's why:

Once, long, long ago in a place very far from here, I worked for a company that became interested in employee engagement.  The reason for this interest was that studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive than unengaged employees.  In the training class on engagement, I asked if this was a correlation or a causation -- are people more productive because they are engaged, or more engaged because they feel productive?  The answer was "Hmm, good question, never thought about that, I don't know."  Then, of course, we moved on, assuming that if only we could get people to be more engaged, they would be more productive.

However, I suspect that I was on to something.  Based on my own experience, I am more engaged (there is some definition of this word, but let's agree to each use our own definition based on what we think it means, and we'll be all right) when I feel that I am doing something that fits my interests and talents, and I believe that, in such a situation, I feel productive.  I think everyone everywhere feels that way.  I'm pretty damn sure of it.

So, based on my insightful (but admittedly obvious) question, they should have scrapped the whole idea.  But that is not the way the world works.  The world really, really does not work that way.

The company took a survey of the employees and measured their engagement.  Then they started trying to raise the engagement scores on the survey.  They took surveys every year for a few years after that, and after about three years of concerted efforts to increase engagement scores, at least in my department, engagement scores plummeted to levels lower than I would have thought possible.

So what happened?  I will tell you.

The department tried forming groups to address various issues, like job rotation and working from home, and they found that there was very little interest among the staff.  They formed an "engagement committee" to address the problem, but substantive ideas were shot down by management, and the committee was reduced to trying to have some fun events, like potlucks and Wii bowling.  I tried to tell them, when I could, that what people care about at work is not how well they get along with their coworkers on a personal basis; instead, they care about the work they do eight hours per day, whether it is interesting, whether they see value in it, whether it is a good fit for their abilities.  I found articles that backed me up on this point.  However, we continued to try various gimmicks to make people feel better while ignoring the need to give the staff new opportunities and chances to develop.  And engagement scores went down.

It wasn't too long before an interesting change took place.  At first, management was responsible for improving employee engagement.  But when they couldn't do it, the burden began to shift to the employees.  Suddenly, people were praised as good employees in management meetings because they helped organize department events.  The word "engaged" started to creep into performance reviews.  A director suggested that something was wrong with employees who were not engaged.  Then they started trying to identify people who were not engaged so they could get rid of them.

But wait a second.  Increasing engagement was supposed to be a way to increase productivity in a group, although even that connection is dubious; it was never intended to be a measure of how effective an individual was.  By the time you start equating individual engagement with job performance, you have stepped completely off the reality track and into crazy world.  Engagement itself is not a measure of performance.  But management was being evaluated partially based on engagement scores, and since they could not focus on (and didn't care about) anything that really mattered to employees, their solution was to try to get employees who would score higher on engagement surveys.  What was supposed to be a way to make employees more interested in their work quickly evolved into a weapon management could use against them.  The staff knew it, and engagement scores tanked.

So my final words on engagement are these:  ignore it.  Give employees interesting assignments that match their skills and allow them to learn.  Give them opportunities to be productive.  Make sure they understand that what they are doing makes a difference.  Judge their performance based on how well they perform, not on unrelated factors that you hope correspond to performance.  If you do it right, they will engage.