I recently attended a Lake Washington Human Resources Association (LWHRA) event focused on employee engagement. Though this is not a new topic, today's state of constant innovation means there's lots to learn about how it's evolving. Before engagement, companies measured employee commitment, but soon realized it was a faulty metric. What if your worst-performing employee was highly committed to the company? That's hardly good news.
Engagement became the focus, as it was seen as a more meaningful metric. The definition of engagement is evolving as belonging, connection and inclusion become increasingly important to employee retention, driven largely by millennials. Millennials are the largest generation represented in the U.S. workforce, and we know that this group tends to be motivated by mission and purpose, in addition to a paycheck. They value opportunities to grow, give back and build on their strengths.
Pitfalls Of The Engagement Survey
Not that long ago, many companies measured engagement through an annual employee engagement survey. These surveys included questions like: Does your manager talk to you about your career? How likely are you to leave the company in the next couple years? Do you have a best friend at work?
Not all companies made good use of what they learned, but those that did would transparently communicate results, sponsor employee action committees and follow up at least quarterly by measuring commitments and sharing progress. The goal was to improve a targeted set of low scores, and sometimes it worked. Plenty of companies are still doing things like this today.
But all too often, this process breaks down. Each phase of the survey process is prone to risk — the risk of not communicating, the risk of being defensive rather than curious and the risk of inertia. Even leaders with the best intentions find that it would have been better to do nothing than ask employees for their feedback and fail to follow through with meaningful responses. Executive teams can get mired in the details looking at various data cuts, trying to interpret what responses mean rather than talking to employees and teams. They argue over which results and comments are most important, causing long delays between employees taking the survey and learning the outcomes of it. Worst case, employee feedback goes into a vacuum only to find leaders scrambling months later to do something, anything, just in time for the next annual survey.
Complementing Engagement With Employe Affinity
Even engagement — and how we as leaders evaluate it — has its shortcomings.
At the LWHRA event, David Rowlee, managing director and engagement survey practice leader at Gallagher, presented research that explored the connection between engagement and passion by asking people if they were enthusiastic about their employer and took pride in their company. Researchers asked if people loved working for their organization, and if they could imagine working anywhere else.
I found the research's discoveries presented at the conference stunning. While engagement was a strong predictor of employee and customer satisfaction, engagement with job passion is significantly better — according to Rowlee, measuring job passion, or affinity, rather than simply engagement, can double a manager's ability to predict how an employee will perform.
What Gallagher billed as a measurement of affinity is, in my view, really a measurement of love in a way that's acceptable in a corporate setting. Though we're not used to talking about it in those terms, aren't our attempts to woo employees really a way of building loyalty, pride and, yes, love? Think about all of the benefits and perks that companies use to win over employees — from concierge services to candy walls and unlimited time off. We hope our employees will feel so connected to us, our offices, our teams, our mission, that they'll never want to leave.
Arguably, we want our employees to have a sense of purpose and get behind our mission. We've learned over time that perks are not synonymous with culture. Having a ping-pong table is fun, but does not ultimately help someone decide to stay or go. Many companies are steadily increasing mission and purpose, too, by sponsoring teams to volunteer together in their communities, matching charitable gifts and creating models that donate products and services to those in need, such as Tom's and Warby Parker. These are practices any organization can do that show and foster feelings of affinity.
You don't have to pick just one measure, and of course a survey is just one data point. That said, if you've been focused on engagement, you'd do well to add mission, purpose and affinity to your list of priorities. Or you can be brave and call it love.
