Organizations across the world seek an engaged workforce. However, what does that entail? Essentially, it involves facets beyond employees delivering impeccable scores to the leadership in exchange for a good salary and benefits. Engagement extends beyond the mere agreement that a specific organization is a “good place to work” or employees stating that they enjoy their work. Albeit these aspects are crucial, they merely form the foundation of engagement.
Employee engagement, in simple terms, is the emotional affinity felt by the employees for their organization. Every other aspect is as important as its contribution to the emotional connection that is fostered among employees. In a company, the engaged employee feels immersed and is attached to its culture as well as its well-being. Such employees do not just work for the company. Instead, they consider themselves to be a part of the company, and they often turn to the company when defining themselves.
An engaged employee need not necessarily be good at their job. However, it can be quite challenging to handle employees with subpar performance if they are extremely engaged. Alternatively, people demonstrating exemplary performance need not remain engaged and may always have one foot out the door. What is crucial to note is that the engaged employee experiences a bond. They remain committed to the organization and are emotionally involved.
Moreover, engagement does not operate in black and white. Instead, there is an entire spectrum that identifies and gauges engagement levels in employees, ranging from people with no attachment at all to those who consider switching jobs to be blasphemous.
The New Reality
When it comes to engagement, the bar is quite high, and several leadership teams remain delusional regarding the engagement levels among their employees. For instance, if you ask the management in a company regarding employees of other companies, they are typically very critical. On the other hand, if asked about their employees, they change their tunes.
Gallup has revealed that more than half of all employees are largely disengaged in the country. Yet, companies believe that their employees are different. Unfortunately, it is highly likely that even half of their employees are essentially disengaged.
The majority of leaders are under the misconception that employee loyalty is a given and is owed. Upon encountering critical employee surveys and feedback, they express dissatisfaction against the respondents. However, it is crucial to note that the commitment of employees is something that must be earned and not assumed or demanded. Not doing so will cause disengagement and the leaders have nobody to blame but themselves.
Lacking the Emotional Connection
The majority of leaders look at the employee feedback process as a routine process that lacks significance. Circulate a survey, wherein you are supposed to ask a few questions about what people think or are willing to say regarding the company, leaders, managers, and peers. Develop some form of an index and identify benchmarks that demonstrate that you are better than your peers or are on the same level. Direct the HR to conduct some focus groups and seek recommendations. Then, everything goes back to normal till the next mandatory survey.
This process uncannily resembles a person who is trying to reach somewhere while on a treadmill. Obviously, there are no returns. Moreover, this specific approach may deteriorate the situation since employees can quickly identify insincerity and half-hearted effort.
The point that is being made is not that basics are not crucial. It is important to ask employees questions regarding their salary and benefits as well as various facets of their workspace such as furniture and lighting. It is important to also learn about their views on leadership and corporate strategy, along with their views on their direct managers and peers.
Apart from that, you must also ask questions regarding accessibility to the required resources as well as the functioning of the processes and infrastructure. That’s not all. One may even formulate a few questions about the company’s products and treatment of customers, along with the sustainability objectives of the firm. This list can go on and on as there is a lot to gain input on from your employees.
However, the fundamental goal must be to understand how all of their responses can be used to comprehend their level of attachment with the company. Thus, regardless of what you do or do not incorporate in the survey, you must remember to integrate the emotional measures.
Gauging Emotions
There is an obvious challenge here. It is not easy to compute emotions since our conscious minds cannot completely fathom our feelings. Thus, when we ask employees questions regarding their feelings, they will essentially be formulating thoughts that are murky and obscure.
However, every company must at least make attempts to gauge employee feelings. What can be done?
Conventionally, companies ask individuals to rate or score their feelings. However, this particular method has drawn criticism since human beings do not consciously understand their feelings and are usually unwilling to give very weak scores.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to ask because it is very simple, cheap, and practical, and it does shed light upon how the employees think they feel. Do note that
The second survey-based technique to gauge emotion involves the implicit measurement of emotional attachment. With the help of implicit association tests, we can compute the magnitude of emotional attachment based on the speed or accuracy with which a particular employee manages to answer something in response to either a prompt or some associated stimuli. This approach refrains from asking direct questions about people’s feelings.
The next method is nothing but obtaining employee comments. This can be done with or without asking questions, with the latter encompassing all the unprompted comments and suggestions that they wish to express. Their comments can be assessed to understand their underlying feelings. Is the employee angry, or are they exhibiting signs of frustration? Are they implying disappointment? Today, there are tools that can be used to automate this function to scale, which includes complex algorithms to identify the underlying emotions in different words and comments being expressed.
Regardless of the method that a company employs, the aim must be to integrate an emotional dimension if the management is attempting to evaluate employee/workplace issues. That is because the emotional bond forms the keystone in the overall foundation of engagement in organizations. If the emotional bonding is absent, the foundation will give away.