What if your next job was not about salary?

Somewhere down the line, we made a mistake. We forgot that work is not about uncomfortable toil in return for tangible financial reward. It used to be so in the industrial age but those days are long gone.

Unfortunately most corporations still create non engaging jobs and most employees keeps accepting them. According to Gallup only 13% of world wide employees are engaged.

So how come companies still think we are motivated by money and most of us still behave like we are?

What if jobs were not only measured against the tangible reward that were offered but by the intangible benefits that the job might involve? Would companies create different jobs and would employees take them rather than high paying jobs?

These are the central questions in this brilliant article by Lynda Gratton of London Business School. Her recommendation is to include the intangibles into the job description:

• How interesting and engaging the job is
• The challenge and growth opportunity of the job both from a personal and skills perspective
• The job being non-routine and in danger of being automated.

I would like to add:

• Is it a job with independence, choice and responsibility
• How meaningful the job is to the corporation.
• The job makes the world a better place by tackling some of the large issues in society.

If you think your next job is about money then you should be ready to accept a routine, boring, controlled, non-developing, meaningless job without responsibility.

Is this your next job? 

Maybe this is your current job?

How are you engaging your customers?

To create satisfied customers doesn’t really make you successful anymore – apart from creating value you also need to engage your customer to grow your revenue.

Customers are not just looking for the same product or service they have only cheaper or with an extra feature – they are looking for something radically useful or something that creates meaning for them.

Every market matures and in every mature market the product/service looks more and more alike. It will be based on the same technology made on the same factory or delivered after the same principles. Not much room for differentiation other than price that shrinks the pie for all market players. All products will eventually satisfy customers but not necessarily engage them.

To engage customers you will need to go beyond the product or service itself. It is not about what you do, it is about why you do it and how you do it.

 "Always start with why" Simon Sinek

Customer engagement is an emotional relation between the customer and one or more actors associated with the company. It is certainly possible to create an emotional relationship between a customer and a product/service brand as is seen with luxury items and cars; however this is not possible in most markets.

Relationship with the product itself

When products and services become more alike it becomes more important how it is made and what the overall purpose of the producing company is. It is not anymore about transactional selling but more about a relationship and eventually being part of a movement.

Relationship with the company

Customers don’t buy from you just because you want a lot of money but they might want to buy from you if your company is trying to support society or making the world a better place. The low priority of CSR in many companies, will not work in the future. It does not inspire customers or employees. The new hyper growth companies predominantly from the US, all has a strong purpose in the centre of their activity. Google, Apple, Tesla, Facebook and similar are not in the business just to make money – they want to make a difference also. This engages not only employees but also customers.

Relationship with touch points

The rise of the internet and social media has made many companies forget that their employees are vital in creating engagement with customers. Unfortunately only 13% of all employees worldwide are engaged and hence capable of creating customer engagement. The service aspect has also been neglected even though there is a higher probability in creating an engaged customer through a service issue than there is through a normal successful delivery.

The massive advertising on social media that looks the same as the old newspaper advertising can create awareness but is not successful in creating engagement. Most companies miss the point of having their senior managers’ active on social media (Only 28% of CEO has social media accounts). CEO’s have an opportunity to engage in conversations about purpose and sustainable production that can catapult engagement. Leaders like Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla) Eric Schmidt (Google) are all very active in engaging both customers and employees.

Relationship with other stakeholders

The most important consumer buying decisions are heavily impacted by people close to the consumer and different interest groups. You cannot ignore Greenpeace, Amnesty international or trade unions anymore. The company need to include all stakeholders into their strategy formation and make it transparent. A transparent company does not need to hide behind a brand.

The link between Employee and Customer engagement

Gallup has shown that there is a strong relationship from Employee Engagement over customer engagement to financial results. Companies that manage to engage both customers and employees have 240% better results on performance related parameters.

"Companies that engage both customers and employees have 240% better results on performance parameters." Gallup

The 3 dimensions of Fairness that Impacts Employee Engagement

What is fairness really?

When most people talk about fairness, they talk about the concept as an absolute and objective term, things are either fair or they are not. This is also how people behave although it is blaringly obvious that even two people can disagree on what is fair. If fairness truly was objective we would have no wars, sufferings or extreme inequality – there would be enough for everybody.

Fairness is a very subjective concept and it is shaped by age, culture, religion, age and a whole host of other dimensions. Fairness also changes according to context; in scarce situations like who should have the last bottle of water in a desert, people’s perception of fairness changes dramatically.

Anybody that has been in a situation they deemed unfair knows that the response is instantaneous and can be quite powerful. This reveals that fairness is hardwired in the emotional parts of the brain, in particular the amygdala – where also anger gets trigged and the two often works in concert.

Why fairness impacts Employee Engagement

For companies the fairness concept really is a tightrope that needs to be walked. If you trip, you risk getting a powerful emotional response from people that can have a dramatic and instantaneous impact of the engagement levels – disengagement can increase very fast.

Fairness is also a positive engagement factor but it builds slowly over time as the company demonstrates that it is a fair company. Communication strategies cannot only be built around rational business strategies and decisions – it will need to respect the fact that fairness is emotional in nature.

The 3 Dimensions of fairness

Taking a deeper dive into the concept of fairness, reveals that there are three dimensions that needs to be considered when dealing with Employee Engagement and the fact that they interact.

Fairness towards Self

The relationship between the employee and the employer can be seen in the light of fairness. The tangible elements of fairness are what the employee gives in terms of presence and effort compared to what the company gives back in pay and benefits. The tangible elements of fairness are closely related to satisfaction but not much to motivation and engagement.

The intangible elements of the relationship, like how you are treated, trusted and listened to combined with other leadership and cultural elements has a high impact on how motivated and engaged the employee is. Engagement is not about money – it is about how you treat people.

Fairness compared to others

Another dimension of fairness is when employee compares their situation to those of others. This could be colleagues, leaders, similar groups outside the organisation. When employees start to compare their situation to others, their perception of fairness can change very rapidly. What they were happy with a second ago is now completely unacceptable when they have seen what the others get. This is key in designing engagement, you need to either be transparent and up front or be secretive if you have very differential pay or treat people very different.

Fairness towards others

The last dimension is about how fair the company treats others and can have a significant impact on the engagement. Companies that only focus on shareholder value are typically short term oriented and see conflicts between the shareholder and other stakeholders like workers, customers, society and the environment.

Fortunately a lot of the younger more successful companies are built on a foundation of a strong worthwhile purpose and know that serving multiple stakeholders eventually benefits the shareholder. If a company treats all stakeholders well and respect them their reputation, brand and image as an employee grows. This can significantly increase employee engagement.

If you want to create engagement in your company you need to be able to manage fairness along the three dimensions

Everybody talks about Employee Engagement - can anybody define it?

There are many definitions of Engagement, some more academic than others but one of the simplest was made by David McLeod in his report to the British Government of the state of engagement in the UK: 

“You know it when you see it”

It would be very easy to accept the term “Employee Engagement” as a more modern or advanced description of Employee Satisfaction – a term we all understand. This assumption makes most people misunderstand the concept and power engaging people.

The CAB model highlights some of the key differences between Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement:

Where Employee Satisfaction is a rational state that is based on what the employee deliver in terms of work compared to the benefits received, Employee Engagement represents an emotional relationship. This relationship is not only to the company itself, it extends to all the company’s stakeholders and to the company’s purpose.

This also reveals that Engagement is not only about the exchange between the company and the employee but also about other exchanges between the company and its stakeholders – exchanges that does not directly impact the employee.

As Engagement is a complex relationship it challenges the traditional industrial HR view of the world. It is not viable to identify humans that “have engagement” therefore it is not possible to hire and fire your way to Engagement – you have to create it. You have to change from selecting and changing the employee to fit the corporation to change the corporation to fit humans.

Gallup that regularly surveys the state of engagement worldwide defines engagement as different emotional states employees are in.

They highlight that not only is Engagement and opportunity, it also represents a threat as disengaged employees are working to sabotage the organisation.

The Institute of employment studies has a definition that highlights it is not only about what you do, but also how you do it:

“A positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of the business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation. The organisation must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employee and employer.”

Engagement is strongly connected to motivation – especially intrinsic motivation like passion, purpose and personal growth. Extrinsic motivators like pay and working conditions can impact negatively but does not have a positive effect.

This also means that Employee Engagement can be seen as a hierarchy  – like the surgeon model to highlight the impact that Employee Engagement has on the subjects – be it customers, colleagues or patients.

What is needed to bring employees from Disengaged to Engaged is very different from what it takes to move them on to Actively Engaged.

This also highlights that the creation of Engagement is not a prescriptive process that can be standardised like most people processes. Engagement is a strategic process that depends on people’s current level of engagement, the company, the market situation – it has to be tailored.

The creation of Employee Engagement is extremely important as it impacts: Motivation, Company performance, Learning, Knowledge and Innovation.

Additional Definitions of Employee Engagement:

"Full discretionary effort and living up to their full potential and doing what it takes to help their organisation succeed." Towers Perrin

"Engagement is a positive fulfilling work related state of mind that is characterised by vigor, dedication and absorption." Schaufeli et al

"Engagement or passion for work involves feeling positive about your job as well as wanting to go the extra mile to make sure you do your job to the best of your ability." Truss et al

"The extent to which the employees commit to something or someone in their organisation, how hard they work and how long they stay as a result of that commitment." Corporate Leadership Council

Interesting data about your Employee survey

Officevibe has some very interesting data on the view of employee data. It is obviously not enough just do a survey.

• 25% of employees think that their manager views an engagement survey as a tick box exercise

• 30% is the average response rate for employee surveys

• 20% is the abandon rate for surveys longer than 8 minutes

• 29% of employees found the survey pointless

• 80% did not believe their manager would act on the information

• 47% of managers spend less than 5 days a year related to activities of their surveys

• 20% said their managers never responded to concerns raised

• 27% of managers never reviewed survey results

• 52% of managers reviewed results but took no action.

• 48% of senior managers found surveys highly valuable

• 45% of employees found little or no value in surveys

http://www.officevibe.com/blog/employee-surveys-infographic

Innovation requires employee engagement

The concept of innovation is often associated with companies and products – successful companies like Apple, Google and similar are coined to be innovative or to have innovative products. Nobody has yet found a good way of measuring how innovative a product or an organisation is although number of patents is used by some. This did not help Kodak, Nokia or Motorola much even though each of them had many patents.

The reality is that innovation is a cognitive process that often is team based, especially in a corporate frame and as such not an organisational or product characteristic – it is a way of thinking about new methods of using the present resources.

“Innovation is not an organisational characteristic – it is a human activity”

The role of the organisation is to allow, encourage and enable innovation though their people and their collaborative thinking processes. That means innovation is closely related to motivation, purpose and employee engagement and not just something that happens in a laboratory.

The way that organisations chose (or is forced by tradition) to shape innovation can be divided into 4 different categories:

The two lower categories are typically in well-defined markets, the two left categories are typically larger corporations and the two top categories are the most disruptive.

History has traditionally protected the larger corporations and their access to capital, technology and scale of economy manufacturing. Large corporate super tankers are built to fight similar entities in a competitive battle with well-defined market rules. It was almost impossible for a new company to enter an established market and get access to customers through an exclusive sales network.

The start of the internet century has changed that completely. Foxes – small innovative companies have easy and scale able access to capital, technology, prototyping, knowledge and customers and are not bound by the rules of any markets. The list is growing rapidly lead by companies Uber, Nest, AirBnB, Tesla and similar.

They follow a blue ocean strategy where they redefine the rules of the market and look for joint value creation with customers and collaboration with potential competitors - Google sees Apple not only as a competitor in certain business areas but also as a partner in other.

The established companies have a hard time competing as they are locked in the logic of their market and a zero sum product price battle with similar companies.

Maybe Tesla is still a small company compared to the automotive giants, but they have certainly captured the agenda – so much so that OPEC had to comment that they did not believe Tesla would become successful. The reason Tesla scares the established community is that they are innovative in 4 different areas – all of them disruptive.

Not only are the Tesla cars innovative as a product with a great sustainability message, they also incorporate new innovative technology in storage, drive and information displays. At the same time Tesla uses a business model alien to the industry with ownership of the technology development and the sales channel and finally they think completely different to the incumbents:

”Tesla is not a car company, we are an clean energy storage company”

Elon Musk                             

With this in mind it is of vital importance that companies not only upgrade their labs, their scientists and their people to be able to innovate but also create an environment where innovative thinking is possible. Not just innovative thinking about products but also about business models and how the corporation is organised. Finally it is important to motivate employees to innovate – employee engagement is vital for innovation.

"Great innovation does not come from satisfied employees, 

it comes from fired up engaged employees"

What engages employees is not the same that attracts and retains them

The view of humans as resource often leads corporations to think that people are motivated in a uniform way and motivate the same in all circumstances. This leads to a narrow people and policy strategy centered on the classical functional areas of HR, ignoring that people are motivated differently according to their situation, their age, their tenure and what company they are working for.

The Gebauer Attraction, Retention and Engagement Model serves as a reminder to tailor people processes to the task at hand

It is also a reminder that the creation of Employee Engagement is not a low level process that can be automated in the HR department. Engagement needs to be designed into the fabric of the corporation, it purpose, the way it believes in people, the way the corporation plans, strategizes and communicates.

“Employee engagement is not about changing people, it is about changing corporations”

Employee engagement is not the responsibility of HR – it is the responsibility of the Corporation

Most companies intuitively know that satisfied employees, create satisfied customers and the result is a positive impact on financial performance. In management theory this is known as the service profit chain and starts with how the corporation treats its employees. This also used to be a key competitive differentiator – but not anymore. As all companies now have satisfaction ratings above 80%, satisfaction has become a qualifier for being able to compete – not an order winner.

Some companies have found out that engaged employees outperform non engaged employees significantly and have started to measure employee engagement.  That Employee Engagement matters was demonstrated in recent McKinsey study. It revealed that engaged white collar workers had: 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to their organisation and had 46% more satisfaction. Interestingly engagement also had a significant impact on blue collar workers: 27% overall better performance and 53% higher likelihood of positive career progression.

“More than 25% of US workforce is actively disengaged”

Often the results of measuring Employee Engagement are quit depressing as Gallup has found: In the US less than one third of employees are engaged and more than one quarter is actively disengaged. Senior management teams can choose to ignore the results or they can make it the responsibility of the HR function to go fix.

“31% of companies do not see Employee Engagement as an issue”

That management sees engagement as the role of HR was seen in the McKinsey study: 69% of companies surveyed identified Employee Engagement as a top priority for HR although only 43% had activities to measure and impact Employee Engagement. 31% of the companies did not see Employee Engagement as an issue.

 “Only 50% of HR’s activity is seen as value add by leaders”

Unfortunately employee engagement is not only the responsibility of an HR department, often designed to deal with operational and transactional issues rather than strategic. In the McKinsey study leaders only found half of HR’s activity to create value for the business. It is easy for the senior managers to blame HR forgetting that they themselves have created the boundaries and the rules for HR to operate under.

38% of HR professionals believe that their current Engagement actions will succeed

The view of management is shared by HR professionals themselves. Only 38% believed that their current actions in Employee Engagement would be successful.

A lot of HR activities have been designed to ensure a flow of people through the organisation with a focus on Analysis, Recruitment, Compensation, Training and Organisational Design. People seen as uniform objects responding to the same kind of motivational or demotivational activity is not something that creates engagement. Engagement is a very individual state for each employee. Engagement is also a state that connects to the corporation’s or department’s purpose and finally engagement is not only about what you do, but also how and why you do it.

The single most important driver of employee engagement has been identified as the behaviour and leadership skills of the Line Manager – not something that is fully within HR’s area of responsibility.

"Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox"

To significantly impact Employee Engagement it is necessary to either elevate it to top management level or to enable HR to participate at a strategic level. Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox.

The 4 Pillars of Employee Engagement

The world of management is still obsessed with the mechanistic view of employees as resources, something that can be acquired and exploited in the quests for profit. This has been covered up by improvement in working conditions, benefits and skill training programs and it has even made the executive wall: People are our greatest strength. Despite this apparent progress most corporations still treats people as a commodity. HR departments are tasked with getting the best resource, shaping the resource with skills training, keeping the resource with competitive compensation packages and finally getting rid of the resource if it does not live up to expectations.

The employee is seen as something that has certain characteristics that can be changed (skills) and something that cannot (personality and motivation). When something goes wrong the problem is assigned to the employee rather than the corporation and the personal improvement process starts often resulting in a termination and a search for more appropriate resource.

Assuming that employees can be “good” or “bad” and corporations are always “right” makes the life of management a lot easier but not necessarily more profitable. The task will become to locate engaged employees and attract them with appropriate reward.

Research has shown that although engagement is clearly a state of the employee, the creation of engagement is an activity that both depend of the employee and the corporation. Progressive and innovative corporations know that employee engagement is not the responsibility of the employee. This gives them an opportunity to create long term sustainable competitiveness even in mature industries interlocked in the Race to Zero (margin).

Employee engagement can be viewed as being founded on 4 different pillars:

Fairness: The concept of fairness as being important for employee engagement is not new. What is often forgotten is that fairness is completely subjective and changes over time. People don’t see their parents work contract as fair. For younger generations, the concept of fairness goes well beyond the psychological contract between the corporation and the employee – it involves the fairness towards all stakeholder groups.

Identity: Through the development of social psychology it has become apparent that people’s decisions are heavily influenced by social settings and what group people belong to. As work represents a significant part of most people’s lives they derive a lot of their identity from work. Great corporations understand this and create jobs and an organisation that individual are proud of being associated with.

Growth: Being appropriately challenged and given the opportunity to learn and grow is a key element in employee engagement. Is the corporation a place where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities or where they are punished? Is HR and their policies and procedures seen as enabling people or limiting them? Do employees have the opportunity to be promoted at appropriate points in their career or are they locked in their current position. Great corporations know that this is the responsibility of the corporation.

Purpose: The days of pure focus on shareholders are over. Money, profits and growth is not a purpose – it is an outcome of successfully pursuing a purpose. Being the very best “x” in the “x” industry is a very common vision, but not a powerful purpose. A powerful purpose is in its essence something that benefits many if not all stakeholders of the corporation – a purpose that benefits society and humanity. This might sound soft to hardnosed finance people but customers and employees do not get engaged by cost cutting and headcount reductions in a race to zero margin as most mature companies are engaged in.

Purpose is connected with creation of prosperity – the solution to human problems

Companies that believe in people and in their ability to create value for customers and society have the potential to rally all stakeholder groups around a strong purpose and will prosper as they will create engagement in all groups.

The essential role of capitalism is not allocation – it is value creation.

Research from Gallup has proven that companies with engaged employees creates engagement in the corporations stakeholders and as a result creates better financial results. Corporations with engaged employees outperform companies with lack of engagement:

-          22% better profitability

-          21% Higher Productivity

-          147% better earnings pr share

-          10% better customer ratings

-          41% reduction in quality defects

-          65% reduction in turnover

-          50% reduction in accidents

-          37% reduction in absenteeism

All companies have the phrase “People are our greatest strength” hanging at the walls unfortunately most miss the opportunity to create sustainable competitive advantage through employee engagement. It starts with believing the sign.

“One great employee equals three good employees”  Kip Tindall, CEO Container Store

Design your Engagement Survey so that it creates Engagement.

Although many companies has understood that having high scores in satisfaction surveys does not correlate strongly with customer satisfaction and financial results anymore, they are struggling to understand why and what to do about it. Some companies have found that having high employee engagement impacts customer engagement which in return does create positive financial returns for the corporation, but don’t understand how to increases employee engagement. The increasing importance of employee engagement and the resulting lower importance of employee satisfaction have its roots in the generational mixture of the corporation in question.

The new generation is very different from Baby boomers (born 1940-60) that was motivated by duty to the corporation they served and  generation X (1960-80) with a focus on individual return versus the sacrifice of serving the corporation. Generation Y (1980-2000) is only loyal to the corporation if it serves a higher purpose, listens to them and invests in them.

This is very important to understand when designing an engagement survey for a given corporation. The questions themselves can create or destroy engagement – make sure you ask the right questions.

To create additional engagement you should think about including questions about the future direction of the corporation – get the employees opinion of what is important. The fact that you ask will increase employee engagement and if you ask questions about the future purpose of the corporation it will go even higher. GenY is motivated by purpose in opposition to Baby boomers acceptance of a focus on shareholder and the more personal gain/sacrifice view of GenX  motivated through profit sharing .

If you accept that pay itself does not motivate (too little can demotivate however) this is an overview of what motivated the different generations:

	Motivated by	Willing to	Activity should   benefit	Employee measurement
Baby Boomers	Duty	Sacrifice	Shareholders	Retention
Gen X	Balance	Sacrifice for personal gain.	Shareholders, Management and Employees	Satisfaction Survey
Gen Y	Purpose	Engage in return for benefits to society	Society and environment before corporation	Engagement Survey

Competitive advantage can only be created through people.

Since the financial crisis the focus of some corporations has turned from a desire to create value to a perceived need to extract value from their existing business. This has mainly been achieved by starving the existing business through headcount reductions and outsourcing of corporate support functions to cheaper jurisdictions.

 Included in the cost savings has been customer direct and indirect support functions – in reality revealing that these corporations has limited belief in these functions as assets able to deliver revenue and growth to the corporations. This also means less delivered to the customers for the same price; as a CEO of an insurance company put it: “A more disciplined offering to our customers” – a lyric formulation for less.

Reducing frontline employees is a dangerous game as automated response systems and web based support might not be able to create the emotionally connection with customers that most corporations marketing campaigns are based on. What customers expect and what they get will be quite different – automated and generic response does not create engaged customers.

These kinds of headcount reduction and reductions in funding to training programs, maintenance of equipment and R&D to improve the bottom line has not exactly been rare. There might not be anything legally wrong with doing this but ethically there can be issues.

From a governance issue, under-investing in people and under-investing in the revenue generating part of business is considered stealing from the future to benefit today. This is especially a problem when executives are paid based on P&L metrics and share compensated affected heavily by earnings per share. It could be seen as stealing from the future for own personal gain.

The increased cashflow from these activities has predominantly been reinvested in the company’s own equity as pointed out in the Harvard Business Review article: Profits without prosperity, with increases in share price as a result. The problem is that this is not an investment in the business future and based on assumption that the existing base of competitiveness is relatively safe. Companies might believe there is safety in size, like Kodak did or safety in technology as Nokia did. They might think that their brand is the strong enough – like Blockbuster or Motorola did.

Unfortunately for these companies there is a new breed of predator in the corporate jungle. Companies like Google, amazon, Netflix, Tesla and Apple are redefining the rules of the game in ways the more mature companies has no response to within their current way of thinking. 

The mature companies think that the new companies have created their competitiveness through people-less assets like computers, artificial intelligence, automation, robots and Internet based offerings and assume that reduction in headcount is the way forward.

What they have failed to understand is that all of these companies only create competitive advantage through their people and not at the expense of their people. If they wanted to take a closer look they would see companies highly focused on getting the right kind of people, making sure they are continuously developed and satisfied.

These companies know what is well established outside the economic and financial circles – probably also in these circles but not stated publicly – that human beings are not only rational people but more importantly emotional beings that are affected by the social context around them.

They make sure that their employee are not only rationally connected to the companies though satisfaction but more importantly connected emotionally through engagement. Connected to the purpose of the corporation – the “Why” of the corporation.

These companies also have a belief that employees are the only true source of competitiveness, even if it manifests itself through products, systems, knowledge or other employee made artifacts.

Employees make a difference. Employee engagement matters.

Employee engagement is not something you do to people – it is something you do with people.

For many years the logic behind the service profit chain has dominated the way corporations treat their employees. The theory behind service profit chain suggests that satisfied employees create satisfied customers that in return stay loyal and affect corporate results. 

This has changed with recent Gallup research that was unable to verify the link between employee satisfaction and results. It could have been that satisfaction used to give corporations an advantage, but failed to do so today. It could be that satisfaction has turned into a qualifying rather than a winning attribute of the organisation. 

Gallup did however identify a clear link between corporate results and employee engagement. The “Employee satisfaction” concept has its roots in fulfilling of employee’s needs, wants and aspirations and is seen as something the corporation does for its employees. As such it is, for the employee a passive arrangement, where the corporation can decide what rewards it is willing to offer in return for the employee staying with the corporation. 

The psychological contract between employer and employees is not limited to tangibles, but has been seen mainly as a rational agreement and as such something corporations impact though HR activities, predominantly compensation and benefits. Satisfaction can be improved by job safety, promotions, empowerment, appraisals, communication and similar activities focused on the employee and the job role.

The problem is that money and benefits above a certain existential minimum does not motivate people to do more as Gallup proved – the path to improved performance is not though increases in tangible benefits – but through an increase in engagement. So the bravest of HR departments has turned to measuring Employee engagement.

As in Gallup’s engagement surveys, most employee engagement survey show significantly lower results than satisfaction surveys, something that suggests a problem. No doubt a lot of management teams like the old satisfaction survey that could be done and ticked easily without rocking the boat. 

The new engagement survey could be seen as a threat and not as an opportunity to gain competitive advantage. The other problem for the HR departments are that where employee satisfaction can be improved through systems and programs focusing on the lower part of the organisations, improving employee engagement is a completely different game. 

Although in HR’s areas of influence - key elements in creating engagement, like personal growth and developments are a hard sell for HR in a rational skills focused world. Other areas of creating engagement are outside the reach of HR.

The newest neurological research of human behavior and decision making processes has firmly established the important roles that both emotions and social context plays as powerful modulators of what was once believed to be a predominantly rational process, which put us apart from the animals. 

The Merriam-Webster’s definition of engagement: “emotional involvement or commitment”, confirms this is true for creating engagement also. Research suggests that engagement is influenced by the level of which employees identifies themselves with the organisation. The purpose, vision and leadership of the organisation play a vital role in engaging employees and the connection is emotional.

Why the corporation exist and what its purpose is become a potential powerful source of employee engagement. Unfortunately the post crisis corporations have had so much focus on improving profits that they have forgotten that creating profits is not a strategy – it is an outcome of a successful strategy.

Organisations that want to survive and thrive will eventually need to focus on a higher purpose that improves the situation of customers, employees and other stakeholders than just shareholders.

So employee engagement is not just something that can be designed by a HR department and injected into the workforce, it is about changing the fabric of the department or the corporation itself.

Employee engagement is not just about improving, it is about transformation. To transform people you need to transform the organisation and its purpose and goals. Visionary companies know this.