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?

Honest Feedback is vital for Employee Engagement

If you want to create Employee Engagement you should invest in creating a culture of giving and receiving feedback. This is often confused with creating an environment of being friendly and although this is important it is more important to create relationships strong enough to be able to handle the truth (How to create a frame of honest feedback).

Gallup research has shown that a manager that gives mainly positive (based on strengths) feedback has more engaged employees versus managers that give predominantly negative feedback. What is more interesting is that giving no feedback is significantly worse that giving negative feedback.

As a leader you are responsible for growing your people which sometimes involves giving negative feedback. Research has shown that direct and honest feedback on wrong answers in tests has a bigger impact than feedback on what went well. 

When people are encouraged and allowed to grow employee engagement increases. To grow people need feedback that also means negative feedback.

Knowing that negative feedback also creates employee Engagement should be sufficient to encourage leaders to have difficult conversations with their people – ignoring the conversations are too expensive.

In the book “Crucial Conversations” the authors introduce the concept of the Fools choice: “The choice between friendship and honesty.” 

It is a fools choice because no friendship can be based on dishonesty so a crucial conversation is necessary to give honest feedback

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" Martin Luther King Jr.

Are you still involved in skilled based recruitment?

For many years through the industrial and knowledge age, skills have been imperative when recruiting people. Are they capable of operating the right machine or be part of the right department. However work is changing and people are now entering corporations with a job title that are not likely to survive many years – we don’t even know what will be needed a few years from now. Marketing has gone from paper and television to online and mobile at a blistering pace rendering the entire skill base obsolete. The same thing is happening in sales, where customers has access to more information than the salespeople and are capable of identifying the best deal without even calling.

“Companies are running 21st-century businesses with 20th-century workplace practices and programs.” Towers Watson

Need for specific skills are changing at a rapid pace.

If the obsolescence of skills is accelerating, it does not make sense to hire for skills alone anymore. A better way is to combine skills with attitudes and behaviours when recruiting. Define the attitudes you want in your company – they are likely to interact with your values and culture and the basic belief system your company is based on. They should also be the first evaluation process that existing and new people are evaluated against as attitudes are hard to change. A very imortant point is that the attitude of an employee is going to decide if your culture and operating logic is able to create engagement - a key element of motivation.

"Getting an employee with the right skills is not the same as getting a motivated employee"

Secondly it is needed to look defining the behaviours you want. On LinkedIn it is possible to get a good idea of behaviours of a candidate that can be explored through the interview phase. Even though you would like certain behaviours it is more important to look for the potential of behaviour you would like to have in your company as behaviours can be coached.

Skills should really have the last priority and you need to be looking for the potential to acquire the necessary skills and the ability to acquire future skills. Whatever you are looking for right now is going to be obsolete faster than you can believe.

Pulling it all together will help you identify your high performance A Players that exhibit the desired Attitudes, Behaviours and Skills you are looking for. B Players that have the potential to become A Players and finally C Players that does not have the potential.

Using the 3 Gate process will ensure that you get the right potential people into your organisation but not that they are motivated and engaged. Engagement is an emotional relationship between the employee and the company that the company is responsible for creating. It is not a characteristic of the employee.

"With high levels of engagement, firms can see revenue growth 2.5 times that of their peers and a 40 percent reduction in expensive staff turnover" HayGroup

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

A company as human as the people in it

Most companies operating in mature markets have similar value chains with limited sources of competitiveness – in these markets the employees become the key differentiating factor. Unfortunately many companies are experiencing that traditional models of motivation, such as financial reward and personal achievement is suffering in the post financial crisis era. The misalignment between the organisational goals of corporations and the individual aspirations is increasing. Business performance, risk management, efficiency, cost control, uniformity, lean is colliding with greater autonomy, variety, meaning, challenge and growth.

“Management is undoubtedly one of humankind’s biggest inventions“  Gary Hamel

A large group of employees are satisfied and stay with the corporation but they are not inspired to go the extra mile and create productivity gains. Gallup and other organisations have demonstrated a significant performance gap between engaged and disengaged employees. This is now making corporations increasingly interested in Employee Engagement.

As Employee Engagement is often seen as tactical task, is becomes the ownership of the HR department that has to fix the issue with Compensation & Benefits, Training and Recruitment peppered with some leadership training of middle managers. This is ignoring that most people, be it customers, employees and other stakeholders distrust and are demotivated by the current mainstream management philosophy.

Gary Hamel together with other prominent thinkers and business leaders has outlined 25 points that needs to be addressed in order for corporations to evolve to management 2.0:

Management 2.0

1: Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2: Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3: Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, political science, and theology.

4: Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5: Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6: Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.

7: Redefine the work of leadership.  The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

8: Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9: Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10: De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11: Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12: Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process in which share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13: Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14: Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. We need to discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15: Create a democracy of information. Companies need information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16: Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than the past.

17: Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18: Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19: Depoliticize decision making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization and beyond.

20: Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or-choices. What’s  needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21: Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22: Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.

23: Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective.
New management tools are needed for building and shaping complex ecosystems.

24: Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25: Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

This is undoubtedly a significant challenge for most corporations. However it is becoming obvious that the old models are not sustainable anymore. A new management model that creates engagement in all stakeholder groups can significantly disrupt existing large companies and markets.

Who dares to start?

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

If you lose the Millennials – you lose!

Corporations with long tenure in mature industries often operate based on a number of principles that is reasonably stable. The most important one is that the future success of the corporation is based on the same principles as the historic success. The leads to an operating principle focusing on continuous improvement: Evolution over revolution or small incremental changes to what was done last year. The model is also based on a view of the market as a place with stable boundaries and actors that are quite similar and unchanging - a place of competition.With the rise of first the internet and later the revolution of social networks, unlimited power of the cloud and the rapid move to mobile technologies, no industry is immune to disruptive changes.It is well known that the disruption can come from a change in product offerings, like the iPhone changed the mobile industry. It can also come from outside the market boundaries like Google’s absorption of advertising budgets or it can be a disruption of the supply chain the way Blockbuster died from Netflix competition. Most mature companies are aware that they need to keep an eye on changes in the market structure, customer preferences.
There is however a significant change underway that will fundamentally change the way corporations has to operate in order to succeed independent of what industry or market they operate in. The rise of the Millennials or generation Y as people born in the 1980 -2000 time span has been categorised. This is not a surprise to the marketing departments of consumer based corporations – they know Millennials are different customers to the prior generations (generation x and baby boomers) and work hard to position offerings attractive to them.
What seems to come as a surprise is that Millennials are also becoming a significant factor as employees. 

Before 2020 Millenials and younger generations  will become the dominant part of the labour market everywhere, and most of them will work in an environment designed by generation X for generation X. This is likely to fail, just ask your marketing department.

Beyond.com survey, 2013

A survey done by beyond.com shows that the gap between Millennials perception of themselves and that of HR professionals are very different, This indicates the expectations of the corporations based on Gen X thinking and that of Millennial employees are very different – a recipe for disaster.

The problem has still not become visible as very few corporations has been in talent acquisition mode since the financial crisis but as Gen X moves towards retirement it will become an issue

It is easy to point fingers at HR and HR policies and blame them for not adapting to attract and retain the new employees but the problem goes a lot deeper. Millenials don’t see work as a chore like the baby boomers and they don’t see it as means to an enjoyable life outside work like generation x. They are hard workers but not motivated the same way as earlier generations.  Millennials want freedom, trust, support, fun and they need a higher level purpose to really engage. Corporations need to develop a purpose above and beyond profit and revenue. To attract and keep Millenials, it is imperative to create an environment of personal growth, equality, Social/Environmental responsibility, freedom and team spirit.

Are your company’s policies designed to enable employees or limit them?

This might sound alien to companies firmly based in command and control thinking but it is already being implemented by successful companies in the new economy. Google, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla and similar companies are ahead and design their people policies very different.

You are not only competing with these companies for the consumer

 You are also competing with them for the employees.

Talent – Hiring is the most important thing you do. Chapter 3 of "How Google Works"

The most important thing you do is to hire talent – every sports coach knows this is more important than strategy. Scouting is like shaving – if you don’t do it every day it shows. Every leader in Google spends a lot of time with in the hiring process, not just for senior positions, at all levels.

Sergey Brin’s favorite interview question is: “Could you teach me something complicated I don’t know?” To be hired in Google it was not enough to be able to teach or simplify –you also had to be interesting. Explained dating instead of economic theory was one way of getting hired.

Hierarchical hiring does not work in Google. Despite intentions to hire people smarter than them self, managers most often surrender to human nature and hires people that will not threaten them. Google’s hiring practices originates from academia rather than corporate. As most academics rarely leave, the academic hiring process has to work and is elaborate. Peer based committee’s works better for ensuring high quality candidates enter Google – even if there is no specific job at the time. The right people will create their own jobs.

As Google grew and senior managers were not able to control what everybody did but they made a conscious decision about deciding to control whom they hired. As Google managers are expected to find the right people and not be “fighting for headcount”, the hiring manager is not the one making the final decision.

Hiring great people not only creates great work – it also attracts other great people like a herd. “You are brilliant, we are hiring” was the advert which attracted Marissa Meyer to Google. The objective is to create a hiring culture that can resist the siren song of compromise, a song that only grows louder amidst the whirlwind of chaotic hyper growth.

Google wants passionate people, but not people that wear passion on their sleeve – people that live it.  They are also looking for people able to learn – what they call having a growth mind-set. People that decide to set themselves learning goals rather than performance goals. Everybody is a recruiter, Google expects all employees to bring at least one great candidate. The most important skill for a leader is interviewing skills: Prepare, push the limits of the candidate

Google don’t hide that they are elitist – they want the best because they believe there is a big difference between good and great people. Equal hiring is not seen as only the right thing to do but also the most effective: Homogeneity in an organisation breeds failure. It is seen as important how the candidate treat other people in all situations. The interview process is long enough to judge and involves dinner and other activities. In the exponential internet world knowledge and specialisation deteriorate fast and learning becomes increasingly important – much more important than knowledge.

Apart from Passion, Intelligence and the ability to learn, Google is also looking for Googleyness. Integrated in to the word Googleyness are: Knowledge, leadership, ambition, drive, team orientation, service orientation, listening and communication skills, bias to action, effectiveness, interpersonal skills and integrity. You don’t need to like the people you hire, but they do have to be interesting.

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.