Recent Ashridge research
compared what organisations
described as their highly engaged
teams – based on consistent high
engagement scores – and their
disengaged teams – based on
consistent low scores – and found
that 29% of those deemed highly
engaged were actually satisfied,
not engaged.
“Organisations have been
heavily reliant on engagement
surveys as the ‘answer’. But we
found that they’re not showing
a true picture of engagement,”
says Armstrong.
Others point to the difficulty of
ever measuring engagement in a
truly concrete tangible way. “For
me it’s around the connection an
employee has with the employer
and what that means to one
person is different to what that
means for another. How can you
define and measure an emotional
connection between two parties?”
says Liz Jeffery, VP HR at Sony
Music Entertainment.
“It’s a soft issue so it will never
be defined like financial things
can be defined,” concedes
MacLeod. “But it doesn’t mean it’s
not important.”
“I’m not sure you can really
make sure what you’re measuring
gives an accurate picture of
engagement,” muses internal
communications and
engagement manager of
Medway Council Sandra
Steel. “It’s not a tangible
subject where you can give an
accurate measure, so it’s more
an overall general look.”
Such sentiments have played a
key role in the move among many
organisations in recent years,
away from using – or only
using – the traditional
annual engagement survey.
Take MTR Crossrail.
“Intangible” measures like the
culture and feeling of the
organisation can be “tell-tale
signs” of engagement, says HRD
Alison Bell. From a quantitative
perspective the organisation is
Strategic HR What is engagement?
definitions are hard – nigh
impossible – to come by. “If you’re
looking for a perfect definition of
employee engagement it’s a bit
like looking for the Holy Grail –
you’ll never find it,” says Jo
Moffatt, strategy director at
Engage for Success and MD
of Woodreed.
“There’s more than 60 different
definitions and no universallyaccepted
definition of what it
means,” says Amy Armstrong,
senior faculty at Ashridge at Hult
International Business School.
“It’s something that has been
looked at in organisations since
the late ‘90s and there’s been more
than 2,000 studies in it but each
study has looked at something
slightly different.”
To survey or not to survey
And yet the idea of reaching
a standard definition has
garnered particular attention
of late in relation to the humble
annual engagement survey
and Taylor calling for the major
survey companies to come
together to establish a standard
or benchmark.
“If they collaborate they could
establish a standard for good
robust surveys – there would still
be room for diversity within that
standard,” he says. “And there’s an
enormous amount of data out
there that isn’t being pulled
together effectively, which if we
could combine and mash up we
could get a really vivid picture
of where we are and the
underlying trends.”
This would counteract a
situation in which today there are
hundreds of different survey
providers all offering
organisations varying ways
to measure how engaged their
workforces are. For instance, a
score of 50 could be phenomenal
on one scale and dire on another,
meaning that even where a
definition is upheld there’s
still confusion over the
data’s reliability.
The employee engagement “I think we’ve hit peak engagement,” says Rob Briner,
professor of organisational psychology at Queen Mary
University of London. “More people are saying they
don’t do engagement now or realise they’ve made a
mistake.
“Employee engagement isn’t the fi rst all-purpose,
all-singing, all-dancing, umbrella term to come along
to HR,” he adds. “The question is, if we’ve hit peak
engagement, what’s coming next?”
Briner’s educated guess is: employee experience. He
points to research he’s conducted using Google Trends.
“If you put ‘job satisfaction’ in as a term and ‘employee
engagement’ in as a term, what you see is the number
of searches for and appearances of job satisfaction on
the internet has gone down and employee
engagement has gone up, suggesting there’s been a
kind of replacement,” he says. “So have we just
replaced job satisfaction with another term?
introducing more frequent pulse
surveys: “Because of the position
we’re in as a business with the
delay to the Crossrail programme
and opening of the line,
engagement is really important to
us and can change very quickly.”
Sony Music Entertainment has
gone further, dispensing with any
type of engagement survey
altogether. If an organisation has
genuinely engaged its workforce it
shouldn’t need a survey or score
to tell them this, says Jeffrey.
“My team are never at their
desks as we’re all just out having
conversations with the business,”
she says. “You get far richer
feedback from having a
conversation with people than I
think a survey ever delivers”.
The process of an engagement
survey itself can drive the very
opposite impact to that intended,
Jeffery warns. “People don’t want
to fill out surveys so why force our
people to do something we all
know is annoying?” she says.
“Most people want to talk so give
them a platform to do it in a
meaningful way.”
Dan Cable, professor of
organisational behaviour at
London Business School, recounts
working with another firm that
If an
organisation
has genuinely
engaged its
workforce it
shouldn’t need
a survey or
score to tell
them this
24 HR June 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
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