In these straitened times there is mounting evidence that the level of employee engagement in an organisation makes a huge different to its effectiveness, profitability and productivity. For example, on average, engaged employees take fewer than three days a year sickness leave while actively disengaged employees average more than six days a year; and the most committed employees perform 20% better and give a 57% increase in discretionary effort.
Engagement also saves on recruitment costs: on average there is a 4% difference in employee turnover between organisations in the top and bottom quartiles on employee engagement. This may not sound very big, but it equates to $120,000 (£76,000) per business unit per year[1].
Clearly ensuring your employees are actively engaged at work makes good business sense. However, it is estimated that only 19% of employees are actively engaged at work at any one time, while another 19% are actively disengaged. David Bolchover[2] exposes what actively disengaged employees do instead of working, it makes interesting reading. He found that:
- one three people have taken illegal drugs at work, such as ecstasy, cannabis, and cocaine;
- one in five people have had sex at work;
- 70% of porn site hits happen during working hours;
- one in five people describe themselves as constantly surfing the net;
- 7% send more than 20 personal emails a day;
- one-third of young professionals confess to being hung-over twice a week at work; and
- a quarter of people have fallen asleep at work.
It is estimated that this disengaged activity costs the UK economy between £37.2 and £38.9bn a year[3]. Positive psychology suggests there are ways we can promote engagement at work.
Encourage people to use their strengths and talents
Considerable benefits accrue to organisations able to do this, for example Rath[4] found that an employee whose supervisor focuses on her strengths is over two and a half times as likely to be engaged as one whose supervisor focuses on her weaknesses. Hodges and Asplund[5] analysed some of the extensive Gallup data and found:
- among employees receiving some strengths feedback turnover rates were 14.9% lower than for those employees receiving nothing;
- those units where managers received strengths feedback showed 12.5% greater productivity post-intervention relative to those units where the manager received nothing; and that
- amongst those employees receiving a strengths feedback, productivity improved by 7.8% relative to employees who didn’t.
Clive Hutchinson of Cougar Automation in the UK has completely revolutionised how his organisation does performance management to embrace this understanding of the motivating and engaging power of working with people’s strengths, he says: "My experience is that it is very difficult to get people to improve at the things they do poorly... So instead of changing people to fit the work, our strengths based approach is to change the work to fit the people... We find that when we say to our people, find your own way to deliver what the customer wants, they work efficiently and deliver high quality. The result, we make money and the customer is happy.”[6]
Help them experience flow
Flow refers to a state where people are so absorbed in what they are doing that they not only lose all sense of time but also become largely unselfconscious: they are concentrating fully on the task in hand. Flow is by definition, an engaging experience[7]. A flow state is well known to occur during some leisure activities, less well known, is that flow experiences can also occur at work. When people are engaged in activities that induce flow they are, by definition, engaged, and all the benefits of an engaged employee accrue.
Use skill in setting goals and reward structures
Much goal setting at work is poorly done. At its best, goal setting provides opportunities for people to experience plentiful, positive and meaningful rewards (positive reinforcement). These don’t have to be material rewards, working for social or self-reinforcing rewards can be highly motivating and engaging.
Help them find meaning in work
When people are engaged in work that they experience as meaningful, they are more engaged. People can be helped to create positive meaning at work, particularly when groups are given the opportunity collectively to discover why their work is meaningful to them, to the organisation, and to the world.
Collaborate over change
Traditional change methods carry with them the challenge of ‘getting buy-in’ or, to put it another way, gaining engagement. Transformative collaboration methods such as Appreciative Inquiry engage everyone involved from the start. Working this way with a local authority recently produced a huge surge of energy, focus and engagement amongst the stakeholders to the process up for review. And, this was before a word of the formal strategy document had been written. By turning the normal order of things on its head and first creating the motivation, engagement and energy and then capturing the ideas on paper, the organisation has produced change faster and with less need to wrestle with those energy depleting activities of ‘overcoming resistance’ and ‘getting buy-in’.
Engagement indicators
Positive psychology research is making it clear that helping employees identify, develop and use their strengths aids engagement; that goal setting used to increase the opportunity to receive positive reinforcement (rewards) increases engagement; that experiencing flow at work is a sign of engagement; that believing one’s work to be meaningful is also a healthy sign of engagement; and that collaborative transformative approaches to change foster high levels of employee engagement. Employee engagement is a state not a trait, everyone can be helped to find their work more engaging.
[1] Stairs, M. and Gilpin, M., 2010. Positive Engagement: From Employee Engagement To Work Place Happiness. In Linley, P. A., Harrington, S. and Garcea, N. (eds), Oxford Handbook Of Positive Psychology And Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[2] Bolchover, D., 2005. The Living Dead. Capstone
[3] Flade, P., 2003. Great Britain's Workforce Lacks Inspiration. Gallup Management Journal, 11.
[4] Rath, T., 2007. Strengthsfinder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press.
[5] Hodges, T.D. and Asplund, J., 2010. Strengths Development In The Workplace. In Linley, P., Harrington, A.S. and Garcea, N. (Eds), Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology And Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press
[6] Hutchinson, C., 2011. Performance Management in Lewis S (2011) Positive Psychology at Work: How Positive Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry Create Inspiring Organizations. Wiley Forthcoming March 2011
[7] Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2002. Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness. Rider: London
See also: ‘Inside their minds’ by Michael Wellin, in The People Bulletin, 18 November 2009.