How Employment Engagement Has Failed Companies AND Employees

by Robert Bacal

According to estimates by Bersin at Deloitte, companies are spending about three quarters of a billion dollars on attempts to improve "employee engagement, and that number will hit the billion dollar a year mark shortly, and continue rising.

Despite this investment, not to mention the time spent in these efforts which isn't included in this figure, and is probably MORE valuable than the money, all of the research indicates that employee engagement scores haven't increased at all. In fact, they seem to be fairly stable, or have DROPPED since companies have jumped on this bandwagon.

Has Employee Engagement Failed?

The definitive answer is yes, it has. It has sucked out valuable resources, distracted managers and staff from more important goals, but what's worse is that once you understand the psychology behind employee motivation, and how organizations work, you'll come to one central conclusion:

Not only has it failed in terms of raising those scores but it has failed as a business tool, and, it cannot possibly succeed.

Find Out Why Employment Engagement Has Failed - An Executive Summary

I'm happy to unveil a series of articles about why it's failed us, why it's a dead end, and ultimately what companies should be doing instead.

Here's a brief rundown of key points, an executive summary, if you will:

1. There is no central accepted definition of employee engagement, making communication about it difficult. Some definitions focus on behavior, others on feelings, others on what employees think.
2. Companies have jumped on the bandwagon of employee engagement not because it's a fad, but because it provides a simple -- no, oversimplified way of thinking about employees and what makes them tick. The simplicity that makes it so popular is the over-simplification that causes it to fail.
3. Researchers and analysts suggest there is you can improve business results and productivity by increasing employee engagement, but in fact, it's far more likely that successful businesses create more engaged staff, not the other way around.
4. Companies are over-focusing on employment engagement SCORES as an end in itself, and this is causing squandering of huge amounts of money and energy to no end but to increase survey scores.
5. In fact, companies have little ability to increase employee engagement, but much more ability to destroy employee engagement. In other words, it's far easier to destroy it than improve it.
6. Spending resources on employee engagement moves those resources AWAY from where they can have direct impact to where they have no impact on business results.
7. Often employee engagement processes backfire because employees understand that the company's motivation for increasing their engagement is not for them, the employees, but is solely to manipulate employees to work harder without additional compensation.
8. Companies are making the huge error of forgetting that employee engagement isn't an end in itself, but only a means, and a poor one) for achieving business goals. It's the wrong focus. The scores mean NOTHING.
9. Since it's impossible to evaluate the return on investment for employee engagement efforts, companies aren't doing that kind of analysis, so are never learning that they are wasting their investment in it.
10. There are far better ways to invest resources to improve business results that are more direct. Spending money on employee engagement involves more indirect use of resources, and it doesn't work. There's better ways.

Want To Learn The Details

Visit our employee engagement page for much fuller explanations about why these ten points are accurate and true, and how the research findings are incredibly misleading.

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