It's Impossible For Companies To Improve Employee Engagement Enough To Make A Productivity Gain
With companies planning to spend somewhere around three quarters of a billion dollars a year on increasing employee engagement, you have to wonder why suddenly, the world has forgotten completely about the decades of research on employee motivation, because, folks, companies are simply not going to succeed.
Why?
First, because both employee engagement (or what we used to call motivation) isn't under the control of the company, and the company has very FEW means to INCREASE IT. However, companies can decrease it, making it a "hygiene factor".
Second, While companies may want employees to work longer hours, be loyal, and all that great stuff that affects the bottom line, the basic psychological implicit contract between employee and employer no longer exists, with frequent layoffs, restricted raises, and so on. The sometimes insane push for more profits, particularly by publicly traded companies puts employee and employer on opposite sides.
Third, people have lives. If you look at the items often used in employee engagement surveys, you'll see that many of them have to do with sacrificing those lives in the service of a company. People aren't going to do it in our modern world, NO MATTER what a company might do. It's no sustainable except for Type A employees.
Bottom Line
People who want to devote themselves to a company will do so. They will always be a small minority. Always. The rest might work a bit harder provided the company doesn't do dumb things to affect the employee-employer relationship, but there's a personal limit all of us have on how hard we want to work, how many hours, how much stress.
Spend your employee engagement money as you wish, but remember that you will get far better impact if you take all that money you spend on surveys and process and just do something good for employees. Provide better day care facilities, for example.
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