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.

Stay tuned to this area of our blog, since we'll be providing additional executive summaries, and notification of new additions to this section. Make sure to register here.

If You "Understand" Millennials, It's Time To Reconnect Your Brain

Oddly enough, the Millennial Generation, also referred to as Gen-Y, is not so well defined, even when it comes to the boundaries for who fits and who doesn't. One common range runs from 1980-2000 although some people use a narrower birth band. Think you know what Millennials are like? Let's take a look.

Surveying The Experts On The Millennium Generation

Jean Twenge, in a 2007 book, called them the ME Generation, claiming this generation is riddled with Narcissism.
Emily Jarvis, in 2012, characterized Millennials as:

Millennials -- they are often motivated, pushy, impatient and innovative -- they want change and they want it now. 

Fellow author, Susan Heathfield writes about Millennials:

• Millennials want to look up to you, learn from you, and receive daily feedback from you. They want "in" on the whole picture and to know the scoop.
• Millennials are ready to take on the world. Their parents told them they can do it - they can.
• They are used to working in groups and teams. In contrast to the lone ranger attitude of earlier generations, millennials actually believe a team can accomplish more and better - they've experienced team success.
• Your millennial employees are used to loving parents who have scheduled their lives around the activities and events of their children.
• Boring is bad. They seek ever-changing tasks within their work. What's happening next is their mantra. Don't bore them, ignore them, or trivialize their contribution.
• Millennial employees are multi-taskers on a scale you've never seen before. Multiple tasks don't phase them. Talk on the phone while doing email and answering multiple instant messages - yes! (Ed. This despite the fact that research has shown that human beings are not capable of true multi-tasking).
• Your millennials are used to cramming their lives with multiple activities. They may play on sports teams, walk for multiple causes, spend time as fans at company sports leagues, and spend lots of time with family and friends. They work hard, but they are not into the sixty hour work weeks defined by the Baby Boomers
• Millennials want to enjoy their work. They want to enjoy their workplace.

Actually, one thing about descriptions about Millennials, or for that matter, any generation, is that it's a lot like Alice's Restaurant, from the 60'. You can get everything you want at Alice's Restaurant...

Now, Re-Connect Your Brain

Before you take any characterizations of this generation as true, here are a few things to think about:

If we use the boundaries of 1980 and 2000 as the outer limits for this generation, it includes people who are currently twelve years old and people who are thirty-two years old. If you take one hundred Gen-Y twelve year olds, and one hundred thirty-two year old Gen-Y's, will the twelve year old resemble each other or will they resemble the thirty-two year olds?

Will you find obvious similarities between the two groups, compared with similarities if you compare either of them to different generations - let's say a group of people aged fifteen (from a later generation) or people aged thirty-seven (from an earlier generation?

Or will you find that the differences between the twelve year olds and the thirty two year olds, both part of the Millennial generation, are so huge that there's no way they resemble each other in terms of many of the characteristics attributed to the generation?

The answer is obvious. Twelve year olds have almost no resemblance to their older Millennials. They don't look the same, or talk the same, or prefer the same things, or behave the same, even though they are supposed to share all the characteristics of the generation.

Maybe we're expecting too much. Since the birth year boundaries are debatable, let's make the range smaller. Let's take 1985-2000 (if we change the 2000 boundary, we no longer have a millennial group, so we'll leave that constant).

Anything different if we compare fifteen year olds to thirty-two year olds? No. The younger millennials show almost no obvious resemblances to their other generation brothers and sisters.

So, What Do We Know?

When it comes to generations, we know a lot less than we think, both collectively, and as individuals, yet we continue to act as if the categories we use (generational names) have both truth value, and practical value in guiding our behavior (see Susan Heathfield's article on managing Millennials).

Part of the problem is obviously that the categories are much too large. In our examples above, we see that Millennials are somewhere between twelve and thirty-two years old, and with an age range that large, the affects of age, maturation, and life stage render any generalizations incorrect, but worse, misleading.

We know, for example, from the work of David Foot, author of Boom, Bust, Echo, that where people are in terms of their life stage (first child birth, child rearing, student, buying first house, etc) has far more influence on what people believe and how they behave than what generation they are part of. So, if you compare thirty year olds from today, to thirty year olds from twenty five years ago (from another generation), you'll find that even though they come from different generations they are more similar to each other than are their "generational brothers and sisters" who are in different life stages and different ages.

Seniors from ANY generation are more risk averse, politically conservative, and hesitant to embrace change than teenagers, REGARDLESS of what generations they are part of.

It's not generational labels that matter. It's life experience and stage of life, and that renders generational stereotyping useless. That's not to say that the life experiences of a generation born in 1940 are the same as those for people born in 1985. Wars, technology changes, culture and environment DO affect people who live in different times. Shared experiences of  "generations" are part of the equation for understanding people, when the experiences and events are extreme, and particularly traumatic (e.g. wars, great depressions). Less traumatic events, not so much..

For example, if you look at people who have escaped war zones (i.e. Vietnamese refugees, refugees from WW I and WW 2, you'll find they have some similar traits (e.g. sense of scarcity, distrust of governments), but that those commonalities have nothing to do with generations. People who escaped death by trekking across Europe to safety in WW1 will share some traits with those who did the same thing in WW2, despite the fact that they are not part of the same generation.

People who have only rudimentary education (i.e. grade 3 or 4) will share many characteristics regardless of when they were born, or WHY they did not receive more education.

What Do You Think Now?

Do you still really understand Millennials? Does it still make sense to use generational labels to classify people, or is this starting to sound like many other stereotyping systems about race, or gender, or even culture?

Why do YOU use generational stereotypes? Do they still make sense?

Human Resources Policies: Focus On Anti-Bullying Or Pro Civil Workplace?

Human resources departments are usually the nexus point for creating policy, and are usually responsible for drafting workplace anti-bullying policies. As our awareness and sensitivity has increased, more companies have or will continue to create anti-bullying policies. But should they? On one level, I think we'd all agree that as is the case with sexual harrassment policies, companies need to provide guidelines and policy to employees, with the aim of reducing both. The question though, is the slant. There are actually two different alternatives. We can create an anti-bullying policy, which highlights on what we do NOT want, or we can create a "civil workplace" policy that highlights what we DO want, with less emphasis on what we don't want. It goes a little beyond mere semantics. 

Problems Associated With Focusing On Anti-Bullying

1. Bullying itself is poor concept because it evokes such emotional responses and tends to polarize people about what constitutes bullying and what does not. In part, that is because bullying, much like sexual harrassment is hard to define via strict behavioral definitions. Context counts. Behaviors that would be construed as bullying in one context and between two specific people, might be perfectly acceptable to two different parties. The term bullying makes it sound that there are universal behavioral definitions of the term, and that's simply not true.
2. Anti-bullying policies, by focusing on what NOT to do, may not help people know what to do, and we know that to achieve actual behavior change, we need people to know both what is not acceptable and what IS acceptable, or in other terms, what one should do instead.
3. Anti-bullying policies tend to be much narrower than focusing on the more positive civil workplace policies.

Civil Workplace Policies Better And Broader 

 One major difference between an anti-bullying policy and a civil workplace policy is that the latter can be broader. Bullying is only one aspect that affects whether a work environment is toxic. Civility in the workplace can include things that don't really fit in a more narrower, "this is what you can't do" policy. For example, it can define how employees should use common resources shared with other employees, processes for resolving conflicts, and norms for communication that go way beyond what you'd normally find in an anti-bullying policy. it's simply more comprehensive. There's another advantage to a civil workplace policy and that is that it is positive, not negative. It helps create a shared vision about the type of workplace one is trying to create, because, it spells out preferred methods of interacting and communicating, rather than just saying: "Hey, this is what we don't want". It can still include reference to bullying behaviors, of course, but it can be much more. Civil workplace policies reflect what a company CAN be, and that builds culture. On balance, HR departments might be well served, as would companies and their employees, by looking more broadly, and creating a more positive, vision linked and comprehensive policy that describes the civil workplace most employees want and crave. It's broader, and doesn't use terms, like bullying, that are often ill defined, and have a huge amount of emotional baggage attached, often stemming from childhood experiences. 

This appeared originally on The Performance Management and Appraisal Resource Center. Due to the importance of this topic -- bullying in the workplace, we've set up a special area, where we'll be adding additional material of interest to HR about the effects of "bullying", and the challenges of addressing it.