How do you know if your employees are really engaged?

I have recently had a debate with several executives on the paradox inside many companies regarding the difference between the real engagement (seen also by the exponentially increasing amount of CVs sent to recruiters during the last years) and the employee engagement results (which are often underlining a very high engagement).

I decided to leave the article without our conclusion as I believe yours is much more relevant and instead ask few questions inspired from the discussions we’ve had with various managers:

How many managers have teams smaller than 5 - 6 people in your organization?

Provided the pure truth is written in a survey (about the perception of course), how likely is it for some of those managers to become defensive and revengeful when seeing how they are perceived by some of the subordinates?

How likely, even though it was an anonymous survey, is it for the manager to actually have more than a hint about who said what?

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Thus, how likely is it for the person to be truthful in an anonymous survey once knowing she/he has a revengeful boss?... Because almost everybody knows whether their boss can or cannot take feedback well.

How many of you feel the leadership team is self-centered, short term focused, not driven by compassion and yet, scores at employee satisfaction are high and the likelihood for them to actually change behavior is small? Confusing, huh?

I am not saying there aren't companies where the reality is close to the results of a survey because there are. I am just challenging those where the reality is often in the opposite direction and where fear drives the answers...

Some of you may wonder what is the solution.

Well, it depends...

One (with mid-long term effects) could be that from top to down, the moral values (ethics, compassion, responsibility, etc.) are to be used as mandatory criteria for hiring and firing. It is not easy because very often we find companies keeping toxic managers due to bringing outstanding short term results.

It requires commitment from the top and no compromise when about retaining/promoting/hiring high performing people lacking character.

What do you think?

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Tags: executive search, executive search consultant, IICPartners, K.M. Trust & Partners, Managing Partner, Radu, Manolescu, Radu Manolescu, #KMtrust, #RaduManolescu