How to be Happy – Time to call off the “Engagement”

“Yes that’s right, we had a one hundred percent response rate to the survey.”

The speaker from a international airline proudly stated his results. His lovingly compiled pie charts labelled “Engagement” were resplendent in the Power Point behind him.  The audience were incredulous, a one hundred percent response rate how was it possible they asked?

“…well, of course, we made the survey mandatory”.

Whilst there are many different definitions of “Engagement” in the HR world broadly speaking and employee’s commitment to and involvement with their work and their organisation seems a decent place to start.  Like most HR initiatives the will to measure engagement starts out as well intentioned and a move towards concern for the employees themselves.  However, too often, in the application and the building of processes around this the notion of “Are our employees OK?” has been replaced with “Are our employees productive?”.  The change is a subtle one and has occurred as the results of surveys have been used as the answers to questions for which they weren’t intended.  Engagement, when measured effectively can be broken down into constituent parts.

• Intellectual engagement – Does the person feel challenged in their work, are they thinking.
• Emotional engagement – Does the person feel positive about doing a good job, is there an efficient emotional reward structure in place.
• Social engagement – Does the role facilitate positive interaction with their co-workers.

When used incorrectly they are answering different questions.

• Productivity – Is the employee producing the requited amount of labour that the company expects
• Performance – Findings of surveys here are used as a proxy to explain results.

The shift is small and goes beyond just the semantic. For one set of employers “engagement” is now about measuring what we can “get out” of a workforce.  Like many other terms the human aspect has become distanced and now the people in the organisation can be reduced to a resource, counted and catalogued accordingly.  Even the manner in which these surveys are conducted can affect the results.  An annual engagement survey sent to everyone in the organisation is little more than the pointed stick poking at the bloated corpse of your organisation’s apathy.  Everything they measure has already happened, it’s post-mortem and the changes it would be possible to make are already too late.  A few click boxes on a website once a year is a chore not a meaningful interaction, regardless of the best intentions those questions are compiled with.

Some forward thinking companies have found a better solution.  In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created a new way of measuring how well an company treats the people whose lives it affects—how well it generates relationships worthy of loyalty.  His Net Promotor Score or NPS was widely adopted and in use of companies of all sizes, segmenting the people into Promoters, Passives and Detractors with it’s simple one or two questions.  There are a great deal of benefits of adopting this approach and adapting it for employees.  When creating an eNPS (employee NPS) the annual laundry list of questions and ratings is replaced with a more frequent check-in, trends in happiness can be linked to real changes in the environment.  An entire team’s mood seems to be changing? Maybe it’s that new office space? Maybe it’s that new manager? Waiting 6 months to a year later to issue a survey is all too late.

So engagement surveys are too little too late and misused tools for measuring productivity.  eNPS is an improvement but in it’s attempt to be as answerable as possible still misses some of the larger aspects of the employee experience.  Some companies seem content to only measure those periods of time they are extracting effort from their employees, ignoring completely the fact there are external influences that might occur after 5pm.  The current toolset of HR is ill-equipped for the reality that the productivity and performance are great to measure but just as important are those things that employees themselves want to get out of work.

There is an alternative that more progressive organisations are adopting and in doing so re-humanising the process of collecting this data.  Instead of asking if an employee would recommend a place of work or waiting a year to prod at them with a laborious survey they ask a one question daily.  “How happy were you today?“.

Happiness at work and employee engagement are similar ideas but have unique and subtle differences in meaning.  Imagine you are managing a team and told to make them “more engaged” it might sound like a request for more meetings, for incentivising longer hours or an edict to start “cracking the whip”. Compare this with a manager tasked to make their team “happier”, this request isn’t about driving productivity. It feels more like a search for ways to empower the team, remove obstacles and better motivate them.

There are a number of new tools that seek to give a better insight into this broader question, at Forward Partners we use the MoodMap tool from Happiness Works. The tool asks the single question “How Happy were you today?” every day at 5pm.  I can answer in one click of the mouse.  Monthly “Climate Studies” probe deeper and allow more insight but not at the cost of provoking respondent apathy or the feeling that it’s all “too little too late”.  Better yet the tool allows respondents to offer “ideas” for improvements in the workplace.  In our use of the tool it’s been interesting to note that these ideas mirrored almost perfectly sections of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  The first suggestions were physiological or environmental – the air-con is noisy, my chair is uncomfortable etc.  In fixing these small, nagging, yet solvable items the “ideas” we’ve captured have evolved too.  There have been ideas for conference attendance, skill sharing, training budgets and social outing suggestions.  How’s that for “engagement”?

No software tool is magic and whilst it has been incredibly beneficial perhaps the biggest benefit is in facilitating the conversation around employee happiness.  For those companies looking for a way to gain insight into their employee’s well being and then empowering them to improve themselves and their environment these tools could be a great way.  Of course for the rest of you you have about 12 months to sharpen that pointy stick, or maybe wait to get that insight at the exit interviews?

Matt Buckland is Head of Talent at Forward Partners.  He tweets as @elsatanico and blogs at The King's Shilling.