Passion vs. Engagement

Do you know anyone that openly has bad intentions when it comes to work? I’d be very surprised because there aren’t any humans who want to do badly or even any that want their company to do badly. Tired adagio or not, everybody is really invested in bringing their best selves at work. They are.?

This is not to say everyone has their heart in it, far from it. One of the most immediately evident signs of having extreme HumanDebt is how many of your employees are actively disengaged but does anyone know how many those are? No. Does any enterprise have any definitive numbers regarding how their employees feel to hand? No. Do companies honestly measure how invested their employees are in the well-being of the company, how emotionally connected they are with the work and their colleagues and how motivated they are to succeed? They absolutely do not.

They may think they do and they may send a yearly or bi-yearly NPS survey out. Or they may have gotten the more modern version of that that asks the same questions with a slightly more relevant user experience and somewhat more often. But do any of these tests tell them, what their people truly feel? Does anyone know?

On a 1-10 scale for overall passion with zero being actively-disengaged-bank-employee level and 10 being Apple-fan-boy-with-their-dream job or starry-eyed interns at Google - where are your people??

There are a bunch of words that get thrown around when it comes to the topic of how employees should feel about their workplace:

• Purpose
• Impact
• Passion
• Engagement
• Wellbeing

These words are interesting because the topics of "Engagement" and "Employee experience" arrived into the business world vernacular a few years back and that was before this new brave post-Covid world where we discuss burnout, disengagement and flexibility depending on how our humans feel. Consider that the terms above were also the only area where such “fluffiness” was discussed. No other feelings and emotions were discussed or encouraged in the workplace.

Certainly no negatives and certainly nothing too “human” or “too personal” - in general people weren’t expected to have lives and react like human beings with emotional responses, they were to be “professional” and maintain an official, stiff and artificial affectation at all times. Except when it came to purpose.?" Emotionless professionals with purpose" was what was expected. No other emotions but the ones that are positive towards the enterprise.?

Preferably don’t feel anything unless it’s a nice feeling that would cause you to recommend this place of work.?

As we often said before, when we designed our software, we spent a lot of time and money investing in additional research and one of the topics that needed the most dissection was “engagement” because every HR professional worth their salt has to admit the definition of it has genuinely become corroded over time and that while at first it may have been born out of a desire to find out how people really feel but the end result today is immensely far from that. So we decided to scrap the definitions and the usual suspect questions and redefine engagement as what it is - a measure of the degree of emotional connection. Be that connection with your teammates or the enterprise.?

Of course, “passion” and “engagement” are not interchangeable, one can easily be passionate about the product or the mission of the enterprise but still feel no true connection to the company or never feel a part of their team. Equally one can be productive if not at all emotionally invested in the purpose and impact of what they do but can they be high performing in the absence of passion? The answer to that, no matter how we would like to dress it so we don’t have to address such a thorny topic, is “no”.

We all have a certain internal score on that passion scale and, the beauty of it is that it can so easily be worked on when we remind ourselves of purpose and impact and when we remember what brought us here in the first place and doing so in Psychologically Safe teams where real conversations on purpose are possible, where our true needs and motivations can be named and underlined, where we can understand each other’s drivers and where we can refresh our investment and reignite our passion is a joyous exercise.

?A few of our plays help with purpose redefinition, and some others help reinforce the tight bond between team members -which incidentally underpins everything and can easily supplement poor organisational level engagement- but all of them aim to bring us to the same place where nothing is just fluffy and things matter intensely and our passion score being up is paramount.?

So what can we do about it? That is indeed the question and one that legions of ping pong tables, pizzas and mousepads haven’t answered. Neither has the occasional talk. Or the employee discounts. Humanity can send people to space routinely but can’t work out how to keep them happy and motivated at work. It shouldn’t be this hard, should it? Less of the “initiatives”, of the “programs”, of the blame culture, of the command and control and of the lip service.?

So what should we give them instead??

• More money;?
• More fun - more time spent in flow - with colleagues in collaborative exercises or alone but in the zone;
• More respect for their lives;?
• More time; ?
• More consideration and empathy;
• More demonstrable care about what they think;?
• An eternally open and honest dialogue;
• Space, time, compensation and resources to do the human work;
• Ways to let them be curious, learn and grow and enough encouragement and support that their passion grows not shrinks as they see the impact and that reinforces their purpose.

Come back tomorrow as we go through some of these again and we give you some more tips and ideas if you’ll be courageous enough to think deeply about “passion” and “engagement”.?

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

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