Satisfaction or Engagement?

Have you ever got a feeling that your employees are not present at the company? If yes, don’t worry, you are not alone. In case you haven’t detected that yet, please go through a walk and talk with some people.?

Surveys are common tool used by companies to identify how happy their employees are with the company performance, the way they are treated and to identify areas that can be improved. Started in 1920 and with traction after the World War II, the surveys were developed to measure people attitudes.?

But what means a high employee satisfaction to work? When an employee is satisfied, it fulfill it’s needs and they feel happy. This happiness with their jobs plays a vital role in their life. Around 50% to 75% (Wikipedia) of the companies in the world have a kind of employee satisfaction survey and the question is how effective it is.

Some of the mechanisms utilize to increase employee satisfactions were developed during the 80’s and still a strong baseline in many companies nowadays. Thinks like?pay, promotions and promotion opportunities, coworkers, supervision, and the work itself, were broadly used to drive satisfaction percentages high. But have also created a negative effect in the companies.

We saw internal competition for promotion destroying relationships, and lack of career path when couldn't be promoted more, pushing satisfaction to lower levels. However, an employee satisfaction should be the bottom line to talk about employee engagement.?

Gallup has been measuring employee engagement over the last 20 years, in 3 distinct categories:

1. % of engaged: people that are connected, committed and contribute to the company growth
2. % of disengaged: people that work at the company and do the basis as expected.
3. % of ACTIVELY disengaged: those are the time eaters, toxic people, and fully disconnected with the company.

In their survey, they measure if I have the basics to perform my job, if my relationships take care and challenge me with the opportunities that are presented, followed by how I work together with my colleagues leading for my personal development and growth.?

It looks decent steps to drive accountability, commitment, and results. But why we are not seen a movement in the up direction? The trends shows that we are having very organic growth, when we talk about employee engagement. And with the pandemic, to take care of our employees became, especially for middle managers, a nightmare.

There is a clear reason why people don’t want to return to their jobs. Here some hints on what I've been reading and listening in my network:

• They learned how much you care about them.
• They learned that at the end they are just a number from payroll.
• They learned that they could survive with much less.
• They learned that relationships matter most than status.
• They learned to have options…

If you have only 1 on every 5 employee in your company that are engaged to work, how do you expect to create an environment that foster work conditions recognition, care, development and lately wellbeing? What kind of leader are you?

There is not a simple answer to this question and it probably lies on you the action that must be taken.

There is many views to define different types of Leadership and I like this one for the simplicity. I’m in favor of the Servant Leadership.?And I act in this way.

Servant leadership is sustained on the principles of humbleness and active listening where the focus is the care you take about the people you serve.?

I let this short link for you to learn more about the servant leadership.

And please let me know what kind of leader you are. A good discussion is always the clever way to learn something.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. — John C. Maxwell