What can the pandemic teach us about employee engagement?

This article initially appeared in the March 2021 issue of Insightism. The thoughts and opinions here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of my employer or other affiliates.

Much has been made of employee engagement and its benefits over the past several years. Businesses continue to require more work with fewer people, making it increasingly important to reap the rewards of employee engagement and its many tangible workplace benefits. Firms that masterfully engage their employee base are more likely to experience increased productivity and customer loyalty, which in turn leads to increased daily financial returns, stock values, and profitability.

Despite the positive financial outcomes that result from having a highly engaged workforce, Gallup’s most recent research shows that only 31% of workers in the United States are fully engaged and 14% are actively disengaged (meaning they work against the company’s best interests!). These figures have not moved significantly in more than a decade, despite an uptick at the start of the pandemic. Gallup estimates the economic cost of low engagement to be $300 billion annually in the United States alone.

What happened at the start of the pandemic that would account for the quick rise – and then decline – in engagement scores? Some of the increase can be explained by a sense of gratitude among employees who kept their jobs while their friends and neighbors lost their livelihoods. Furthermore, companies responded to the pandemic by increasing their communication frequency and showing genuine care and concern for their employees. In short, leaders behaved like they cared – before they returned to a “business as usual” mindset that coincided with the downturn in engagement levels. 

This rapid increase and decline demonstrate that engagement relies on reciprocity between leader and employee that goes beyond mere economic exchange. We’ve all seen employees who are only willing to perform their basic duties in exchange for the check, but engagement requires more than getting a paycheck. In fact, cash for task employees often flout company policy, ignore the needs of customers, and bring their coworkers down with them – all of which hurts firms in the long run.

True engagement requires what social scientists refer to as social exchange. Social Exchange occurs when an organization or a leader behaves in a certain way and the employees are obligated to reciprocate by acting in an equally beneficent way with the organization as a matter of fairness. Social exchange requires trust, mutual personal obligation, and gratitude. For example, allowing an employee to work from home so they stay physically safe from coronavirus obligates the employee to go above and beyond by giving more time and energy to their job.

This dynamic of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” is a fundamental part of human nature. In the work context, this begs the question – how do employers scratch their employees’ backs to create engagement? The back scratching usually consists of three elements: psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability.

1. Psychological meaningfulness is a sense that the work itself and interactions with others provide sufficient return on investment to justify expending personal energy.       
2. Psychological safety is the ability to be one’s self at work without concern for negative consequences, which requires supportive group dynamics and norms, trusting interpersonal relationships, and open management styles.
3. Psychological availability refers to an employee’s sense that he or she has sufficient physical, emotional, and cognitive resources to contribute to their job or organization. Being available requires not only a sense of security within the employee’s organization, but also requires a non-work life that provides sufficient latitude to apply these energies to work.

These three conditions can be met in a number of ways:

• An employee can find their work psychologically meaningful when they are doing work they’re trained for, have autonomy or control over their work, can see the results of their work (and are proud of the outcomes), and are appropriately rewarded for their contributions.
• An employee is psychologically safe when they feel as if they belong because of good relationships with their supervisors and coworkers.
• An employee is psychologically available when they have access to the right tools to do their jobs, and see the company as fair, just, and supportive.  

When these three elements come together, an employee can participate in a gain spiral, which is a type of amplifying loop where the employee’s positive thoughts and feelings about their work performance create the psychological meaning, psychological safety, and psychological availability they will need to be engaged in the next task they will perform. The employee’s positive thoughts and feelings give them the ability to apply additional cognitive, emotional, or physical energy to their jobs – in short, they are engaged in their work. This higher level of engagement allows the employee to complete the task, which will itself become a measure of performance; and the cycle begins anew.

Whether an employee participates in mere economic exchange or enters a social exchange relationship depends a great deal on the quality of the leader-employee relationship. A leader who cannot build strong relationships ends up with a group of hired hands – employees who are more likely to be destructive to the organization because of their low engagement. On the other hand, a leader who builds strong relationships ends up with trusted partners – employees who are highly engaged, demonstrating loyalty, commitment, support, and trust.

Volumes have been written about what it takes for leaders to create strong relationships, but the foundations remain the same. Not surprisingly, leaders who are agreeable and likeable are more likely to drive employee engagement, because nobody wants to work for a jerk. Strong communication allows employees to understand the leader’s expectations of them, what’s going on in the broader organization, and where they stand – all of which allows employees to perform better. Similarly, leaders who delegate and show trust will likely reap the rewards of an engaged workforce. Finally, leaders who recognize and reward their employees will find their teams perform better than teams with leaders who appear ungrateful. 

The Coronavirus has put a lot of attention on companies and leaders, allowing employees to decide how much their leaders really care about them and their well-being, creating conditions of psychological safety. Ample time at home has allowed employees to assess how meaningful they feel their jobs are. The stress of changing social conditions has forced employees to choose how psychologically available they will be for their employers. When the virus recedes, leaders will have an opportunity to show their teams how well they have learned these lessons and whether they will rise to the challenges of leading for engagement in a post-pandemic reality.