Are You Feeling Spursy? - the two approaches to employee engagment

I’m going to take a risk and write a piece about football, and as if that weren’t divisive (and off-putting) enough, it’s going to be about Spurs. That's because last month Tottenham Hotspur FC published their annual financial report, and whilst most fans and investors didn’t expect it to be laden with gold, it gave a devastating vignette of the affect COVID has had on live sports. In a statement accompanying the report, Chairman Daniel Levy said that the club has spent around ￡400m on recruiting players, ￡800m on a new stadium (which is now the largest London stadium after Wembley) and ￡30m on upgraded training grounds (which include 11 outdoor grass pitches and state of the art fitness, medical and physiotherapy facilities); and yet in that time they have precious little to show for it (except perhaps a barnstorming Champions League final against Liverpool in 2019). As Levy, who happens to be the longest serving Chairman of any Premier League club, has acknowledged: “Player spending is no guarantee of success.”?

Levy’s background is in real estate where typically you expect to get back a proportion of what you invest over time with interest. Unfortunately football isn’t always like that (with or without COVID) and neither is investing in employees. Since the report came out, there's been a sea-change at Tottenham, spear-headed by their Head Coach Antonio Conte and his team, and despite their recent losing streak a place in the top four of the Premier League (and hence qualification into the UEFA Champions League) seems like a real possibility. But the story does show that spending money on what an employer thinks is best for their employees doesn’t always yield greater productivity and job satisfaction.

The first person to really look into this was Frederick Herzberg. Herzberg started his academic career as a psychologist, but interrupted his studies to join the US army during WWII and he was among the first American soldiers to arrive at the Dachau concentration camp when it was liberated; he later said that the experience, as well as his talks with ordinary Germans who lived near the camp, led to his interest in motivation. In the 1950s he studied 200 engineers and accountants in the US which he used as the basis for his theory on job satisfaction which became known as his Two Factor Theory. His theory breaks job satisfaction, or “enrichment” as he called it, into two factors:

• Hygiene or extrinsic factors such as working conditions, safety - essential tools necessary to do the job
• Motivation or intrinsic factors such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself, personal development (Learning & Development), and advancement

[Note that financial remuneration doesn’t feature in Herzberg’s motivators - and it didn't help much at Spurs either. In fact, beyond a basic subsistence that provides for the employee, he referred to it with the derogatory acronym KITA]

Hygiene factors are baseline expectations which workers have in order for them not to be dissatisfied in their work, but they rarely contribute to higher levels of motivation or performance. Motivation factors are what fulfil a need for meaning and personal growth. So for example, if the office is too hot or too cold or the toilets don’t work, employees will feel “dissatisfied,” but if these things are fixed it won’t suddenly make them all super-performers, it’ll just meet the minimum standards they expect in the workplace (just as being hygienic won’t make you healthier, but will help prevent you getting sick). Likewise, there’s no point in implementing cool-sounding employee wellbeing programmes if the basic working conditions are intolerable. One way of putting it is that hygiene factors are 'push factors' that will drive employees away if unmet whereas motivation factors are 'pull factors' which draw people in and keep them retained within the business.

[There are similarities to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in that if the creature comforts - ie the hygiene factors, are not (perceived to be) fulfilled, the motivation factors are irrelevant and employees won’t engage with their work.]

What was most notable about Herzberg’s findings were his premise that job satisfaction is not the opposite of job dissatisfaction. His interviewees would list things that they were unhappy about and things that they were happy with and then give an overall opinion based on the two.

However, just focussing on the hygiene factors whilst ignoring the higher motivating factors isn’t enough – people rarely leave a job because of hygiene factors. Yes, employee engagement is more than just taking care of the hygiene factors, but it’s also about creating a physical and psychological environment, a culture, in which employees can thrive in a way that suits them and keeps them motivated. And yet so much is spent on the creature comforts, all of which are basically hygiene factors, none of which can be linked to improved productivity. That’s not to say they’re not important, it’s just that going overboard with them at the expense of the higher motivating factors will yield limited benefits.

HR has come to split hygiene and motivation into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ HR respectively, where hard HR like policies and procedures were much easier to quantify, monitor and manage than soft HR. However with the recent coming of age of HR analytics, LMS and HRIS tools, tracking employee engagement in realtime using regular but short pulse surveys is becoming much easier. In addition, 'stay interviews' are becoming more popular as a way of gauging what it is that employees like about their work and spotting any danger signs early on.

During the recruitment process assessment tools can be used to identify candidates’ strengths and weaknesses quantitatively and this can continue through their employment history to identify training requirements, job performance capabilities and even employee wellbeing.

But there are two things that need to be kept in mind when using this approach:

Firstly, just as not all people are the same. Not all jobs are either, and there are jobs in which for example there is a low level of autonomy and self-management, where workers are given specific tasks to complete within a given timeframe (eg warehouse and logistics). These would be classified as low-skilled blue-collar jobs and would typically be considered highly stressful (more prone to high staff turnover and automation). Whilst for some of us this sort of work would indeed be a nightmare, there are those who like the comfort and re-assurance of a set routine with easy to follow instructions, and as long as this is clear on the job description this should be fine. So generalisations about what employee engagement or wellbeing looks like in terms of the job, team or the company are not always helpful - especially as we're recruiting an ever-diverse workforce with disparate needs (which change over time).

The second quandary is that it’s not always easy to differentiate between hygiene and motivation factors. What is essential for one person may be a ‘nice to have’ for another – take a coffee machine as an example! In fact, as employee rights and quality of life have improved over time, items that would once have been considered motivators are now merely hygiene factors. The only way to truly know which is which is to ask those who it affects the most.

I don’t want to give the impression that investing in smart offices with nice facilities is counter-productive. Employees need to feel proud of their workplace, and setting the bar high means that everyone’s expectations will be met. I just wouldn’t want it to be used as a fig leaf for things that are more problematic like toxic work cultures or poor employee wellbeing. After all, there’s no point Spurs spending loads of money on an expensive trophy cabinet if they don’t have anything to put in it.