Something Different for Engagement
Written by Daniel Debow and David Pardy
There’s an extremely long, drawn-out engagement crisis underway. It’s been happening for decades.
Disengagement is like a virus that spreads to all parts of the company — from the individual employee, to the team, the department, the customer, and ultimately net profit. It’s costing America hundreds of billions annually. Only 33% of American workers are actively engaged. 85% of executives agree that something must be done it.
The kicker? Nothing I’m saying is new. Businesses have been throwing mountains of money at this crisis but yesterday’s tactics just aren’t working. Given the global trend towards remote and distributed work, engaging employees is only going to get harder. We need something big. We need something different.
Surveys are just the start
The #1 best selling product for boosting engagement scores are employee surveys. Surveys can tell you that your engagement scores are low, and where the issues are. Qualtrics, Gallup, Medalia, and many other companies are focused to telling you what you might already know: workers are unhappy. And that’s where the buck begins to pass.
HR departments slap managers and business unit leaders with low engagement numbers and tell them to fix it. Some provide resources like how to tweak workers’ benefits or schedule management coaching sessions (more happy vendors will provide that). But these tactics are, we believe, not addressing core issues.
Managers, starved for ideas, comb through the 11.7 million Google search results for this topic and find more of the same: “give more recognition,” “make advancement paths clear,” and “ask your employees for answers.” They provide logic for why these things will work. And they do, sometimes. But again, they ignore a core issue.
Here’s where we kick off the endless cycle of surveys, again.
(1) Managers realize there is an engagement problem.
(2) They implement a technique to fix it.
(3) It doesn’t work, so they run a survey again.
Why are we stuck in this loop? We believe it’s because executives and leadership are so busy trying to come up with a solution that they haven’t taken the time to back off and discover the right question. We shouldn’t be asking “How do we improve engagement?” but rather “What is engagement, really?”
What is engagement?
Engagement is getting people to give a 💩.
Disengagement is when people are able to make a difference to the company, but they just don’t give a 💩 so they choose to do nothing instead.
According to Gallup and the Harvard Business Review, here’s how you can engage people.
- Visibility from senior management
- A good relationship with direct manager
- Having work friends
Doesn’t seem all that tough, huh?
Except it is tough — and it’s getting tougher. And this is the core issue. We believe that for engagement, the medium is the message. More and more work is done in distributed teams, shift cycles, and contract work, all in a world that’s increasingly complex and would benefit from more face-to-face interaction.
Here’s the core issue: the mediums we use for most of our communication. We’re drifting apart and disengaged because we communicate, daily, in ways that strip our messages of human emotion, connection, and feeling. We type at each other, all day, every day. Most management is management by typing or powerpoint. That’s our engagement bottleneck.
Let’s talk about text. Email is 50 years old. PowerPoint is 30. They are not modern, authentic, engaging forms of communication. Text was humanity’s MVP product for asynchronous communication (Person A writes something down and, later, Person B reads it). It has low informational throughput and it systematically prone to negative misinterpretation (see below). In short: it’s woefully inefficient at saying everything we need it to in a complex workplace and it starves us of connection.
If you truly want your employees to be engaged, you first must stop and consider how thoroughly text — an inherently unengaging medium — dominates your workplace communication. Slack, GIFs, and Emojis do not fix the problem — they’re just a facade for actual human-to-human connection.
So, if not text, then what? We need something big. We need something different.
We need to be human again
Curious what your employees are doing when they’re disengaged? According to Social Media Today, they spend an average of 40 minutes per day on YouTube where they collectively watch hundreds of millions of hours of video. After that, they spend 35 minutes on Facebook, perhaps watching more video, the fastest growing type of post. After that, they spend 25 minutes on Snapchat, yet another video-heavy platform.
Mobile video is the most engaging medium.
By 2021, video will account for 82 percent of all internet traffic. And we can venture a guess as to why: video brings the feelings flooding back. Video communicates all the emotion, empathy, and nonverbal behavior that people in this age of dislocation and text communication so desperately miss.
Why, then, aren’t we applying this consumer arena revelation to engaging workers?
We have, but poorly. Video in the workplace hasn’t yet caught on because it draws groans from white collar workers who suffer through buggy video conferences. It induces yawns in those exposed to stuffy executive fireside chats and conference-casts. It’s been deployed poorly, dragged down by technical or operational limitations. Desktop video often look like hostage proof-of-life videos – cold, awkward and emotionless.
Mobile video is different. Its inherently human, authentic, in the moment. It’s real. Its deeply engaging.
But we truly believe that if the message is the medium and you can successfully shift important communications to a more engaging medium like mobile video you’ll be onto something big.
The solution? Unleash the video
Let’s review.
Workers are disengaged. Millions of dollars are wasted.
Executives want to solve the problem. Surveys don’t help. We need a big change in our approach.
Engagement is getting people to give a 💩. This is within reach. The keys: have good visibility from senior managers, good relationships with direct managers, and work friends.
Text is a bad medium to achieve any of these things because it has low emotional throughput. GIFs and emojis try to improve it but don’t.
Mobile video is blowing up in the consumer world because it has high informational and emotional throughput. It is an inherently engaging medium.
To date, we’ve applied video in the workplace poorly. The right solution to replace text would have to genuinely make people more productive and more connected on a daily basis. It will be a change of habit, but when you get there, people will give a 💩.
If this article resonates with you, you might want to check out the new app we built that uses mobile video to engage people at work.
Check it out and let us know if you find it Helpful.
