Employee engagement is a personal and iterative process.
Why building engagement is hard.
Employee engagement levels haven’t moved in the past 30 years. Some recent studies even show it decreasing overall. When speaking with organizations we’ve realized how little is known about what engagement is and how to improve it.
As a reminder: employee engagement measures the extent to which employees are willing to go the extra mile for your company’s success.
Employee Engagement is the holy grail
You can find countless statistics showing the importance of having engaged employees. Here are some of our favorite:
- 87% less likely to leave your company (lower recruitment costs!)
- 43% more productive (more sales, less bugs, better products!)
- 60% more creative (more innovation, more collaboration!)
To give you an idea of the bottom line impact of these factors: companies in the US lost half a trillion dollars last year because of disengagement.
Don’t expect a magic trick ✨
It’s a big issue, with big payoffs for companies who do it right. For that reason, you won’t find a simple trick to magically turn an employee into a devoted super-performer. Building engagement is hard.
Nonetheless, there are 2 key aspects to engagement that every one needs to know by heart.
1/ Engagement is personal ⭐️
Macro efforts to build engagement are unlikely to yield great results.
a) People work at your company for different reasons
The reasons why employee A and employee B work for your company are completely different.
One might be here because it’s an opportunity to learn a lot quickly.
The other might be here because of a strong belief in the company’s mission.
b) People have different expectations of your company.
Take two people with the same manager.
One might rate their manager’s support 8 — the other may rate it 5.
This isn’t because the manager treats one better than the other. It’s because both employees have different expectations of their manager.
One might be comfortable with minimal interactions, whereas the other might need daily interactions.
2/ Engagement is iterative 🔁
a) Constantly changing environment
People change, expectations change, teams change, personal lives change, markets change, projects change… on a weekly and sometimes daily basis!
Yet, organizations see engagement as a slow-moving indicator which evolves quarter over quarter (see blue line in the graph below).
Something changes in your life day 1 (engagement goes down to 4/10), quarterly review come in on day 90, action plan come up day 97, action might be taken day 100.
By then the issue might either: have blown out of proportion or be irrelevant. In our case engagement has gone back up to 6/10 by the time the engagement measurements come in. Issue took 2 months to resolve.
b) One action might not solve the issue
If an individual is having work-life balance issues, you might decide to offload some responsibilities to a co-worker in the short term.
Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it helps a little, but not enough.
It’s an iterative process. We have to: (1) make an assumption, (2) test it, (3) measure results and (4) repeat until we’re satisfied.
We A/B test everything with our design work, yet we think of employee engagement like we did about starting a company in the 70s.
Let’s stop looking at people developement like we looked at product development 40 years ago.
At Spot.coach we’re building the all-in-one employee engagement tool for teams who want to land rockets on the moon.
It takes care of each individual’s needs and aspirations and goes through people sprints as often as 3 times a week.
We’re so convinced by our solution that we guarantee we can reach and maintain high engagement levels no matter what. If we don’t, we’ll give you your money back.
