{"id":61,"date":"2015-07-20T14:44:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T14:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/?p=61"},"modified":"2015-07-20T14:44:26","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T14:44:26","slug":"employee-engagement-a-tired-topic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/?p=61","title":{"rendered":"Employee Engagement: A “Tired Topic?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone recently suggested to me that \u201cEmployee engagement has been written about and talked about so much that it\u2019s really a tired topic.\u201d I\u2019ve heard this before, and in part I think it\u2019s a reflection of our culture\u2019s obsession with the Next New Thing. Whether it\u2019s the latest political crisis, celebrity scandal, electronic toy\u2014our individual and collective attention span seems to constantly grow shorter.<\/p>\n

The real issue here, it seems to me, is that for as much as employee engagement has been researched and written about over the past ten or more years, the fact is that we still haven\u2019t come close to solving the engagement problem. According to Gallup<\/a>, which has been tracking employee engagement in the US since 2000: \u201cLess than one-third (31.5%) of U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2014.\u201d As for the rest, 51% are not engaged, and 17.5% are \u201cactively disengaged,\u201d which by Gallup\u2019s definition means they \u201caren\u2019t just unhappy at work; they\u2019re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.\u201d What\u2019s truly amazing is that these results are actually the best<\/em> in terms of engagement since 2000!<\/p>\n

So basically what this means is that two out of three employees in the US go to work without feeling a strong emotional and intellectual connection to their organization, their job, and their colleagues\u2014the kind of connection that leads to their putting in that extra effort to get the job done right. Is there any doubt that this has a negative effect on performance?<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the issue is not that employee engagement is a tired topic. The problem is that most organizations haven\u2019t solved their engagement problem. Given how much has been written on the subject, why is that?<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s because creating\u2014and sustaining\u2014the kind of culture that produces high engagement is just plain hard. And most leadership teams don\u2019t do the hard work to make it happen. They may put raising engagement on their list of goals for the year, but all too often they don\u2019t include it in the strategic plan. Or if it is<\/em> included, it rarely receives top of mind status within the plan or at executive or board meetings.\u00a0 This in spite of the compelling research that highly engaged organizations perform better across most of the dimensions within those strategic plans.<\/p>\n

The fact is that building an engaged workforce means addressing or changing your culture, which is difficult and takes time. It\u2019s not enough to get excited and implement some new benefits or other employee-focused programs. While this may bump up an organization\u2019s engagement scores in the short term, all too often that progress leads to a loss of momentum. Then engagement falls off the radar screen. Managers and employees come to see the engagement initiative as just another \u201cfad\u201d in a long line of fads. The managers slip back into old behaviors that lead to dis<\/em>-engagement.<\/p>\n

What can be done to keep this from happening? No one has all the answers; I know I don\u2019t. But I do know that in the organizations I\u2019ve been part of, we were successful in building and sustaining an engaged workforce only when engagement became an integral part of our strategic plan.\u00a0 When we defined\u2014and tracked\u2014a set of clear engagement metrics. When we gave those metrics visibility at the most senior levels, and managers had at least 25-40% of their annual review weighted on their progress and achievement of their engagement goals. When engagement received the same level of planning effort as any other major business change effort within the company\u2014 and when that plan was communicated as such.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s in your strategic plan? Do you really think engagement is a tired topic? Or are we just too tired to make it happen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone recently suggested to me that “Employee engagement has been written about and talked about so much that it’s really a tired topic.” I’ve heard this before, and in part I think it’s a reflection of our culture’s obsession with the Next New Thing. Whether it’s the latest political crisis, celebrity scandal, electronic toy—our individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greensummit.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}