10 Things I Want To Hear About on Morale and Engagement at SHRM11

Like a lot of people I am excited to be going to SHRM’s annual conference and exhibition this year in Las Vegas, Nevada and to have a chance to blog from there as I did last year. With so many sessions, I have to focus, which is easy for me with my field of interest and the way the sessions are organized. So I can take in morale and engagement all day long, meet some of the great presenters, take their pictures and blog about their offerings. Having said that I want to make a plea for some breakthroughs this year, in that we need to go beyond the meat and potatoes stuff which has been done so many times. Let’s see if some of the speakers can reach down into their creative psyches to come up with answers to questions which this part of HR and general management needs to answer. Here are some of those which come to mind:

–we think of the US as a very open society in many ways, which is a basic building block for worker engagement; yet we only have average engagement levels according to most who measure this…..why is this?
–the UK is even worse, its engagement levels were recently described by my former employer, HayGroup, as “the worst in Europe”….why is this? Is this a sign that social class issues have a big effect on worker engagement potential in a given society? Do other societal and national cultural factors have a big effect on engagement of workers?
–even if there are societal factors which affect engagement, can universally applicable activities create work environments in which workers choose to engage at high levels, almost no matter the society in which those workers live and work?
–we have heard a lot about “happiness at work” lately; some even say we need that instead of engagement. But is “happiness” enough? Can you prove that it drives performance more than engagement? What happens when the “happy” worker meets the boss from hell?
–executive compensation levels, especially in the US, are back at strastopheric levels. Does your organziation consider this when it approaches worker morale and engagement, like Whole Foods and BMW do? Does your CEO truly get “paid for performance” like the rest of the workforce? What impacts do these things have on engagement levels and if so, what can be/is being done?
–trends in engagement are very tricky to tie down, with big differences between the “big guns” of research and consulting in this field, such as Gallup and TowersWatson. Does this mean that they each define engagement differently, and if so how do we deal with this?
–if we cannot agree on engagement’s definition (see above) how can we convince leaders to go to work enhancing the conditions to bring it about?
–similarly why do organizations still compare themselves with outside morale or engagement “norms”, given the big differences in those norms from one consultant to the next?
–there is a tendency for some people with specific skills in the morale and employee engagement (EE) business to think that they alone have the skill-set to handle things in this field; the internal communications people, the psychologists, the HR specialists, and so on. Is this one reason for all the differences in EE definitions, questionnaires and trend data? What skill or skill mix works best for those who are involved in this field?
–how does individual personality affect engagement? You can create the best work environment in the world…but some still will not engage. This is a personality issue, and we need to know much more about it so that we can avoid hiring such people and deal with the ones we inadvertantly hired.

I’d love to see our SHRM11 morale and engagement presenters cover these and other key questions. They dont have to tell us that engagement goes up when people are treated well at work; that first line managers are the key to engagement; or that morale and EE drive performance, all of which we have known for some time. Let’s go beyond the basics to see some new things, which people can really take home and use. I’ll be there asking these questions and more….and I hope to meet you if these are your interests. Contact me through this blog or on Twitter and add more question topics if you want….I’d love to hear them and can ask them for you if you cant make it to Vegas.

LinkedIn profile/contact: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbowlesphd

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Employee Engagement’s Big Issues for 2011

It’s a New Year so time to take a fresh look at the state of engagement at work, employee/partner/associate engagement, whatever you might call it. How is this field doing and what are the big issues facing it and its practitioners? What challenges do we face moving forward? Has engagement met its potential in terms of acceptance by the larger organizational community and its leadership?

First of all, 2010 has brought more evidence of the importance of morale and engagement at work as more and more data are added to the extensive set which Cary Cooper and I detailed in our late 2009 book on the subject. No one should now be doubtful that engagement at work is not only a correlate of performance (customer satisfaction, productivity, profitability and even worker health) but more importantly, a driver of this. So this our starting point, the fact that worker engagement is mission critical.

Again this background, there are several issues which this field faces in 2011, and we will look at three of them here:

–Trends in Engagement: Are We Improving? Getting Worse?: depending on whom you talk to there might be good news or bad news. If you talk to Gallup, it would seem that engagement has not gone down during this Great Recession, which would seem incredible until you remember that this means that engagement of employed people has not gone down. Those who still have work perhaps feel so relieved that the downsizing machine has missed them, that that translates into some form of engagement. There are also some very well managed companies which have avoided layoffs by shortening the work week of those who work for them, and they indeed have benefited from stable engagement levels as a result. Some would suggest workers are now engaged only as long as the job market is bad, and they will then fly out of their jobs like out of a cannon, as soon as things turn around. Nonetheless, this is pretty good news and not as depressing as what we hear from others who collect data in this field, namely that both engagement and job satisfaction have suffered badly in the recession. The fact that these data do not agree is something we will cover in more detail next.

–Definition of Engagement: as strange as this may seem, the fact that trend data detailed above differ so much (Gallup has engagement flat while some have a minus 9% shift in the last year) means only one thing, and that is that they are defining engagement differently and this is reflected in their questionnaires used to collect this data. This is troubling for the industry and I have talked about it before, but it is still the case. The field is quite fragmented and each practitioner seems to have different definition of what engagement “is”. Can we imagine what would have happened in the physical sciences if someone said water was H2O and others said, no its HO2…? But in the social sciences we are used to disagreements in definition (witness the arguments about intelligence when it was a very inexact and fairly new concept), although this does not mitigate the problems which this brings to the field of engagement. Somehow and in some way we need an industry standard definition so that all can get on the same playing field and know that we are talking about, measuring and tracking the same thing.

–Professionalism of Practitioners: there has been an explosion in this field and it seems like everyone and his brother is now an employee engagement consultant. This is a bit like when your taxi driver gives you stock tips, and its time to pull back from the stock market. Maybe the field is a bit crowded and buyers of professional services in this area need to remember one of the few phrases I remember from my 5 years of English grammar school Latin: caveat emptor (buyer beware)! I am not saying that there are not great people in this field and I consider it very positive that many wish to help organizations improve in this area. However there is a two-part skill-set which is required to help an organization measure and/or improve worker engagement and morale. First a real professional in this field must have a knowledge of business issues derived from experience and learning in actual business settings, not just academic. Secondly, since engagement is about emotion and human behavior, it is essential to have a background in the social sciences, especially psychology, to really add value. I do not consider a background in communications sufficient, valuable yes but not sufficient for this. There have been too many times where I have seen great communications programs put together for the workforce which had a wonderful message but which in no way represented the way the organization culture really “lived”.

Hopefully 2011 will bring some improvements in these areas which will move engagement forward and into more and more organizations, where it should be. By most accounts the number of organizations which have ongoing and extensive worker engagement efforts is still quite low and I have never seen a number of more than 30% put forward for the US and the UK. The percentages in France, Germany and other European countries are lower even than this. This is pitifully low (given the huge benefits which accrue from it) and anything which can improve it is to be encouraged and welcomed. Part of the issue here is that some of the practitioners whom I have discussed above take a far, far too “touchy-feely” approach to the subject with prospective clients, which puts them off the subject.  As I discuss elsewhere here, morale and engagement are and should be focused on the ability of the organization to achieve its mission, and that is something any CEO can get behind given the overwhelming morale-performance connection to which this blog is dedicated. A second reason for low levels of engagement at work is that engaging workers means coming down off one’s high horse, letting go of ego-based behavior and fears, and some leaders find that hard, if not impossible, to do.  As I have pointed out, ego is probably the greatest destroyer of engagement at work.

So that is where I see this field as we begin 2011, and clearly there is lots to do.  The three areas I have discussed above would be a good start!

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Maximizing the POWER Of Your Employee Engagement or Morale Survey

In all the time I have spent consulting with clients in the area of morale and engagement, I must say there is almost nothing which compares to the power of an employee survey.  I recognize that for some, the word survey elicits a groan, and the thought “on no, we just did that and nothing happened, why on earth so we have to go through this again?”  Others, like managers I have worked with, get excited at the thought and cannot wait to get back the results.  What is the difference between these surveys?

First of all let me say that I am going to preach to the choir here; those who conduct or plan to conduct surveys.  If you think that surveys are the most awful and useless thing that an organization can do, I can’t help you. I have written enough about why that is nonsense, in these pages, and now is not the time to re-hash those arguments.

Having said that, doing a survey without maximizing its power is like going to a well, painstakingly dropping the bucket all the way down, and bringing it up a quarter full….why such a small return for the effort and for the potential benefit?  As far as your workforce goes, why raise expectations and then deliver so little?   It makes no sense.   What makes sense is to squeeze as much value out of this process as you possibly can, and in return benefit your workforce and increase its potential for higher morale and engagement.

Maximizing the power of your survey occurs in several areas:

–Questionnaire content:  I know that many of you use very small questionnaires such as Gallup’s Q12.  I am a fan of Gallup and used their data (with their permission) in my 2009 book, so this is not a criticism of them in general.  But why would anyone want to squander the opportunity to find out so many valuable things by not using a longer survey?  Because of the time it takes to complete?  But even long surveys (say 100+ items) can be completed in 20 minutes or less, not such a big investment of time.   Don’t you have a long list of things which you are dying to find out about from your people?   What about that new sales incentive program you just implemented with the outside salesforce?  What about the new marketing strategy, is it clear?   What about your benefits plan, on which you spend so much money, do its customers…your employees…see value in it equal to your investment?    What about the desire to leave the organization when things turn around, wouldn’t you be interested to see how spring-loaded your workforce is, when given a chance to confidentially say if they plan to stay more than a year…or less?  I could go on and on, there are so many opportunities to find out things which you need to know which you can know in a well designed, customized survey.   

–Use of Professionals:  this is not a shameless plug for my profession of consulting.  Instead, its common sense.  Doing surveys is a real field of expertise, ideally requiring a background in behavioral science, statistics, social science research (including survey design) and general business knowledge.  As much as you might want to, don’t let a non-expert design your questionnaire, or analyze and interpret the data.  Your in-house resources might include such experts, in which case you are set; otherwise, spend the money to bring in help and don’t fall victim to poorly designed and incorrectly interpreted research (especially if you don’t know of its faults and make decisions based on this lack of knowledge…as in “you don’t know what you don’t know”).

–Mining of Data:   here we go back to the quarter-full bucket again.  Why generate all the data which you can from this kind of survey then fail to find the real meaning of what is being said, the trends over time, the differences between groups, etc?  Again expertise and (especially) software is essential.  I went looking for such software in 1987, when I started my consulting firm, but it didn’t exist so I had someone write it for me.  I now have a program which can take a 15,000 person company and analyze the results for me in one minute.  The data which it generates, rankings of internal groups by level of morale/engagement, never fails to have executives on the edge of their seats when the presentation is made to them.  You deserve nothing less with your own data.  The possibilities are endless:  if you are a stand-alone hospital, don’t you want to see all departments ranked in terms of engagement?  If you are a hospital system don’t you want to see each emergency room ranked against all emergency rooms in the system? Or a restaurant chain which has each store ranked against the whole or against its region….?  How about all managers in one area ranked against all managers at their level in your organization?

–Merging and Correlating Data from Other Sources: do you have customer satisfaction data?  Does it exist in one silo while the employee survey data exists in another, and never the twin shall meet?  If so, its a waste!  Let me tell you what I did for one client, Hilti:  I merged the employee and customer data and did some basic statistical analysis on it.  Looking at the data over time and staggering it in various simple ways, I showed that customer satisfaction there is driven (yes, driven) by morale and engagement.  Employees with more customer contact demonstrated this effect in direct proportion to their contact level.  So direct (outside) sales force morale/engagement had a much higher correlation with customer satisfaction than inside sales or those with little customer contact, which is exactly what one would expect if morale is driving CS.  You can do the same thing with your data, break down the silos and with a small amount of work you will know exactly now engagement works, not in some textbook but in your organization and how it effects your customers’ experience.  Its powerful stuff.

-Benchmarking (external or internal?):  notice that my example above uses internal benchmarking.  I am not talking about comparing you to outside organizations, many of which may not even be in the same business as you.  I don’t believe in such comparisons, for reasons I have described elsewhere.  The data I have on this is very compelling, so please follow the link and read it.  I am one of the few consultants to have seen competing benchmark data from different consultants, and lets just say it leaves much to be desired.  Stick to internal benchmarking, find the champions and best practices in your own operations, they will teach you what it takes, within your own culture, business sector and individual organization, to have a fully engaged workforce.

–Involving everyone in the process:  here is where there are so many complaints from people who have been surveyed.  In spite of all the work, the time, the hoopla, nothing happened with the results.  They might have been buried, such a short sighted thing to do after one has set up a positive expectation:  better not to do a survey than not to follow through with comprehensive feedback and involvement of all workers surveyed.  At least then you will be at zero and not minus 50!  Better still, invest , from the outset, in a complete process which requires not only the things I have talked about here but also feedback to everyone, no matter the results, and action planning involvement at the department level,  guided by survey results.  Then you can amaze people that “something actually happened from that survey we did”…..

This is a brief trip through some things you need to do.   Just doing one would greatly improve many surveys which don’t have that feature.  But don’t stop at one, work towards incorporating all these power tools so that you:

–know that the data you collected is valid and represents your organization accurately

–really know what is going on in every nook and cranny of your organization, as well as at the overall level

–know precisely what is working and what is not, for example that new sales incentive plan or dental insurance you introduced last year

–know precisely which managers are walking the talk and those which are just talking, based on the key input of their own people: how much more democratic can you get than that?

–know who your champions and centers of employee engagement excellence are

–know why they are doing so well and what others might learn from them

–can tell your entire workforce that they participated in something crucial to your culture and success and that their input was valued and used to the absolute maximum

Now that’s an engaging process from which your organization can and will benefit.

Why Morale and Engagement Are So Important

(first published in this form in humanresourcesiq.com April 1, 2010)

Author’s note: this is an abbreviated and edited version of part of a Chapter in my book, detailed below. 

If there is one word which encapsulates the benefits which accrue from a high morale organization, it is this: performance. This refers to performance at the individual level and that of the organization as a whole. Evidence for morale correlating highly with, and driving, performance is strong and growing.

If you have competition such as most organizations in the private sector (although increasingly public sector organizations have competition), then high morale will increase your competitiveness. If you serve customers, your customers will be more satisfied when served by high morale employees; those customers will also be more likely to return to you. If profits are your goal, you will increase the likelihood of these. If you have a publicly traded stock, even your earnings per share can correlate strongly with your morale level. If you are in the public sector and have a mission, like in the military or law enforcement, you will be much better at fulfilling that mission; indeed many in the military say that without good morale, missions become much more difficult or even impossible to achieve.

At the individual level, the high morale employee will experience less stress than the low morale one and as a result, less absenteeism and sick days; the high morale employee will be more engaged, willing to work harder, be more committed to the organization’s goals than the low morale one, and certainly be a stronger advocate for the organization with others such as customers, family and friends or potential employees.

Combining morale with organizational performance is one of the central focuses of the morale field of study, since consultants in this area are so often faced with the “so what?” question, such as: 

“I like the general idea of high morale and it sounds like a good thing, but what does it really do for me?” 

An alternative and more negative view is often:

“I’m in business to compete and make a profit; this stuff is a waste of time and won’t change a thing.”

Against this background, to counter these still widely held views and demonstrate just how powerful morale is, we will summarize many of the performance and effectiveness benefits of the high morale organization here. Everything you will read on this topic is backed by solid data, in nearly all cases from multiple sources.

• Morale Provides a Competitive Edge in Good Times and Bad

Surviving a crisis (for the organization alone or for the society in general) is far easier when morale is high. The team pulls together and works as one. Sacrifices are shared much more easily. High morale is therefore more than protective armor, although it does play that defensive role: it offers an offensive path through the crisis which those lacking it will not be able to follow.

• High Morale Supports the Implementation of Organizational Strategies

 It’s not your plans that are important; it’s whether you can implement them. A good strategy is a fine thing, but it is useless unless you can make it happen. Making it happen depends to a large degree on your people, and therein lies the power of morale.

• The Morale Process (Measurement-Implementation) Gives Employees a Voice

It sounds like a circular argument, but it is true: simply measuring morale and feeding back the results, when carried out correctly, improves morale. Over and over again, employees have thanked us for being in their organization, collecting their opinions and letting them know how they and their colleagues feel as a group.

• High Morale Helps Organizations Attract and Retain Talented People

Organizations selected by Fortune and the UK equivalent Sunday Times Best Places to Work, trumpet their appearance on such lists in recruitment advertising, not just at the point of sale like at Starbucks, but also in newspaper and online ads. They are eager to let the world know how good it is to work for them. 

• High Morale Makes the Workplace Easier to Manage and Increases Productivity

Stripped of the dramas created by negative morale situations and the challenges of dealing with people who like to perpetuate them (from individuals with no management responsibility to managers themselves), the high morale workplace becomes less fearful, stressful and more “fun”. Management time can be focused on things which make the organization more productive, not just “putting out fires” related to personnel, or replacing the people who have left. 

• High Morale Reduces Workplace Accidents, Reduces Absenteeism, Reduces Workplace Stress, Improves Employee Health and Reduces Sick Days Taken

 Plenty of evidence exists for all of these claims; in fact the evidence is so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine why organizations do not implement practices which would lead to a maximum level of morale, even if only to gain just these advantages; and yet many do not.

• High Morale Organizations In The For-Profit World Have Better Financial Performance Than Low Morale Ones

There is strong evidence from multiple and highly credible sources that morale is positively correlated with higher stock prices, higher earnings per share, and even 5 year survival following an IPO.  

• High Morale Organizations Can Have Higher Customer Satisfaction Than Low Morale Ones

A great deal of research shows the morale-customer satisfaction connection, and demonstrates causal connections between the two. 

• Morale is a Leading Indicator and Allows Organizations to Prevent Potential Negative Situations

 By examining trends based on previous employee survey data you have collected, you can have a sense of how the future will play out if you take no action. This is especially true when a poorly performing manager is having a negative effect on employee morale.

• The Morale Process Is One Of The Most Democratic Activities In Which An Organization Can Participate

There is nothing quite like giving every single person who works in an organization the chance to say exactly what they feel, knowing that top management will look at every piece of data and every written word. 

• High Morale At The Individual Level Is Connected To Job Performance By That Person, And Is As Good A Predictor Of That Performance As Other, Well Tested Measures

Multiple studies now demonstrate that there are few activities one can undertake better than knowing a person’s individual level of morale, in order to predict how they will perform on the job.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence for the power of morale and its effect on organizational performance, some put forward the idea that the relationship is actually reversed, i.e. performance drives morale. While there is a “loop” effect, in that a customer’s positive feedback about a company’s product or service to a sales representative can boost that individual’s morale, for example, the evidence supports a much stronger effect in the other direction, from morale to performance.  

Recent data from Gallup show that the US workforce is only 29% “engaged” at work, and the Conference Board states that US job satisfaction has been falling for two decades. Europe is, if anything, even lower.  With the US and Europe facing ever more intense competitive pressures from high workforce morale countries like India, China and Brazil, they cannot afford to fall behind; it is in their interest to do all that they can to enhance the morale aspect of work life.  If they do this, the morale and engagement of their people will be one of their key competitive edges in an increasingly global marketplace.

 Excerpted from Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times by David Bowles and Cary Cooper. Copyright © 2009 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

A Troubling Issue in Consultants’ Employee Engagement Trend Data: Why Do They Disagree?

As a follow on to my previous post on trends in US job satisfaction and morale/engagement, I was fascinated to come across the latest data from WatsonWyatt and World at Work (lets call them WatsonWyatt from now on) which indicated that engagement was down over 9% in the most recent period. Here is exactly what they said:

The 2009/2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Study found that employee engagement levels for all workers at the companies surveyed have dropped by nearly 10 percent since last year

I had argued previously that two apparently conflicting databases (from the Conference Board and Gallup) on job satisfaction and morale/engagement had to do with what was being measured, but this new data compels me to share something else very important with you.

Here are the facts:

Jennifer Robison wrote in the Gallup Management Journal (as reprinted in The Free Library) on January 14^th 2010 that :

Gallup has tracked the engagement levels of the U.S. working population for the past decade. Its most recent employee engagement research shows that 28% of American workers are engaged, 54% are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged…..In addition, from July 2008 to March 2009 — during the heart of the recession — Gallup tracked a large sample of employees and found only slight (1%) changes in overall engagement. In July 2008, 31% of employees were engaged, 51% were not engaged, and 17% were actively disengaged. In March 2009, these percentages had changed very minimally: 30% were engaged, 52% were not engaged, and 18% were actively disengaged.

 

(emphasis added)

For several years Gallup has reported that the number of US workers who are “engaged at work”  has hovered between 26% and 30% for the US working population.  Now the WatsonWyatt data tell us that there has been a significant drop since their last survey in 2008.  Gallup data show that engagement is either up 1% or down percent in that time period, depending on which month the measurement was made, but this is nothing like the 9% drop from the WatsonWyatt group.  Unlike my previous post, both these benchmarks purport to be about engagement, both cover the same time period, and both cover the same general population. None of my previous arguments are valid here and so we are faced with something which I consider to be a significant weakness in the the morale/engagement consulting field:  the validity of these external benchmark databases.  This is so important that I covered it in my book, at the risk of infuriating some who work in this field, but I did it because of its importance.  I also had my own data in the book which had never been shared with those who did not commission the original study, a group of large utility companies.  That data showed that external benchmark databases of employee morale can differ significantly from each other, for the same industry, in the same country, on exactly the same question, and for the same time period. I was so troubled by the finding that I literally gave up using such things in my own consulting practice, even though I had spent years building them.  The reason was that I no longer had confidence in them and told my clients exactly why.  I moved entirely to internal benchmarking and built my analysis software around that function.  So my question is: if it is the case, that such differences can be found in benchmarks for a specific industry, how much will they differ when measured across many industries?  This recent data gives us a window into this issue, and an answer to that question:  they differ, and significantly so.

In my previous post I pointed out that methodological differences or errors were unlikely to be the cause of differences between job satisfaction and engagement data;  plenty of reasons for the differences could be found in the factors being measured, not the methodology.  I also said that I had confidence in both Gallup and the Conference Board;   that is true with WatsonWyatt as well. (I do not know enough about World at Work but a cursory look at its website indicates it has been around a long time, is an organization with 30,000 members which certifies professionals in compensation, benefits and work-life skills, etc. and I have absolutely no reason to doubt their competence).  WatsonWyatt is now TowersWatson, an organization of which the Towers part bought the well known survey research house ISR some years back, giving them a huge amount of data and survey research firepower.  I will use “WatsonWyatt” here because the study was first published under that name. All these organizations are therefore large, well run, and entirely competent. 

So lets look at how this happens and draw some conclusions from it.   There are several reasons for the differences between these benchmark databases, in my opinion:

–worker engagement is not like water.  Water is H2O.  Engagement is, well it is a number of things.  Each dictionary would define it differently, as might each consultant.  Who can say that one is right and one is wrong?  I defined it, as best I could, in my book, and compared it to morale.  I repeated some of this in a recent post. Based on the definition you choose, you develop a questionnaire.  The items in the questionnaire measure your engagement elements.  You then refine that questionnaire, as Gallup has done, going down to only 12 questions.  You test and test and test.  WatsonWyatt and its partner in this latest study no doubt has its own specific methodology, its own definition of engagement, its own questionnaire.

–consulting in worker morale and engagement is very fragmented.  There are stand alone research houses like Sirota Survey Research;   there are global giants like Gallup, TowersWaston, Mercer and HayGroup (where I used to work)…and these firms do many things in addition;   there are thousands upon thousands of smaller groups or individuals who work in this field, some of whom have their own benchmark “norms”.  No one firm has a lock on all the companies in one industry, or on all the best performing companies, etc.   If I am Apple and want Dell, HP, Sony, Nokia and a list of other competitors in my benchmark, I cannot find all that in one place.  A “national norm” or benchmark either has to come from firms collaborating with each other and sharing client data (it has happened but I imagine it has some anti-trust issues, and in any case some clients might be wary of sharing their strategically valuable employee opinion data).  It can also be created from sampling techniques of employees from non client organizations.  This latter method creates its own problems:  how do you get non-client employee opinion data?  With great difficulty.

–sampling the national engagement level from 1000 people at work is very tricky.  Look what happens with opinions polls for political elections: they are not always right!   This and other reasons were why I always told clients to poll 100% of the workforce and do everything possible to make sure than 90% + would respond, which they usually did.  That way I knew that the data we had really did represent the whole, and that managers deep in the organization would have enough data with which to work, which they often did not with a sample.

–as a result of the above issues, with the definition of engagement and the resulting questionnaires and with possible sampling, the companies covered by WatsonWyatt and Gallup might have been very different, in different industries than each other and they certainly received a different questionnaire.  All these things affect the data.  Watson Wyatt talks about the data representing “the surveyed companies” but also implies that this represents a national sample.  These might be quite different, its very hard to tell.

Perhaps the clearest thing that a consultant who uses client data for national or industry-specific benchmarks could say to a client about a benchmark would therefore be this:

This benchmark is based on how we define engagement, which might be different from how others define it;  it is based on our proprietary questionnaire, which is based on our definition of engagement;   it is also based on a sample of our client data, and others might have different types of organizations in their databases which will affect their data and cause it to be different than ours.  As a result we cannot guarantee that our engagement benchmark will match any other, even for the same geographic location, the same worker demographics and the same time period.

(one not using client data for its benchmark would have to add even more, about possible sampling errors and response rates).  In any case, don’t hold your breath that we will ever see such a disclosure!

Perhaps clients of all the firms which provide external engagement and morale benchmarks are quite happy with the benchmarks they are given.  Maybe they look only casually at such things, and pay less attention to them than internal benchmarks?  Maybe they just look at a group of top performers as a comparison and find that useful?  Whatever the case I think it behooves us as consultants to make clear that we might not have “THE answer”  as to what an external trend is in worker engagement.  We have ONE answer, our own.  That answer might be as much as nine times (1% change versus 9% change) higher or lower than another’s answer, as we have seen in the two firms’ data shown here.   For me that was not good enough, and so I focused on telling clients how they had shifted internally over time, how groups internally were different from each other,and what their scores were on an absolute basis.   They all found that so valuable that they did not miss the one thing which some believe is a “must have” in this business…the external benchmark.

Tell me what you think….

Job Satisfaction is DOWN but Engagement is FLAT or UP? How can that be?

Recent data from the Conference Board tell us that this Great Recession has slammed job satisfaction.  The numbers speak for themselves and reflect a long downward trend over time:  US satisfaction is at the lowest level in two decades.  From 61.1% satisfaction with the job in 1987 to 45.3% in 2009, the drop really is quite precipitous.  Should we be alarmed?  Maybe we should “wait to worry”, as my accountant once told me 5 minutes before a tax audit (I didn’t have to pay more, he was right).  We first need to look at some other data, then try to make sense of it all.  The other data comes from an equally reliable source as the Conference Board, Gallup, a company in which I have great confidence, and who were gracious enough to share their data with me for my book.  Gallup’s recent data on employee engagement in the US are quite stunning:

They show that engagement has hardly shifted at all during this recession;  if anything it has moved slightly upward.

Can these both be true?  Is there some methodological reason in the research why the data seem to contradict each other?  It is certainly true that the Conference Board and Gallup use a different questionnaire, since Gallup’s is the well-known “Q-12″, or 12 item engagement questionnaire.  As a proprietary measuring instrument, it is probably nothing like the CB questionnaire on satisfaction.   Using sophisticated statistical analysis, Gallup found that it could predict all major elements of engagement with these questions, and no more than 12 were required.  I certainly understand this, in my own consulting firm’s research we could, for certain clients, predict an entire morale survey’s result from one question:  that question was how the employees rated their manager’s ability.   For fans of correlation,  it was slightly more than +0.88, a very significant result.  The power of (local, not top) management to influence the morale of employees was demonstrated quite clearly.  Gallup can therefore easily make a good case for a 12 item engagement questionnaire.  The Conference Board no doubt also has a well-tested and stable instrument with which they measure job satisfaction every year.  In any case, knowing the quality of these two organizations, I doubt that any methodological errors drive the difference between the data.

This means we have to turn to whether “engagement” and “satisfaction” are different, and indeed they are.  Satisfaction, and in this case with the job only, is a very specific element in the overall morale at work, and in my own research I was never able to correlate that specific element very highly with overall morale, unlike the rating of the manager.  It was just one element in a questionnaire which, for us, often ran up to 110 items, and is equally just one element in morale.  Employees seem to compartmentalize feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction they have about the job itself, the company, and so on, and these feelings don’t have anything like the influence on their morale as how they are treated by management.

Engagement is something quiet different.  My previous post on this might interest you if you want a bigger discussion of the difference between engagement and morale, but essentially engagement is the behavior that people exhibit when the have relatively high morale.  It’s all about volunteering for tasks,  willingness to “pitch in”, “go the extra mile”, and especially talk up your organization as a place to work or place with which to do business.  So engagement is a broad brush, job satisfaction is a part of that brush.  This means they can differ from each other.  In the Gallup article linked above, the author makes the case that the recession has made managers more likely to try to engage employees, treat them better, etc. because their companies don’t have the money to make financial investments in their workforce.  They go back to the intangibles, the non financial incentives like recognition.  Things they should have been doing all along.  This would explain why, even in a recession, engagement might edge up.  So why would job satisfaction drop?  Because people are being asked to do more with less, they see others being laid off, they are scared of that happening to them…but remember the people in these surveys have jobs, we are looking at the survivors here!   That also counts towards better morale/engagement, its like “hey it’s not all bad, I still have a job, maybe I work harder but I am still here”.  If we add to that the Gallup idea that bosses are trying harder to treat people better in these hard times because that is all they can afford to do, then we can imagine why engagement might be stable in spite of loss of good feeling about the job itself.

As I said earlier, job satisfaction can be quite independent from other feelings of satisfaction:  for example (and I have found this often when surveying workers), people can like their job much more than they like the organization for which  work.  This happens when you have a skill or a profession or something you really like doing, whatever it is, and the job gives you the chance to do that every day.  Or you might not like the actual job but you like the fact that you have a job in the first place.  You can feel all this but at the same time be anything from mad as hell at the company, to simply indifferent, for many reasons.  Your commitment is to the job/profession or whatever it is, not to the organization.  Of course this is less than optimal because you are then much more likely to leave.  Your engagement is only to the job, not to the broad spectrum of things which I have mentioned above, and so you are far from an ideal employee as a result.  Companies need to counter this with all the things which drive good morale, and which are too numerous to list here;  but most of all, good management.

I’ll post more on this as more data become available.  Let me know what you think and what you see happening in your organization; I’m always interested to hear peoples’ experiences.