The SHRM 2011 HR Survey and Employee Engagement: Shocking News!

Well I am all geared up for SHRM’s annual extravaganza, which promises to be quite amazing this year.  Why is that?  Last year in my home town of San Diego we were pleased to welcome some 11,000 SHRM people.  This year, 13,500 will be coming to the Vegas event.  OK a better economy helps, but Vegas and 103 degrees versus the cool and relaxing temperatures we gave 11,000 of you last year?  Right, we dont have the roulette wheels (not downtown anyway), the craps tables….we dont have the “what ever happens in San Diego stays…..” etc.  I know, I know.

Vegas temperatures start later today for me after my flight lands there…but that’s not the reason I am already getting heated up for SHRM11.  First of all the annual conference is a blast, which I detailed last year as a proud member of the Blog Squad.  But not only that, I just received a SHRM e-mail with details of their new HR survey, and it stated that employee engagement was #1 on the list of HR challenges in the next 3-5 years (see slide 9).  So far, so very VERY good.  But the thing that got my blood well over 98.6 was this:

When asked how they measured engagement, 71% said:  employee exit interviews

Excuse me?  You ask people who are leaving about engagement and depend on that to know what is happening?  Where did you learn such a….sophisticated…methodology for measuring engagement?  Don’t you know that people who leave might have had a different level of engagement than those who stay, and that’s why they leave?  A v-e-r-y different level?

OK thats bad, very very bad, but maybe there are as many people who use something more..scientific?  Lets take a closer look:  #2 method, used by 65% of respondents, was: employee retention levels.

At this point I am starting to reach Vegas temperature levels and I am still in cool San Diego.

You look at how many people have stayed with your company to see how many are engaged?  But…but…what if they just stayed because there was nowhere else to work?   What if they were a teacher with tenure just cruising through to retirement, having already “retired on the job”? Or what if they had found a safe and lazy and very unproductive way to work without being seen (like the guy in the Dilbert cartoon who is always carrying a coffee cup)?

Just as I was about to check myself into the local cardiac care unit, I found out that, finally, there are some people who know what to do:  43% and 40% respectively reported that they used outside vendor surveys or did their own.   Some sense at last.  The survey, when done well, is unequalled as a method of measuring engagement, and knowing whether and where to change course or to stay on course in an organization.  Its incredible to me that 50% more organizations use the methods of exit interviews and retention rates over a survey.   It might be cheaper but quite honestly, the data is almost worthless.

That’s my opinion.  If you feel the same or quite differently, I want to hear from you.  Comment here or find me at SHRM and let me know!  I’d love to hear what you have to say.

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Happiness at Work: 3. A Discussion with iOpener, Oxford, England

Note: this is the third in a series of posts on happiness at work. See #1 here and #2 here. For iOpener’s blog, where you can find a longer version of the discussion, please go here.

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It has been quite a wild week trying to advance the progess of my second book, while fielding some deliciously challenging questions and comments from the people at iOpener, an organization dedicated to Happiness at Work and based in Oxford, England. I have learned a lot about their approach, and I think perhaps they have learned a bit about engagement. In the end we have a lot in common, which is a big point in itself. One of the biggest things I took away from the discussion is that the happiness at work people are filling a very important need which we in employee engagement tend to neglect: helping people to be able to engage. We talk a lot about what we can do to create the environment in which people want to, choose to, engage. But whether they do or not is sort of inside the black box of the human psyche. We know that personality is involved, which doesnt make for a good outcome if we hire the wrong person who is incapable of engaging: good luck on changing a personality, right? But there are also skills, there are mindsets, which iOpener rightly points out we need in order to fully engage. This means that we can increase the chances of engagement by training people to have a particular mindset, and I for one am all in favor of that. Having said that, I do not agree, as you will see below, that happiness is a breakthorugh of the order of sliced bread or color TV. In some ways the happiness people talk as if they have re-invented and replaced engagement and its performance correlates….but have they really? They say a person can be engaged, even fully engaged, but miserable and wanting to leave. That that person needs to be happy as well, to be fully engaged. But my understanding of engagement includes a strong positive emotional connection above all else, to the organization, to one’s boss, to co-workers, to the job itself. Absent that, a person can perform but in a sort of empty, emotionless way which does not, for me, indicate full engagement. Wanting to leave, how engaged can you be? Not very, in my view. I am including my conversation with iOpener’s Dr. Simon Lutterbie below so you can see how we went back and forward and how I countered the idea that engagement is just re-packaged high performance. Anyone who knows me will guess that I did not take that comment lightly!  Here is what we said, with Lutterbie’s comments in italics:
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Simon this conversation gets more and more interesting.  Don’t worry at all about being  “controversial”, I think that is the way that knowledge moves forward, don’t  you?  As long as people listen to each other, of course!  And as I listen I begin to understand what you guys are all about and how it relates to engagement and other things.  Please also refer to what I said yesterday to Jessica on my own blog, which is that I am not an apologist or evangelist for engagement, have teased people in the field  quite a bit, and enjoy doing so (they respond in kind, all part of the fun).  It has more than a few shortcomings….like most approaches do.   There is more than one path to God and more than one path to an  engaged…or happy… workforce!

OK let me go with your format of quoting me then commenting.  Here is what you said:

What we are interested in is the mindset that make employees feel motivated to excel at their jobs,  gives them the energy and enthusiasm to perform at their best, and the resilience to overcome challenges.

 This is very important, and in the employee engagement (EE) field it is often overlooked.   There is a sense among EE practitioners that as long as conditions are right at work, then people will engage, but this is not true.  I have mentioned to you that personality is a big factor, and while I do see some people working on this, there aren’t enough.  Personality is hard or  impossible to change of course, so that has some extreme hiring implications.  So I believe that we need more of what you are doing, to give people the skills they need to be happy at work, to engage, whatever we call it.  My only question here is the age old one of nature vs. nurture:  what % of a person’s ability to engage/be happy at work is nature and what % nurture.  You muddy the waters a bit with your piece on DNA and seem to move the argument back to nature!   But like you, I do think people can change,  even when their DNA points them in one direction.

Component 2 is a feeling state. It occurs when the worker feels good, motivated, energetic, and enthusiastic. Component 2 is none other than happiness at work!  Engagement may be an acting state, but it  requires a feeling state. You can create the conditions for engagement, and you can give an employee all the resources they need to fully engage. But unless  that employee is happy at work, the employee may not choose to engage.

 I had said that when conditions are right at work, then people can make the choice to engage (“Component  2”).  What I didn’t say there, because I was not attempting to discuss the full blown psychology of engagement, was  that there is an intermediate step, and that is an emotional one, or “feeling  state”.  Cary and I did this is in our book though, where we explained that when the “psycho-social” conditions are right at work (everything from the physical environment to how your boss treats you and much much more), then people experience a sense of high morale (or “well being”) which then translates into the behaviors we now call engagement.  So now you can see the feeling state more clearly in this model, the emotional connection.  One of the most critical conditions we are talking about here, confirmed by much research, is the boss-worker relationship.  This has been tagged at  explaining more than 80% of the variance in the engagement level of workers, an amazing number.  So the emotional connection we feel is in relationship, not just to the job itself but to the people we are with day in and day out and how we are treated by them.  Now here is where we start to disagree:  Component 2 is not just a feeling state, far  from it!  People react to the conditions at work with a feeling state, but the conditions at work are the crucial driver of that feeling state;   those myriad conditions include the boss, but also all those pesky HR things like performance reviews (yuk!) and incentive pay programs, etc.  Morale and EE practitioners and consultants like me are very involved in those conditions at work, sometimes referred to under the useful heading of corporate culture (“the way we do things”).  With 80% plus of an individual’s engagement at work depending on that key boss-worker relationship, we had better see where the good and bad bosses are, and move actively to decrease the number of the latter and increase the former, and this we begin to do through the extraordinarily powerful methodology of surveys.

And when someone works to build engagement, they’re really just working to build high performance.  Which is great. But it implies that  ngagement isn’t a unique approach, it’s  just another name for what people have been doing for years.  

Oh Simon methinks you have just been “hoist with your own petard” as our own Will Shakespeare said.  I am not denying it for engagement, since I have made the same exact comments about it.   In other words,  engagement took the decades-long concept of morale, added some nice flavoring,  microwaved it and served it up as fresh!  But the same could be said for you guys:  your definitions of happiness at work are essentially what people have been saying for a long time represent the engaged worker.  The exact list which you cite for high performance is what you aim for, right?  So you have taken high performance or engagement and re-packaged it as  “happiness at work”.   You are teaching people to be “engaged”…which as I said before is a great thing and very necessary.  Look I am old enough and have been in this business long enough that there is not much new under the sun.  This happens all the time.  Engagement happens to be a word which excites people, they can use it easier than orale (she is “engaged” but not she is “moraled”), they can use it about customers, not just employees etc.  Having said this I will say that I think engagement (like happiness at work, as you describe it) goes beyond performance because it has a strong positive emotional component.   So I would disagree that engagement is simply performance, because for me, engagement means you are emotionally connected in a positive way and that is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, you perform so above and beyond. As you would say, you are happy. As Jessica said on my blog yesterday, she knows CEOs who are “engaged” but are miserable.  I would not really define them as engaged, I would say they perform, that’s ll.  The level of performance I am talking about simply isn’t possible when you have one foot out the door.  OK maybe for a very short time, but this is a burn out situation which I have seen several times.

So, food for thought right?  I returned your controversial (and somewhat correct!) statement with one of my own.  But I like the tone of this conversation Simon, and appreciate it. This is also very useful for a writer and consultant like me, because it sharpens and clarifies the arguments for and against key things in my field.

best to you,  David

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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.

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I Finally Gave In and Joined Twitter!

When I went to the SHRM Annual Conference last year as a proud member of the 2010 Blog Squad, I was the only one who was not actively using Twitter. Some of the people there were incredulous (but not those on the Squad, they were nothing but friendly), and some who didn’t make it onto the Squad were a bit peeved that a person who did not use Twitter….can you believe it?…made the Squad in the first place. Not so Jessica Merrill, Goddess of social media and especially Twitter, and author of Twitter for Business (highly recommended by the way). Jessica perhaps felt a bit sorry for me…being out in the cold and all that….but that wasn’t her motivation to give me a complimentary copy of her book at the end of the Conference, which she kindly did. That was simply to bring another person into something which she believed in and felt passionately about. I read the book right away and loved it, but it has taken me almost a year to get around to it (my excuse is that I am busy writing a new book). In any case here I am and I am going to go for it. Its not easy being starting with just one follower…but at some point everyone has been there. In fact I just picked up two more in the last hour…including SHRM’s multitasking social media guru and the man who picked me last year for the Blog Squad, Curtis Midkiff. OK, off and running and totally excited about it, and waiting now, breathlessly, for SHRM11 to start and the Tweetup to take place! Like with bacon and eggs, the chickens were involved but the pig was committed: I am committed to Twitter (but with a better outcome). Follow me and my Tweets by clicking below. I’ll have updates about the new book, ideas I am working on for new blog posts, and pleas for help with ideas for just about everything I do. I am a voracious consumer of information, especially as it relates to my passions of worker morale and engagement. Contact me here or….yes now I can say it…on Twitter. Glad to be there.

Blogging from SHRM 2011: See You There?

Just like last year I will be headed to the SHRM’s 2011 Conference in Las Vegas,  Nevada on June 25th.  I am excited about the conference because last year’s was so great.  I will be following the sessions on morale and engagement to see what everyone has to say and find out what new ideas are percolating “out there”.  I will also blog after the keynotes from Sir Richard Branson (pause for tiny feeling of pride for my fellow Brit), Arianna Huffington (must brush up on my Greek) and Michael J Fox (my hero, I am sure many peoples’ hero, cant wait to hear and see him).  Oh yes the Zappos guy Tony Hseih will be a must-see, given his success and cutting edge management ideas.

Last year SHRM had a special focus on military returnees from the Middle East trying to get back into the workforce and some fantastic speakers, who knocked the ball out of the park with their emotional comments on that topic.  That will also be a feature this year and I am excited to find out what else will tug on the heart strings and stimulate the cortex.

One of the best things about SHRM is the unplanned encounters of great people from all over the world, all HR enthusiasts busting their behinds somewhere, trying to make their work places great, like the rest of us.  Fortunately, despite the reputation of Vegas as “Lost Wages”,  I am not at all tempted by the crap tables:  my casino was the stock market and the 2008 Crash cured me even of that, so my attention will be all business, plus the Keith Urban concert of course.  If you wanted to be at SHRM11 and cannot be, let me know and perhaps I can write about something which interests you?  If you will be there, let me know!

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

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Women as Leaders: Good for Worker Engagement and The Performance of Our Organizations!

Some interesting information came over my favorite evening TV news show the other day: it was about the role of women at work, something in which I have been interested ever since I was a young recruit at the Hay Group, an international HR consulting firm which specializes in compensation programs, among other things.  My job as a junior level consultant was to learn the Hay System, a method of evaluating jobs for knowledge and skills needed, and responsibility placed on the person in the job.   Each job then came out with a single score of “Hay points”.  It was interesting because it was capable of separating the job from the person in the job.  The system allowed clients to pay women equally based on what was being paid in their market or locality for a given complexity or “size” of job regardless of male or female incumbents.  As such it enabled our clients to tell their female workers that they were being paid, not on prejudiced pay scales for “womens’ jobs” but on something “gender neutral”.  I got a lot of satisfaction from that.  When I soon moved into Hay’s research business (employee opinion surveys, culture, worker morale etc.) I didn’t forget the lessons learned on the compensation side, and have always been interested in data about women at work.

So on NBC News the other day, this piece came on about how many women are now in the US workplace and what positions they hold, how many go to college and so on. Data was also shown as to how they are being paid, which is always a depressing figure.  The employment and education numbers are far from depressing, however. Sixty percent of women now work outside the home; they occupy more than half the professional and managerial jobs in the US, which is an astounding statistic.  There are now more women in college than men in US, and 40% of women are primary breadwinners in their families.

This was mostly great news for women, but it got better: the part which really caught my eye was about top management jobs and womens’ impact when they occupy them. NBC quoted a study, not a new one but one I had not seen before, that looked at 2000 of the biggest US companies. This was done by David Ross of Columbia Business School and showed that when women were senior managers in a company, it performed better.** Ross was interviewed and he said that is because as leaders women are more democratic, less dictatorial and more collaborative. I would add, also more compassionate. Now the jump to engagement here is an easy one: the traits which Professor Ross mentions are clearly ones which are related to creating a more “engaging environment”, that is one in which workers will choose to engage.

The idea that women are having more and more positive influence on work cultures is gaining ground in both books and the blogosphere. In Enlightened Power: How Women are Transforming the Practice of Leadership, Barbara McMahon states: “In the new form of leadership, it is no longer doctrine that creates a following; it is dialogue. It’s more valuable to be able to engage than to influence. Command and control has shifted to collaboration and empowerment.” As blogger Mitch McCrimmon points out: “Regardless of whether more women make it to the top, organizations are becoming more feminine. There is now more emphasis on relationship skills, emotional intelligence, the ability to nurture talent, listening skills, collaboration and partnership. These skills are essential for success for both male and female executives.” At the same time he points out that mens’ competitive nature is essential and that “In any case, this issue should focus, not on men versus women, but on organizational culture. At that level, a mixture of feminine and masculine traits are required. But there is no doubt that we are in the midst of an unstoppable shift to more feminine cultures”

With women now going to college more than men, and that trend accelerating, they will continue to get more of the top jobs. This study would indicate that this bodes well for US engagement and resulting organizational performance levels. That is good news in an otherwise still quite gloomy post-Crash hangover!

** Note: I am aware that correlation is not cause, and the fact that there may be a third element in this story, which “causes” both women being hired to top jobs and great performance by the organization. I was not able to check if Professor Ross had allowed for this, but he talks as if he has. It is certainly worth further research.

Data source: NBC Nightly News (US), “America in Transition”: March 4th 2011

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Twitter and Facebook as Agents of Revolution in Cairo, Tunis….and Your Workplace?

I was reading a piece by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the emerging situation in Egypt. After a brief intro he made the jump from Cairo to Silicon Valley, saying that without the invention of the microprocessor’s predecessor (the transistor) Egypt and Tunisia would not have happened. The chip has allowed for Twitter and Facebook, along with so much more, and these programs are the basis of communications for protesters on the streets.

Henninger makes the point that this is the end of what he calls “stability”, where governments can control their people via the control of information. Whereas a few people would gather in the past in Cairo to quietly chat over who had been arrested, now such information is blasted across the ether to everyone around the world. As he says “instability is the new status quo”.

From this, I got to thinking about work and engagement, and the effect of Twitter and Facebook there. If such things as happen in Cairo happen in the workplace, what will be the effect? Revolutions at work? Maybe yes, perhaps not so dramatic, but significant nonetheless. Here are the reasons:

–Social media are a very democratic form of communication. Anyone can get an account and anyone can tweet. Such democracy is very welcome to some companies (Google comes to mind with its constant feedback programs and surveys for workers there)…but in some workplaces it is the last thing they want! I’m not going to say that some companies are run like a police state…but some aren’t so far off either, with high levels of fear as the driver.  An ego-driven CEO will not tolerate democracy in his Kingdom! Heaven forbid that the peasants find a way to use Twitter to revolt! Yet revolt they will, if not on that company’s official intranet or corporate Twitter feed, then in other places over which the CEO and his communications staff have no control. As we see, voices want to be heard and they will be heard. Social media is their outlet.

–Social media are extremely engaging. That’s right, people love them so much they can hardly hold a normal conversation while holding a smart phone…(did someone say addictive? Let’s not go there this time, but you have a point). This engagement is the reason why most companies now reach out to social media users…to tap into this. So if Facebook and Twitter are opening us all up to communicating much more with each other and with the companies with which we do business, can we really go to work and experience something so radically different? Can we go from a heavily engaging experience outside work to something which feels like traveling back through time to the unconnected past? Trust me, as someone who has surveyed many people at work, many people do work under these conditions, even now. So the answer is that these organizations will survive in the dark ages for a while, but the pressure will build, as it built in Cairo and Tunis. This will require more than a shallow effort on the part of these organizations, but a fundamental shift to a level of workplace democracy and communication the likes of which many have never had.

So social media are a disruptive force indeed: not only do they allow for whole societies to try and grab freedom for themselves but they are also methods of engagement for the rest of us at a level which human history has never experienced. Organizations which do not reflect this level of engagement in how they treat their people will be Mubaraks of the working world….and like him, they will be hounded out of the marketplace.

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Is “High Morale” Always Good? For Whom? The Case of the LA Teachers.

I try to avoid even the appearance of being political on this blog, but I can’t resist telling you about what I read a couple of days ago and how it made me think about the subject here. Living in southern California I often read the “local rag”, the Los Angeles Times, and one morning recently there was a front page article about how the LA public school teachers had been forced by a court to give up some of the protection of their union contract and to accept that in the future, in some of the LA public schools (but not all), layoffs would no longer be based on seniority only. Anyone who knows that city and its teachers union (UTLA-United Teachers Los Angeles), knows that this is far, far from what they would have wanted, in fact something which they did fight tooth and nail against…..and lost.

Seniority is the basis of many union contracts, not just in the US but also in Europe and elsewhere. It is based on a reasonable premise: that those who have invested their careers somewhere should have some protection, especially if they are older and close to retirement, etc. The arguments in its favor are significant, when looked at on face value. However, there is a downside, and it is a big one: when layoffs occur based on only seniority, young, enthusiastic, often recently minted teachers, with all the new ideas which come from recent college courses and all the high morale and engagement which derive from not having had time to become jaded…and just from being young….these people are GONE! Left behind are those who have been there the longest, whose morale is lower simply because of the opposite effect of what I have described above (as if by gravity over time, morale sinks over the years, until right before retirement, then takes a leap as people realize, “another year and I’m FREE!”). Firing teachers under the LA (or nearly any teachers’) contract is difficult, to say the least, whether for a layoff or any other reason.  This means that less than competent individuals, those who have retired on the job years ago but still show up in the classroom every day, those whose students’ performance in math and reading had barely budged under their tutelage…those people are often not removed after the relatively short period of time which runs before they receive “tenure”. 

So this is the basic dilemma, and it’s a difficult one: protecting older, more “senior” teachers, regardless of their performance, or doing something radically different and basing layoffs on performance only. What does the latter strategy achieve? It achieves something remarkable, something which the parents of some children in the LA schools woke up to and acted upon: laying off teachers based on performance puts the children first and not the teachers!

Yes that’s right, for all these years the teachers’ contract has been geared…surprise!….overwhelmingly towards the teachers, not the kids.  This has protected those teachers who cannot perform now and perhaps have never performed that well. It’s a revolution…but should not be…to suggest that the children being educated should be front and center. Its also a strong legal argument, especially when put forward in a civil rights context, and that is what happened in Los Angeles: the parents of children in poor performing schools essentially said to the court “we believe that laying off based on seniority is leaving us only with the longest tenured teachers, not the best ones, and as a result has deprived our children of the best teaching available to them”. The judge agreed and with a stroke of the pen, changed the system for many of the LA schools. Of course, the union was furious at having this “agreement” forced on them and vowed to appeal; it was quoted as saying that this will “demoralize” the longer-tenure teachers, since they will no longer be in a totally 100% secure job regardless of how they perform (try getting that deal in a normal enterprise!)

“Demoralize”:  I almost fell off my chair with the mis-use of this word. Yes the teachers will be upset at the loss of this deal, one which has been in place for decades and which is still in place throughout the US (although under attack for all the reasons we have discussed here in many other states). But “demoralized”? The people who are demoralized are the kids who are getting a sub-standard education from teachers whose continued employment by the LA Unified School District has only to do with the possession of a pulse, and nothing to do with their performance for those students.  Besides, think of what this move away from senority-based employment will do for the great performing teachers:  it will totally “re-moralize” them, the opposite effect of what decades of seniority-based employment practices have done.

I am not anti-union.  I grew up in England and studied management and business psychology in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester.  I know about the gruesome conditions which workers endured and the way the unions grew to protect people from this explotation.  Under the best of conditions in the private sector, there is usually a balance of power between unions and management;  but in the public sector we have the additional need to consider the ”customers” being served by government entities, whose interests are sometimes far from front and center.   In this case the balance has been far too much in favor of the teachers and their union, and not on the children being educated, and the court is redressing that.  Indeed the situation is so serious that the court agreed that seniority-based practices actually deprived some children of their civil rights….and to top it all off the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), long the scourge of right wing rhetoric and usually painted as a loyal friend of the left, including unions, filed in favor of this lawsuit and the kids.

I feel for any teacher who is laid off in this difficult California financial climate.  But they have had a good ride, for decades. They have had bulletproof employment regardless of performance, fantastic (and far more generous than private sector) pensions. They have done very well. Now is the time for the students to benefit from this system, not just the teachers. This legal case is the first crack in the dyke which will bring the flood of better education to the children of Los Angeles….and hopefully elsewhere.  Listen to the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, as quoted in the same LA Times article:

“This year, if we are forced to lay off teachers, we will be forced to lay off some of the most effective, and keep some of the least effective……It’s not right. It’s not fair. And it’s not something we can allow to happen.”

This story is just beginning.  As with many things in the US, California often leads the way.  Maybe children in our public schools can look foward to their morale, and their performance, being raised as a result? 

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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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Employee Engagement: Lets Stop Making It So “Touchy-Feely”!

I’ve been reading a lot lately about employee engagement as I get ready to write a new book on the subject. While there is a lot of great material out there, it seems to me there is also a focus on something which is not useful to this field: a tendency to make it a “touchy-feely” subject instead of a solid, data driven business essential. A lot of the reason for this is the fact that many practitioners who now work in this exploding field have backgrounds exclusively in the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or they are communications specialists. Many have no direct business training and/or experience, and as a result their career paths and knowledge are very different from those in top management at most of our organizations.

The net result of this is a one sided approach to engagement which, while it emphasizes the human elements which are certainly there, neglects the fundamental reasons why anyone in top management would bother to move towards a more engaged workforce.

I’m talking about approaches which refer to engagement requiring “authenticity”, “compassion” and so on. I am as in favor of these things as anyone else, but if I am a tough CEO at the head of a company I need a lot more than this to go ahead with the steps necessary to maximize the engagement of my workforce. In the words of the political slogan from a past US election: “where’s the beef?” The beef is there of course, and its good stuff: worker engagement and its cousin high morale drive performance. Now that is something a CEO can get her teeth into.

Organizations of any kind, from a police force to a hospital or a mining company, exist to achieve a mission. Just as if you wanted to run the London Marathon, you would need to be in shape to do so, and engagement is a big part of the “shape” your organization is in. A great strategy is useless unless your culture is lined up and your workforce ready and willing to make it happen. Engagement is nothing less than mission critical. It’s not a nice, flowery “add on”, its something which one needs to focus on from Monday at 7am all week long, from the C suite to the shop floor to the home offices of the mobile-connected workers. In this hyper-competitive world where competitive advantage can be wiped out by a sudden shift in technology (ask the makers of CDs) and by ultra-low developing-country wages, engagement of one’s workforce provides an edge, something which organizations can leverage as they fight to survive and thrive. There’s nothing “touchy-feely” about this!

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