By Thomas J. Lee
You're familiar, I presume, with those two old chestnuts of workplace wisdom: "What gets measured is what gets done" and "You can't manage what you can't measure."
Both pay tribute to the importance of measuring what we value in our work. And for the most part both have more than a faint ring of truth.
The trouble is that measuring some things is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds. You need a clear conceptual foundation: an understanding and consensus as to what exactly you're measuring. Then you need a gauge or scale or metric that applies sensibly to the thing you're measuring. Then you need a reliable means of measurement. Some things can only be measured subjectively, by perception, and you need a way to measure the perceptions without tainting the results.
That's just for starters.
Of course, measurement is relatively easy if you know what you're measuring and how, and if everything is plainly apparent in the same way to everyone who looks. So if you're counting money in the till at the close of business, or taking an inventory of boxes on a shelf at the end of a quarter, it's a simple matter.
On the other hand, if you're measuring something as ambiguous as, say, employee engagement, you have problems right from the start. People think they know what engagement is, but everyone has a slightly different notion. Moreover, it's hard to measure something we cannot tangibly count. We can only rely on perceptions, and perceptions are notoriously individualistic. What one person notices, another person can easily overlook or undervalue, and vice versa.
Not only are perceptions individualistic, but they are highly sensitive to context and highly subject to hidden bias. The context is vulnerable to slight day-to-day variations in workplace circumstances: perhaps a personal slight or a new, burdensome assignment. The bias has many sources as well, most importantly the innate desire to protect one's job by appearing fully engaged.
One of the most popular engagement surveys in American business, for example, relies (for its core, anyway) on only twelve questions, and some of those questions are just this side of laughable. The most ridiculed question asks employees whether they have a best friend at work. How that affects employee engagement is beyond me.
Many employers who think they are accurately measuring engagement are, in fact, measuring something else, a different aspect of positive mental attitude. They may be measuring morale or job satisfaction, or loyalty, or commitment, or alignment, or general attitude and just calling it engagement. Or they may in fact be measuring the engagement they intend to measure.
At the root of the problem is ambiguity over the term employee engagement. There is no universal consensus as to what it means. Does it mean enthusiasm? Does it mean productivity? Does it mean technical expertise? Does it mean a spirit of can-do camaraderie? Does it mean satisfaction with current compensation and working conditions? The reality is that no one knows.
You can't just look up the phrase in a dictionary, either. It isn't there. If you look up the word engagement, you'll find all kinds of definitions, but none having to do with what you want. You'll find definitions for an agreement to get married, and for military battles, and for appointments or meetings, but none for attitudes in the workplace.
Moreover, to my knowledge, no one has gone to the trouble of drawing a fine line between engagement and its cousins: commitment, dedication, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and alignment. If we are to know what one of those terms is to mean, we must know what the others mean. Then we must pull ourselves out of the muck of using any of those terms as synonyms for any of the others.
Together all these labels fall under the rubric of positive mental attitude, a phrase coined by the late insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. Having grown up reading Horatio Alger stories, Stone became a rags-to-riches multimillionaire who believed that one's attitude toward work was critical to success. (His name for cold calls was "gold calls.")
Positive mental attitude takes many shapes and forms. Perhaps the best that can be said for most engagement surveys in the workplace is that they're attempting to measure PMA in one respect or another and just calling it all engagement. Even at that, most of them fail.
We would be much better off if we could find some common ground as to what each kind of PMA actually is and why it's important. That way we could zero in on this thing or that thing and obtain some sense of what we should do. As it stands, we don't know.
Near as I can see, there are five different kinds of PMA. Three of them are really-nice-to-haves. The other two are absolutely-must-haves. (Before you come out swinging at the really-nice and absolutely-must taxonomy, read through to the end.) Let's begin with the really-nice-to-haves.
The first really-nice-to-have is commitment and dedication. I cannot see much, if any, difference between commitment and dedication, so I lump them together. I think it's fair to regard them as exceptionally hard work. The definition we came up with is this:
Rising to the level of courage, real commitment and dedication in the workplace is doing whatever it takes, and more, to satisfy the customer (or other stakeholder) within the constraints of safety, the law, and ethical decency.
It should go without saying that commitment and dedication are very, very important. The success of many businesses has rested on their shoulders alone.
The next really-nice-to-have is loyalty. To me, loyalty has to do with remaining at the employer's side, even through adversity, and giving the employer or manager the benefit of doubt. Our definition is simple:
The disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer and its customers in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation and security.
In other words, loyal employees don't jump from employer to employer for a small raise. If unionized, they don't file ridiculous grievances. They place a premium on the relationship, and they want to work together. Strictly as a pecuniary matter, that saves an employer money and time (not to mention headaches) by reducing personnel turnover.
The third of the three really-nice-to-haves is morale and satisfaction. I can't see much difference between morale and satisfaction, either, so we also lump them together. Here's our definition:
The degree of happiness or contentment that people derive from their employment, as a function of compensation, workplace conditions, personal and professional relationships, employment security, and opportunity.
Maybe morale and satisfaction doesn't translate into economic benefit as easily as commitment and dedication or loyalty does, but I sure would rather have a lot of happy and satisfied employees than a lot of unhappy and dissatisfied employees. I don't need to measure the value of that.
Good so far? That leaves us with the two absolutely-must-haves: alignment and engagement. These are two different things.
In both cases, these mission-critical forms of positive mental attitude show up as patterns of workplace behavior. It's easy to see them because they are so obvious and so very important. Ultimately, if you go about it in a methodical way, that fact also makes them surprisingly amenable to measurement.
We can define alignment as follows:
The reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the pre-determined expectations of its known stakeholders.
Most commonly, those expectations belong to customers. They may take the form of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. In return, customers show their approval or disapproval through consumer demand, repeat patronage, recommendations to friends, product returns, and, in the worst instances, defections to competitors or even boycotts.
More broadly, expectations also belong to other stakeholders such as investors, employees, strategic partners, consultants, labor unions, government regulators (such as the SEC, EPA, IRS, and OSHA here in the United States), state and municipal inspectors, vendors and suppliers, NGOs, courts, the news media, landlords, and society at large, whose expectations take the form of laws, cultural norms, and nowadays even trending social media.
Collectively all these expectations are important because they enable us to stay in business. We make various agreements and commitments, or they are made for us and imposed on us, and we must follow through on them. Fulfilling those agreements and commitments is the business of alignment. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.
Finally, we turn our attention to engagement, which we can define as follows:
A culture of discretionary, positive, extra effort—focus, curiosity, passion, and courage—that employees bring to their work in support and service to the organization, its purpose, and its stakeholders.
If alignment is what enables you to stay in business, engagement is what enables you to grow your business. Think of alignment as the work of today, and engagement as the work of tomorrow. No engagement, no tomorrow. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.
But the thing is: engagement is fundamentally discretionary. In other words it's entirely up to employees as to whether they will engage. Though an absolutely-must-have, engagement always remains optional to employees, which is why it is so rare and so vital.
Employees who consistently show engagement often climb the ladder of success, but the opposite isn't necessarily true. People who don't show engagement, far from being dismissed, usually manage somehow to retain their jobs, at least until the next downsizing. Even then, cutbacks often seem to target certain units or skill sets or salary bands or demographic cohorts more than engagement profiles.
(Incidentally, another problem with engagement surveys also has to do with the common fact of downsizing. Many such surveys foolishly use first-person questions. Savvy employees are naturally tempted to say they are more engaged than they truly are, if only to avoid being seen as problem children. The supposed anonymity of surveys doesn't help, because employees assume their surveys are identifiable through computer coding or demographic data.)
Finally, you'll also notice four key words in our definition of engagement: focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. We'll address them each in upcoming newsletters.
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