
The Employee Engagement Myth - lukethomas
https://medium.com/@lukethomas14/the-employee-engagement-myth-3885526782d7
======
wonderwonder
In larger companies, the employee engagement industry is something that
management can feel good about. For the average employee it is a series of
meeting or actions that they are forced to take while still being required to
complete their regular work. All while being treated as an easily replaceable
cog. If you want your employees to feel engaged and happy about their work pay
them well, give them a workload they can complete in 40 hours, and take the
money you spent on hiring a 3rd party employee engagement team and give it
back to the employees.

Its similar to the concept of forcing them to take personality and aptitude
tests. It serves no purpose, and takes time and money. I remember having to
sit through a meeting after taking one of these where the presenter explained
the best way to approach members of different personality styles. My takeaway
was that this is the real world and I am not going to prep to understand
someones personality profile before every meeting or human interaction. No one
at the manager level or above in the company as far as I am aware ever
utilized it again. Lower level people tried but it had no positive results or
changes to their career so they eventually abandoned it and worked for their
C.O.L. increase. This is a 5k+ employee company.

Just treat your employees like real people who have lives and value them, best
way to get employee engagement.

~~~
maxxxxx
My company does everything it can to not get direct input from employees. Need
a new office layout? They don't ask employees but hire an outside company.
Want to increase engagement? Don't ask employees but have some consultants at
headquarters develop strategies. Want to improve project management? Hire
outside consultants and don't get input from employees.

It's really weird. They do everything they can to make their employees into
replaceable cogs without any input. My engagement would go up a lot if our
input would be listened to. For example if my team proposes an office layout
why not actually do it that way instead of doing something nobody wants? Or if
projects are always late maybe ask the workers what they think the problem
problem is and then fix these issues.

~~~
orev
This is an ongoing issue in companies, and I think one reason is to shift the
blame. What if they did ask the employees, and got either contradictory or
terrible ideas? Who do you listen to? Either way someone is going to be upset
and possibly feel more disenfranchised than before. If a 3rd party does it,
they can just blame them.

~~~
maxxxxx
Going through a 3rd party is the easy way out. We are highly paid engineers so
I don't think our feedback would be that stupid especially if we were informed
about other factors like cost. We spend our whole day weighing different
trade-offs for our regular work so I think we could do this also for our work
environment.

~~~
anoncoward111
Typically the person who is deciding to bring in the outside consultants is
getting a kickback, or might even have a direct stake in the consulting firm.

If they aren't, and they're just willingly spending company money on something
they believe will work, then they're just another out of touch spreadsheet
manager.

------
rpcastagna
I don't have the context on the "engagement industry" or whatever that I think
I need to appreciate this post as the specific criticism I think it's trying
to be, but I think people really are bitterly unsatisfied with their jobs and
saying the engagement "number has barely budged over the last decade" despite
notable corporate success is sorta missing the point?

The idea that people's engagement or happiness -- or even just their general
satisfaction at work -- is strongly correlated to their employing
corporations' success is a persistent myth in tech that I just don't
understand. People hate "sell outs" and they hate themselves when they sell
out for a reason. You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up
working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you
the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making
soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps
going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or
another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.

Steph Curry is happy when the Warriors win because he's on a team that is
winning by playing the game _his way_. If the team made him go to dunk every
time he got the ball I bet his satisfaction would be shit too -- and it
probably wouldn't keep netting the Warriors more rings.

~~~
esoterica
People who get paid in RSUs definitely want to see their company succeed. I
bet the Amazon employees who have seen their shares go up 500% over the past
few years are pretty happy about it.

> People hate "sell outs"

No one other than characters in 80s teen movies goes around unironically
complaining about "sell outs".

~~~
closeparen
Stock goes up because a company does _better than the market currently thinks
it will_ , not because it does well. RSU issuing unicorns tend to have an
extreme level of hype priced in already. In the best of all possible worlds,
the stock _might_ stay flat.

------
vermooten
Disengagement: we get emails saying how profitable we are, the directors drive
super-nice cars ... but we get cost-of-living pay increases, no bonuses. Why
should we be 'engaged'? Feels like we're getting ripped off.

~~~
ravenstine
And then we're told it's not enough to just show up and do the job that was
initially asked of us. It's especially worse as a company continues to mature,
which means that it gradually loses the benefits that once made working there
worth it because _reasons_. I'm talking things like free snacks, paying auto
detailers to show up at the parking lot to wash cars once a week, gym
discounts, etc. And it's usually by the time they cut these corners that they
start coming up with ideas like "employee engagement."

Maybe buzzwords like that wouldn't be needed in the first place if your
employees were simply happy to do their jobs; now this faux-philosophical
mumbo jumbo has to be inserted and the job needs to _mean_ something. No,
_screw_ employees being enthusiastic and committed to work because it benefits
their lives _outside_ of work... we need them to be enthusiastic and committed
to work _for the sake of it_ so we can pay them less. (is what it comes down
to)

~~~
mpweiher
Q.: What do you want to accomplish here?

A.: Provide services in return for financial compensation.

Q.: Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?

A.: Providing services in return for financial compensation.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Reminds me of [https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3454](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/?id=3454)

~~~
mpweiher
Looking at it, that‘s probably where I got it from, thanks for finding!

------
sverige
Here's what's really wrong with employee engagement surveys:

1\. Your relationship with your family is more important than any relationship
at work.

2\. For the vast majority of people, their current job may be a potential
route to fulfilment, but is unlikely to be the long-term path to that, and
they know it.

3\. It is incumbent upon employees to pretend to be engaged only so long as a
less draining option for meeting the financial demands for their life is not
apparent.

4\. Employee engagement surveys ultimately are only designed to justify the
cost of maintaining the ongoing salary of a VP and attendant minions.

Yes, practice your craft, and work hard, but please just know that your
fulfilment will likely come from outside of work.

------
canhascodez
I may not be a "good employee", but I tend to consider my enthusiasm as not
being for sale or barter. I offer the value of my labor in exchange for money,
and it would be nice if there were some coincidence of wants between myself
and the persons directing my labor, but the idea that this should naturally
exist, well -- that seems to have worn a bit thin in recent decades. I'm not
even entirely sure that my current employer has my best interests at heart --
and I'm self-employed :)

------
adrian_mrd
The issue is often that Employee Engagement is driven by (and wanted from)
Human Resource* departments who tackle it like another checkbox to tick.

Real employee engagement comes from understanding that employees are unique
and often have similar but different needs when it comes to what motivates
them (money, ego, success, quality, output, social, etc.). The data often
doesn't reflect the fidelity needed here.

* or, Human Resentment, as the joke goes.

------
Johnny555
I work for a growing startup and now, nearly 4 years in, the thing that keeps
me engaged most is the potential value of my stock options.

The first few years the work was interesting and fun, but as the company has
grown, the work has become more segmented and specialized and so much "big
company" process has been put into place that it's not nearly as fun, and
something that I used to do myself requires coordination with several
different teams and seemingly endless meetings.

HR (or "people first", as they call themselves) is not helping, HR used to be
our office manager/HR/facilities manager all rolled into one -- if employees
wanted 2% milk in the refrigerator or an ergonomic keyboard, they only had to
ask him and it was there in a few days.

Now we have to make a request... and get it approved (if possible, maybe it
takes several levels of approval), and someone has to enter it into the
purchasing system, and maybe someday I'll get it.

In an effort to "streamline employee benefits", benefits have been reduced,
nothing added. Likewise, the "unlimited free snacks, add your favorite to the
list" have been reduced to "Here's what you get from the vendor we outsource
to"

Our average engineering salary must be close to $200K, but it still takes VP
of engineering approval to get a second $700 monitor because "policy says
employees only get a single monitor"

When the new office was being planned, management asked for suggestions about
how to make it more engaging, feedback was overwhelmingly against an open
office plan -- the response was "We are listening to your feedback, but we are
going with an open office".

I think a lot of this comes with working at a larger company, but we've
already lost some key early employees, and will lose more as the company grows
and becomes more "big company" like.

The economics are slanted against employees as the company grows - if a 100
person company spends $100/employee on a benefit, that's only $10,000. If a
5000 employee company does it, that's $500K - the cost of several HR staff, so
HR can say "Look, we've saved the company more than our own salary by
streamlining benefits!"

It's not all bad, of course, or I wouldn't be here, but more and more, I find
myself thinking that I'm just here for the money rather than because I enjoy
it.

~~~
badpun
> it still takes VP of engineering approval to get a second $700 monitor
> because "policy says employees only get a single monitor"

This is a bit shocking for a tech startup. In a crappy backwards bank that was
my last job everybody got as many monitors as they wanted, without putting in
any request (there was always a pile of new monitors available, you only
needed to notify the admin that you're grabbing one). Some people even got
five of them.

------
pcurve
My organization does yearly engagement survey as well as monthly. As a
manager, I found them both useful. The former is useful because the vendor
that conducts it does it across entire organization, and you're able to
analyze data by different departments and teams. You also get comparison
metrics against industry benchmarks.

Also, if you're a manager worth his/her salt, you would probably agree with
the survey result at a high level already. Where the survey comes in handy is,
helping you prioritize which problems to tackle to first.

Sure it's a 'lagging indicator', but that's why the survey doesn't focus on
questions that would fluctuate highly. Examples: "Does your manager give you
clear directions" or "does your organization communicate overall company
strategy" etc.

We also supplement it with informal, brief monthly anonymous feedback that
focuses more on short-term issues and qualitative data.

Do I want weekly survey? No. That's what weekly 1:1 is for. You should have
enough rapport with your employees that they feel comfortable sharing their
concerns or joy through 1:1 channel. If not, they can always use the monthly
anonymous feedback.

------
pluma
> We need to focus on figuring out how to get people to operate and deliver
> their best work, because if they do that, the satisfaction will follow.

That sounds like a shortcut to burnout. No, employee satisfaction is not based
on "operating and delivering their best work".

Being able to perform at your best is a contributing factor but employees are
humans with feelings and families. Maybe treat them as humans for once.

------
karmakaze
> “Engagement” is a lagging indicator of performance, not the other way
> around.

This rang true upon reading. The other part is that the engaged employee has
to feel that they contributed to that performance. Long term, if you believe
it doesn't matter how well you do things, there's no motivation to maintain
any level.

My situation has typically been that I take pride in my craft and as a
craftsperson I want to do my best so that I do not contribute to a possible
failure. Another way of saying I enable success if each group does the same.
But as for degree of engagement, the more autonomy I'm given the more engaged
I'll be as I'll see to making each choice I make work out.

------
leetrout
I look forward to your future posts and I hope one of them addresses open
office plans and how they negatively affect the workplace.

~~~
lukethomas
Good idea, I've also been hearing for a while that collaborative workspaces
improve employee engagement, which is garbage.

~~~
splittingTimes
Just search that term on HN and you will find a plethora of articles
criticising the open office floor plan.

------
minipci1321
Another definition of mine: employee engagement is the proportion of the total
employee cost that can be cut before the productivity starts decreasing, over
the total of these expenses. Ranges between 0% and 100%. "100% engaged" ==>
most probably the business owner: ready to pay all expenses from own pocket.

~~~
pyrale
How much you can exploit your employees before they abandon you is not a
measure of engagement, it's a mesure of gullibility. Edit: or dependence.

~~~
minipci1321
LOL. People engage for all sorts of reasons, aren't they? Some could be very
lucid but have no choice. Is exploiting those better then exploiting gullible
people?

~~~
pyrale
People engage for all sorts of reasons, indeed. Many of these reasons don't
align well with predatory behaviour from the employer. That is why your
definition is flawed.

~~~
minipci1321
I don't think my definition above is all that flaved (I have several, all more
or less imperfect). By that definition, any reason making people be engaged,
is good for employer, good as cost cuts with no downsides can be.

Note that this cost cutting can be considered predatory or not -- what if the
engaged person's pay-and-benefits have a big proportion of RSUs which gain
value after said cost cutting?

------
Nasrudith
Reminds me of the one stereotype with HR - they'll do anything to try to
motivate employees except spending money on them.

------
vyrotek
> _" I challenge you to find a vendor in this space who puts some skin in the
> game, charging by results delivered to the income statement. Vendors have an
> incentive to ensure that engagement scores stay low, otherwise, they don’t
> have a product to sell."_

I worked for years in this space at my startup but we found success coming at
it from a different angle. We started with a gamification platform and
transitioned into enterprise integrations to measure "Employee Engagement".
The difference was that we didn't just measure it through employee surveys but
through objective goals on measurable KPIs. Essentially we hooked into live
data sources from our customers and provided a way for managers to create
leaderboards, achievements, goals, etc. against it.

Every time we renewed our contract with our customers we would measure and
compare the performance of employees using the system against to those who
were not and provide an ROI report. Most of our customers felt it was a no-
brainer to renew once you could tie our costs to their increased revenue.

> _" While measuring on a more frequent interval is a helpful start, the act
> of measuring doesn’t lead to improvement. It’s like if I step on a scale and
> expect to lose weight. If I couple the measurement with action, change can
> be made."_

I think what it boils down to is _" If you can't measure it, you can't improve
it."_. It's very difficult to measure something nebulous such as Employee
Engagement which is an intangible moving target.

~~~
mavelikara
>I think what it boils down to is "If you can't measure it, you can't improve
it."

I think it was Tom DeMarco who popularized this slogan (or a popular variant
of it), but he has abandoned it in later years, even going on to give
counterexamples. See
[http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...](http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf)
.

~~~
vyrotek
I can see the issue with the slogan. I feel like the trouble is around what
you actually intend to measure.

If you actually want to increase genuine employee engagement then by all means
do whatever it takes to make that happen even if it can't be measured.

What I've seen is that a lot of companies say they want in increase Employee
Engagement when really what they're looking for is "We want our employees to
be more productive and not quit".

Some jobs just won't be engaging or rewarding though. That's why we're paying
them after-all though, right? :)

------
lifeisstillgood
Try the "Citizen Engagement Myth". Without democracy we don't even bother
imaging our views will be taken into account by our government

And the less often we vote for people further away the less our vote engages
us

What we need are local elections for local bodies with genuine power and
spend, and democratic companies.

------
paulie_a
If you are not doing anything with metrics and kpis and random other pointless
terms it is a waste of time. Employees and managers need ongoing coaching. Not
just some assessment which wastes people's time. Engagement is only one of
many factors to take into account.

------
WhitneyLand
_“The idea that engagement drives performance is backward logic that doesn’t
make a bit of sense.”_

I think a more accurate assessment is, trying to increase on a broad scale
levels for the the typical employee with measurable bottom line impact is
questionable.

Employee engagement is huge if it’s authentic and high powered. Take the top
5% at any company. Likely no software product made them that way, it’s just
who they are.

Separately, that these companies don’t charge by impact to the bottom line is
not really fair. Many companies don’t work that way. I don’t think McKinsey
will give you strategy advice and then take a cut, unless it was a pretty
binary scenario.

------
asplake
It’s one of those assymetries: disengagement is much easier to create than
engagement, and hard to repair

------
jimjimjim
in my experience: without fail, a company will punish a department or office
that tries to improve things by answering truthfully on an engagement survey.

------
sytelus
TLDR;

 _For over a decade, Gallup has measured engagement on an almost daily basis
and the number has barely budged over the last decade. The number tends to
stay in the low 30% range — this strategy is a PR dream. Year after year,
Gallup can state that “the majority of the workforce is disengaged.” They then
proceed to sell products /services to improve the score. It’s the gift that
keeps on giving!_

~~~
sytelus
Personally I don’t think employee engagement is a myth. I have been in the
teams were it felt like you are part of large family, mission was worth it and
everyone felt need to work together. This wasn’t an accidental but culture
that was actively and consciously developed. There are all little things that
leadership did, for example,

\- eating lunch together

\- having fun weekend trips with coworkers

\- getting invited in to celebrate ethnic festivals

\- getting invited in to each other’s parties

\- taking vacations together for common interests

Things like above developed stronger bond to the extent were many folks would
let go bigger compensation outside. It allowed to express opinions without
being politically correct to leadership. It enabled continuous feedback and
information sharing as opposed to infrequent all-hands and toung in chick
critic. This quite a contrast from many 9-5 cultures where employees sell
their time in exchange of money and nothing more.

~~~
lukethomas
I believe that there are great places to work (like the example you gave).
What I tried to convey in the article is that this is not a result of HR
departments sending out surveys and trying to "engage" people. It's a much
more natural, intentional thing that starts at the top.

------
vram22
A word of advice to the emp. eng. peeps:

Just cut all the BS.

Give emps. some PS.

Watch emp. eng. n biz soar.

The stock mkt. will roar.

\- VR

[PS = Profit Sharing ]

