Since yesterday’s disturbing revelation, I’ve been pondering more on the connection between employee engagement and corporate results.
I had an interesting chat yesterday on this subject with Mario Laudi of Red Canary fame about work he is doing to develop a new business called HireFully which he will be launching next month. Their proposition (if I have it right) is that the way people hire nowadays is just wrong.
Too many managers are looking for a very specific skill set and they are all looking for the very best people with that skill set. As you can imagine, we can’t all get the Chief Architect with 10 years of Java experience who has a PhD from MIT. Some of us will just have to settle for something less in terms of qualifications.
So then how do you figure out who to hire from among the unwashed masses? While popular, scoring and testing of potential hires doesn’t work and employees hate it. According to Mario, what you need to do is find a way to identify those people with integrity, character, self-motivation and a whole host of other behavioural characteristics that make them great performers in spite of the fact that they haven’t got the specific skill set that would be ideal. (This is the job that HireFully will be working to address through their secret sauce.)
Well this got me thinking again. Maybe firms with great results happen also to be good at hiring just because they’re good at business stuff in general. And maybe they happen to hire employees who care, who are naturally engaged.
Think about a few people you’ve worked with. No matter how down they get, no matter how many curve balls they face, they get back up and try to do their best job every day, just because they care, just because they are naturally engaged and nothing you can do as an employer can disengage them.
Maybe employee engagement is a function of who you hire, not what you do. Maybe results are created by people who care, who are naturally engaged anyway. Maybe employee engagement isn’t a function of leadership but of natural tendencies.
No big surprise but yesterday’s blog got me thinking. Really thinking. I was disturbed when I thought about Harvey Schachter’s article that said that research showed that the most engaged staff may be the worst performers.
Here I was blithely coaching away to the proposition that increased employee engagement leads to better results. In fact I’ve probably said it many times in blogs and done just a few pictographs and several white papers on the subject.
So this new research made me think. What if instead of high engagement leading to great results, the high engagement was a product of the great results.
Just think about it for a second. If your team is playing well, you’re over the moon happy, highly engaged, right there with them. If it isn’t doing well, you’re mildly put off, disgruntled, or ack….disengaged.
Yes, you’re engaged when your team is doing well, disengaged when it’s doing badly.
What if that is true in business as well? Perhaps companies with good results have engaged employees because it is fun to work there when things are going well and there is money to spend on employee perks. When your company isn’t doing well, it isn’t fun to work in a stressful environment where the company doesn’t have extra money to spend on perks.
Perhaps employee engagement comes from good results and not the other way around.
This for me was a terrifying realization. That I who very conceitedly prides himself on understanding the difference between correlation and causality could confuse one for the other and miss the potential of reverse causality just because Gallup had done so much research on the subject of employee engagement. Rookie move.
From here on I pledge myself to figuring out whether results and engagement are merely correlated or whether there is a causal factor at work and engaged employees cause better results or vice versa.
I would like you to meet Sam. Sam has a great job at Multidyne where he is responsible for increasing network uptake receptor capacity. He loves his job, can’t wait to get to work every day where he gets to meet and talk with lots of interesting people about global challenges in fostering network plasticity.
Problem is that no one really knows what Sam does. But he’s such a good talker and seems so intelligent that he must know what he’s doing. Unfortunately, even Sam doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do or how he’s doing. It appears that there isn’t a way to measure network plasticity or changes in it. Frankly no one is even sure what network plasticity is.
But Sam is a highly engaged employee and by all measures, that’s what we want isn’t it, engaged employees? The question is, engaged in what? Without metrics there is no way to tell if Sam is a valuable contributor. In fact according to some recent research featured in today’s Globe, Your most engaged staff may be your worst workers.
I keep harping on the value of employee engagement and frankly I’ve been brought back to earth today by that article. The research goes to show how using only one metric to gauge success can be fraught with peril. So go forth today in your own jobs and make sure that you measure your own ability to increase network uptake receptor capacity.
As the week trundles to its inevitable close, I’m trying to summarize some differences between the old Industrial Economy and the new Knowledge Economy. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
As you may realize from these blogs, I’m trying to develop a new model of leadership for the Knowledge Economy as the needs are so different from the Industrial Economy. I’m looking for more differences between the two economies so if you can think of any, please let me know.
In the Industrial Economy you can know at the end of each and every day if you’ve done good work. How do you know in the Knowledge Economy whether or not you’ve done good work? Only when someone tells you.
According to Dan Ariely, “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Adding motivation is easy.”
Since yesterday’s disturbing revelation, I’ve been pondering more on the connection between employee engagement and corporate results.
